Mahmoud Darwish and the disproportion

I am not the best person to commemorate the passing of Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine. Any poetry I have written is basically comedic, whether I intend it that way or not. My arabic is not good enough for me to appreciate him in the original, and even of his english translations I only have read or heard a handful of poems. But I do have some sense of what he means and has meant to Palestinians and to poetry.

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Back in Toronto – and a piece from the Pakistan media

I am back in Toronto. Also, I managed to get an op-ed into the Pakistan News, in the hopes of changing some common misconceptions about the nature of the US-Israel relationship. I’m reproducing it below.

US-Israel relationship misconceptions
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Justin Podur

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Countdown to impeachment in Pakistan

ABU DHABI (Airport, just passing through on the way back to Toronto) – I was in Islamabad for the 100-day mark of the elected government. It had fractured over the inability to make any clear move to deal with the situation on the border with Afghanistan, the inability to address the economic problem, and the indecisiveness over whether to reinstate the supreme court judges sacked by Musharraf.

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The Continuing Relevance of the Left in India

An amended version of a talk given to the Secular Collective in Kozhikode, Kerala, India. August 2, 2008 in honour of TK Ramachandran.

by Justin Podur

First of all, thank you for allowing me to be a part of the honouring of TK Ramachandran. I did not know him, but I have done a little bit of research now, enough to know that he was not someone who shrunk from a debate or a discussion. I hope we can live up to that spirit here today.

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Winding down in Kerala

PONKUNNAM, KERALA, INDIA – Sorry for not sharing much since the nuclear deal went through. It is partly because I was busy with non-political matters in Kerala, family visits and kalaripayatu (the martial art of southern India that I study as a hobby), partly because internet access was not quite as complete as it had been in Islamabad or Delhi. But partly there was a good reason, which is that I was actually doing some talks and events here. Thanks to Badri Raina and Girish Mishra (see the previous blog entry on “A Day in Delhi” for more about them) I was introduced to the tireless Sudhir Devdas, who is in charge of R & D at an independent Malayalam newspaper in Kozhikode, Mathrubhumi, which has about 1.2 million circulation (and is the second biggest paper). I described Junaid Ahmad, who organized my trip to Pakistan, as a ‘fixer’, but Sudhir has a couple of decades on Junaid and is a truly masterful orchestrator. Once Badri and Girish introduced me to Sudhir, I had a chance to connect to a lot of what was going on in media and politics in Kerala.

Thanks also to Sudhir I was introduced to folks from a group called the Secular Collective, who organized a lecture for me on the continuing relevance of the left in India. Another connection was through Stephen Shalom from ZNet and via him, Richard Franke, an academic who specializes in Kerala development. Franke introduced me to S Gregory at Kannur University, who organized a talk for me on climate change and development. So I had the chance to prepare these talks, share them with very engaged audiences and panelists including from the fantastic KSSP (Kerala People’s Science Movement) and SEEK (Society for Environmental Education, Kerala), and other academics. It was a real treat to be able to participate in this way. I have not yet transcribed either of these talks, but I will publish at least one of them here in the coming days, and both hopefully in the coming weeks.

I am currently in a pretty small town (Kozhikode, where I came here from is actually a pretty big city with an international airport), again visiting family. I will be here for a few more days before I head back to Canada. Unless I get a chance to write up and publish the talks, this will probably be my last entry until I get back to Toronto.

Congress wins: and so into “nuclear overdrive” India goes…

KOZHIKODE, Kerala, India – In the event, the vote wasn’t even that close. 275-256, a comfortable margin of 19 votes. Several opposition MPs defied party discipline to vote for the government. The BJP staged a disgraceful demonstration waving huge stacks of money and accusing congress of vote-buying. Now the BJP are guardians of political morality, evidently (not to casually dismiss the charges of corruption or vote-buying. Perhaps India could address this corruption problem by formalizing vote-buying through a more developed lobby system, like Western countries have?). In fact, the BJP probably think they benefit from any disruption in normal procedural functioning of government. They also managed to prevent the Prime Minister from making his own remarks.

The remarks of the PM, Manmohan Singh, published in the newspaper the next day, were interesting in several ways. Let’s dismiss the BJP – they were not opposed to the deal, nor to nuclear energy, nor to nuclear weapons, nor to entanglement with the US – they saw (and still see) a chance to gain from the fall of the government and exploited it. The Left’s criticisms of the deal were that if nuclear energy were to be pursued, it could be pursued without greater entanglement with the US, and that the deal was part of greater strategic and economic dependence on the US. The Congress government’s reply was not so much to defend greater entanglement or loss of autonomy, but to say that the deal won’t cost India autonomy and won’t involve subordination to the US. If it were true, and this was the only (and cleanest – the PM spoke against coal on climate change grounds, acknowledging an interesting tradeoff that many will be facing) way to generate energy, the Congress government would be right in pursuing the deal.

But if it were true, the US would not be pursuing it, since the US is not interested in helping to build autonomous powers, but dependencies and clients. More on that later, I hope.

In any case, as unfortunate as it is that the deal is going to go through, this government surviving is not the worst of outcomes, even for the Left in India. As Siddharth Varadarajan, a fine journalist and commentator who spent some time in Canada, wrote in the Hindu before the vote, the government’s fall would not really have benefited the left. A BJP government would not benefit the left. A reconstituted Congress led government without the left wouldn’t benefit the left much either. What Siddharth didn’t exactly acknowledge was that it was the brief period when the left played a role as power broker that was anomalous: centrist parties don’t like to depend on the left, and as politics usually drift right following the current of concentrated wealth, such alliances are always unstable and always break down over something.

The left’s current move is to join in a group of at least 10 parties, including that of the UP Chief Minister Mayawati, to campaign against the nuclear deal, communalism, inflation (it’ll be interesting to see what policy prescriptions they have on this), and agrarian problems. Hard to know what this formation will do, or what its relationship to Congress will be. For me, the behaviour of the BJP in the parliament and since, as well as the textbook controversy here in Kerala, suggests that communalism is still very much alive and needs to be considered as a danger in any political thinking or work.

Hopefully more to say on development, economic, and environmental problems in the coming days.

Countdown to a confidence vote

KOZHIKODE, Kerala, India July 21/08 – The news India is all centered on tomorrow’s confidence vote, on which India’s Congress-led coalition government, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has staked its rule. The confidence vote was necessary, as I said in my previous blog, because of the Indo-US nuclear deal. In between that blog entry and this one, I had a chance to look at a new document prepared by the Left parties, consisting of correspondence between the Left parties and the UPA over the nuclear deal. Now I might be biased but I have to say that the left arguments strike me as much more coherent than the UPA’s, and this seems to emerge very strongly from the correspondence.

But let us review the arguments of the