Gobind Thukral

IS India fast becoming a police state? This question should worry every citizen if we have to create a pro people democracy in the country. Even a casual look around the country would convince us that the daily run of firings on protesting farmers, workers and other political activists are signs of increasing dependence upon police and Para military forces to sort myriad economic and political problems. If the farmers or adivasis demand adequate compensation for the land, they are greeted with bullets.

This practice across the country is becoming a norm. Students are charged with lathis or water cannons and or with bullets. Farm and industrial workers meet the same fate. In Punjab teachers, health workers and other sections face the wrath of the police every passing day. Even women are not spared. There are dozens of judicial probes going on as the unbridled police resorts to ruthless measures.

Apart from these, there are increasing crimes such as thefts, murders, riots, kidnappings. The State perhaps knows only that peace can be maintained through police. Increasingly, India is looking like a battlefield; myriad battles, big and small, being fought all over the country. In fact, vast areas of the country; whole north east, six states of east and west where Maoists confront the State and Jammu and Kashmir, a simple peaceful life is like a mirage. The first causality are women and children who suffer the maximum as food from the hearths disappears, schools shut and jobs are lost and businesses suffer.

The annual expenditure on police and Para military forces by the different Indian states and the union government has increased manifold during the past three decades or so. Punjab was spending just Rs 80 crore on police in 1980; it spends nearly 20 times more. Is there a similar increase on health, education and other welfare activates or creating jobs for the youth?

Overall, according to the Bureau of Police Research and Development, India had 1.3 policemen per 1,000 people in January 2008. Among states, Nagaland has the highest ratio of policemen to people, an amazing 15.4:1,000. Like Nagaland, most other small states also higher policemen: citizen ratio. Larger states fall in the same category. Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal has just 0.8 and 0.76 policemen, respectively, for every 1,000 citizens.

Every year more people die to police firings, fake encounters, illegal dentitions and forced suicides. An Allahabad High Court, Justice A N Mulla had once commented, " I say it with all sense of responsibility that there is not a single lawless group in the whole country whose record of crime is anywhere near the record of that organized unit which is known as the Indian Police Force." Indeed the police force has gained much notoriety for its lawlessness. Today, custodial deaths, rapes and tortures have drawn the attention of the media and the legislature. No check has proved effective during the last decades. It has been getting worse every year. Uttar Pradesh has witnessed the highest number of alleged police atrocities and human rights violations with 21,899 cases registered in 2006-07 as against 31,096 countrywide. Punjab and Haryana could be equally bad. In fact, no police station in the country can claim that there had been no violation of human rights within its area by the police which is supposed to protect.

Encounter killings is a euphemism used in India describe extrajudicial killings in which police shoot down alleged gangsters and terrorists in gun battles. Encounter killings are a common feature across india. In Punjab, Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir and Maharashtra, particularly in Mumbai it is too common. In Mumbai from the 1990s through the mid 2000s and some of the police officers involved came to be known as 'Encounter Specialists'. The Mumbai police resorted to encounter killings as they believed that these killings delivered speedy justice. It is claimed that encounter killings severely crippled the Underworld in Mumbai and busted the extortion racket which was rampant at that time. Human rights activists consider these encounter killings, together with torture by police in lock-ups and custodial deaths to be gross human rights violations. Currently CBI is investigating several such cases in Punjab, Kashmir and Gujarat. While it has done good work, but it has by and large remained ineffective spotting the wayward police. Same is true about human right commissions.

Police encounter is a term used by Indian security forces to explain and excuse the death of an individual at their hands. The term was often used during the Punjab insurgency between 1984 and 1995. During this time, Punjab police officials would often report encounters to newspapers. The Punjab police specifically targeted the families of suspected militants in encounter killings to punish them.

The victim was typically a person the police deemed to be a militant, or to be involved in the militant separatist movement, though proof of alleged militant involvement was rarely given. Such encounters have also been referred to as “staged encounters” or “fake encounters,” as these deaths were often believed to be the result of torture or outright execution. Some police officer made fast buck through these methods. Ultimately, the practice became so common that “encounter” became synonymous with extrajudicial execution.

It is alleged that police would typically take a suspected militant into custody without filing an arrest report. If the suspect died during interrogation, security forces would deny ever taking the person into custody and instead claim that they were killed during an armed encounter. Many Indians believe police would plant weapons to the dead body to demonstrate cause for killing the individual, stage managing the encounter, leading to the popular phrase fake killing. They would also concoct a story about militants staging an attack, or the suspect attempting to escape while being escorted to recover militant arms. At times, the Punjab police applied for and received production warrants that allowed them to remove individuals accused in terrorism cases from jail, and whereupon they often killed the detainees in fake encounters. Police through its propaganda sold the story that these encounters finished the militancy in Punjab. Are there any takers for this bugs statement?

From the time India won freedom from British rule and celebrated its first independence day — on 15 August 1947 — to the finalisation of its constitution and its formal adoption on 26 January 1950, the nation has been essentially in a transition phase. The real work of nation building has yet to start if we go by what is happening in large areas of the country where poverty sickness, lack of food, health and education facilities are the norm.

We are a $1-trillion plus economy. We have a population of over 1.10 billion. India is managing to grow around 7 per cent. But the police and other Para military forces rule the roost. We are living longer and the state of education has improved marginally. But corruption and inefficiencies, poor physical infrastructure are eating the vitals of the country.

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Accepting foreign help

Ishtiaq Ahmed

IN an editorial dated August 15, 2010, a leading Urdu daily warned Pakistan not to accept India’s offer of $ 5 million for the flood victims. According to it, India released excess water into the Sutlej and Beas rivers that caused the floods.

In an interview given to Lyse Doucet of the BBC and shown on August 16, 2010, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi pleaded passionately for help from the international community for the unprecedented monsoon floods that are wreaking havoc in Pakistan. He made a strong political point as well: if international support is not forthcoming, the Islamist organisations would draw full capital out of it, hence callously making use of the misery of the people to further their jihadist agenda.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who visited Pakistan also made a very animated appeal for international solidarity and help. In the question and answer session, he tried very hard to dispel any doubts about the international donors, saying that the current $ 460 million needed will soon be raised and more as the relief work gets underway. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also spoke with great feeling and compassion as she addressed the UN General Assembly, urging the world to come to the rescue of Pakistan. Richard Holbrooke deployed his persuasive skills to plead for greater help to Pakistan. US military personnel are now assisting Pakistan in delivering aid and other help to the people in distress.

Yet, the western media has been reporting that there is scepticism at both the level of states and among the general public about how to help Pakistan. The notoriety that Pakistani governments have gained over the years for corruption is proverbial — irrespective of whether elected governments were in power or the military. A friend of mine who moderates a discussion group on the internet reported that even the Pakistani diaspora is confused how to help. Nobody trusts the Pakistani power elite.

The distrust is not only about the money of taxpayers in the west ending up in some illicit accounts in Switzerland, France and so on, but also it ending up with the Taliban or forces sympathetic to them. A great deal has been recently written and said by western analysts and governments about Pakistan playing a double game with regard to the ‘war on terror’. Our most cogent argument against such propaganda is the fact that our military has been fighting the Taliban, inflicted defeat on them in many theatres and in return suffered thousands of casualties. All this is true but the fact remains that the Pakistani power elite and establishment enjoy an unenviable reputation for double talk.

Nevertheless, two influential voices have been raised from within Pakistan against taking foreign help. One is the all-too-familiar Taliban-al Qaeda duo, which has asserted that accepting foreign aid would provide the west with an opportunity to spread its influence in Pakistan and subvert Islam and the existence of Pakistan. Therefore, if the Pakistan government were to agree not to take such help it would provide $ 20 million to help the flood victims. The UN and other international agencies as well as the Pakistan government are claiming that some 20 million Pakistanis have been badly hit by the floods, standing crops have been destroyed, homes have been swept away, some eight million at least are in need of clean drinking water and thousands of people are ill because of waterborne diseases. How such gigantic difficulties could be surmounted with $ 20 million from the Taliban is totally confounding. On the other hand, it confirms that the Taliban have at their disposal such sums of money and the question is: how come? No wonder Shah Mehmood Qureshi rejected the Taliban demand outright.

Two, in an editorial dated August 15, 2010, a leading Urdu daily warned Pakistan not to accept India’s offer of $ 5 million for the flood victims. It set forth an even more bizarre and alarming conspiracy theory. According to it, India released excess water into the Sutlej and Beas rivers that caused the floods. Further, it reminded the government that since India was occupying Kashmir, help from it would weaken the Kashmir cause. The editorial suggested building of high dams and liberating Kashmir from the Indian occupation as the proper response to the Indian offer of help. Obviously, the editor had no clue about what high dams can and cannot do in such a situation. Also, while the whole of Pakistan lies prostrate to the ravages of nature, to call upon the same people to start a jihad in Kashmir is too callous an advice to deserve comment.

If it were true that the floods in Pakistan had been caused by India releasing excess water into the Sutlej and Beas, I see no reason why the Pakistani government would not have drawn the attention of the UN and other observers to such brazen disregard of all norms and values of civilised conduct by India.

On the other hand, Sindhi nationalists have welcomed the announcement made by Indian peace activists to send a team of 400 doctors and paramedical staff to work in the flood-hit districts of the province. The offer to send the medical team was made by a delegation of Indian peace activists, including Mazher Hussain of the Confederation of Voluntary Associations (COVA), an Indian Hyderabad-based network of over 800 organisations. I am sure Indians from East Punjab would be very willing to help if the Pakistan government were to let them. After several days of hesitation, we have finally agreed to accept help from India as well. This can prove to be a major breakthrough in the relationship between these estranged neighbours. Not accepting Indian help would have meant the appeasement of India-haters. Historically the experience is that appeasing reactionaries never works; on the contrary they are only emboldened to make more irrational demands.

One can actually turn the argument round and assert that confrontation with India is not in the interests of the people of Pakistan. I remember, in December 2004 Imran Khan said on television that a cancer drug imported from the west cost Rs 161 per tablet. The same, if imported from India, would cost Rs 52. The same is true of other day-to-day items needed by the people. In an assessment, the ISI stated that homegrown terrorists have overtaken the Indian Army as the greatest threat to national security. Also, I am absolutely convinced that the resolution of the Kashmir dispute is not changing borders but making them meaningless. It is time to speak the truth.

[The writer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com]

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Flood aid exposes distrust of gov’t

Zofeen Ebrahim

INUNDATED by appeals through text messages, email and Twitter, as well as in print and broadcast media, that call for donations of dried rations, hygiene kits, buckets, tubs and cooking pots, and straw mats, Ambreen Siddiqui feels lost in trying to help her fellow Pakistanis amid the country’s worst floods in decades.

"I don’t know where and how to begin helping these people who have lost just about everything – their home, land, livestock and some even their families," says Siddiqui, a 35-year-old mother of two.

While the calls for assistance say how to and who to give donations to, she is unsure whom she can trust. But she is sure that her donation will not be going into the relief fund set up by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani.

This is a common refrain heard here every day, reflecting the deep mistrust of and anger against the government. For many, this sentiment has been exacerbated by President Asif Ali Zardari’s sojourn to France and Britain earlier in August, when the destruction caused by record floods was at its peak.

"I haven’t heard in the media even once how much donations the ruling elite have given to this fund, how can the government expect me to put my money in it?" 75-year-old Salma Ahmad says angrily.

"This government is not honest, that’s what we hear on the media daily. There are no refutations from them, which means it’s all true. The message we get is they don’t care. Only last night I heard our foreign minister talking to the Pakistani expatriate community in the U.S. telling them to donate generously," says Azra Ahsan, a Karachi-based obstetrician. "He said if they didn’t trust the government, they can give to groups they do, but donate they must. It was laughable for a government to admit this."

"The response of the civilian government was slow in the first week; it took its time to put its act together," Hassan Askari Rizvi, an analyst in the northern city of Lahore, explains. In contrast, the army has received kudos for its operations. "They have the organisational capacity, training to deal with difficult situations and technical skills for rescue and relief operations, building bridges and restoring communication," explained Rizvi. "This helps to build its image as against the increased governance problems of the civilian government."

The massive deluge has killed some 1,600 people and left almost 20 million people affected. A fifth of the country has been submerged.

Some have started their own collection drives for goods and cash. Salim Tabani, 49, a factory owner in Karachi, took four truckloads of rations that he and his friends donated to Khairpur and Kashmore districts in Sindh province ."Now I know better what is needed and will go again next week with more goods," he said.

In Karachi, abuzz with a bevy of fund collectors, a group of young women collects clothes for flood victims. Textile design students are collecting old, faded T-shirts, which are made into blankets, mattresses and hammocks. An art gallery held a "silent auction" of paintings collected from 88 artists and raised 1.26 million Pakistani rupees (140,000 U.S. dollars). Meantime, another group of women collects plastic water and soda bottles and fills them with clean water.

In Peshawar in north-west Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, 32-year-old Najiullah Khattak has collected over 2.2 million rupees (250,000 dollars) since he started a group on the social networking site Facebook on Aug. 2. "To be honest, I and a few friends decided to collect some funds and give it to an organisation, thinking that’s where our responsibility would end," Khattak told IPS by telephone from Peshawar. "All I did was tell people on Facebook what we were doing, and people just came in with their donations."

At the international level, the United Nations has seen a marked improvement in donations. It launched an appeal for 460 million dollars, and has received 227.8 million so far.

But the disaster’s scale is so massive that no government, corrupt or otherwise, can address it alone, observes Khattak. Indeed, the charity arms of organisations linked with extremism have also been busy giving out hot meals, and receiving contributions.

Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik, worried by the inroads these groups could make, has said that "banned organisations" cannot visit flood- hit areas. "There is a possibility that the negative forces would exploit the situation," Zardari said at a press conference with visiting U.S. Sen. John Kerry this week.

Among the charities helping flood victims is the Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation, the charitable wing of Jammat-du-Dawa blamed for carrying out the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India. Its chairman, Hafiz Abdul Rauf told IPS that its 43 camps in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and southern Punjab "serve two hot meals a day to some 45,000 people in all three provinces."

Faisal Edhi of Edhi Foundation, South Asia’s biggest and most trusted charitable organisation, says: "I see no reason why these groups cannot work alongside in this hour of need."

There should be no problems "as long as humanitarian assistance is provided in a way which is neutral, impartial, and independent, it conforms to humanitarian principles," adds Maurizio Giuliano of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

At the same time, many of the relief initiatives lack organisation. "Everyone is doing their own thing. Nobody trusts anyone, not the government or the NGOs. I’m just worried the passion with which people have gone on this charitable drive, may just fizzle out," Siddiqui points out. "This month is also the holy month of Ramadan when people are generally feeling more generous, but we must think of long-term strategy for supporting these people." [Courtesy IPS]

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Every problem has a solution

Vinod Anand

WHEN there is a problem, there is always a solution; and when there is no problem there is no solution. In other words, when there is no solution, it is not a problem, and when there is a solution, there is a problem. For example, population explosion in India is not a problem because there is no way out to control it; price rise in any country is a problem, because there is always a solution (monetary or fiscal) to get away from it. The only exception is that of Zimbabwe, where the inflation rate has broken all the records and is the first such country where inflation has reached to an uncountable percentage, and people have almost lost confidence in money. Instead of goods chasing money, money chases goods, In March 2008, inflation was 3,55,000 per cent, which was the double of the inflation in February 2008, when it was 1, 65,000 per cent. Hence in Zimbabwe, inflation is not a problem, as there is no way out to solve it. The country would return to barter system.

There is no doubt that there are many other countries in the African continent where inflation is quite high averaging to more than 15 to 20 per cent, but with time to come they will surely get away from it. Hence in these countries inflation is a problem, because it has a way out. In this context, there is another example of recession that had emerged in 2008, essentially from the US and many European countries, and it then spread its tentacles to almost all the countries of the world. There are some countries like China, India, and Brazil that have come out of this recessionary trend. In India, the way out was found through stimulus packages. Hence, once again we can say that recession has been a problem in recent times, because there is a way to solve this. Even in the late 1930’s when there was a great depression in the U.K., Keynes found a way out. Hence, once again we can say that depression was then a problem, because there was a way out to get away from it.

In fact, there are a number of problems that individuals, households, and economies face. But once it is there, there is always a solution provided we face the problem boldly. According to Drucker one must

• Know the four types of problems. The four types are: 1) truly generic. 2) truly unique.3) generic, but unique for the situation 4) new generic problem.
• First identify whether the problem is generic or unique. Misery loves company. It’s great to know if the problem you’re facing is a problem that others have faced. Chances are you’re not alone.
• Treat the root cause, not the symptoms. To find the cause, you need to ask “Why?” You might need to ask “why?” multiple times.
• Leverage the experience of others. How have others solved the problem? Who can you learn from? Who else might share the problem?
• Use a principle-based approach to solving problems. This builds on the idea of leveraging the experience of others. What’s the underlying pattern or principle of the solution? For example, I know one of the underlying principles for influence is “rapport before influence.” Knowing this, I adapt that principle to a variety of scenarios, whether it’s pitching a project or coaching a teammate.

It is only then that the solution will be visible and, hence, practical. The basic thing is to face the problem. If one does not do it, the problem will chase him, and it will become more severe. The earlier we face it, the earlier we will find a solution. We must follow the above-mentioned steps to judge a given problem, identify the kind of problem it is, and then make use of the experience of others to find a way out. Once this procedure is aptly followed the solution will automatically appear. Of course we will have to make all efforts to find it, and apply it so that the given problem gets eliminated from its basic roots.

In the context of tracing the solution of a given problem, there is an important theorem in economics, called the theorem of the second best, which connotes the idea that it is not always possible to find the very best solution of a given problem because of many inbuilt assumptions that surround the given problem in various ways. As proposed the Canadian economist Richard Lipsey (1928-1980) and Australian economist Kelvin Lancaster (1924-1999), the theorem of the second best assumes that if one of the conditions necessary to achieve Pareto-optimality (which is a situation which exists when economic resources and output are allocated in such a way that no-one can be made better off without sacrificing the well-being of at least one person) is missing then the 'second best' position can only be reached by departing from all the other Paretian conditions. This theorem essentially applies to welfare economics, which is linked with the satisfaction of ‘optimum conditions’.

Economists can draw up sets of ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions for the efficient operation of an economy. If all but one of these conditions is already satisfied, it would always be beneficial to satisfy the remaining conditions. This would then give rise to a ‘first best situation’. If, however, some of the necessary and sufficient conditions can not be met for any reason, then it may or may not be beneficial to satisfy any particular condition. This then requires investigation case by case. A second-best optimum is one where the best decisions are made about whether or not to satisfy some optimum conditions when others cannot be satisfied. The theorem can be extended to the third-best, and even the last-best solution.

This theorem appears to be specific, but it does apply in all walks of life, as we observe in our daily routine. The basic point is that once there is a problem, and we face it, then the very best solution seldom occurs. What occurs is the second vest, or even the third best, an even the last best way out.

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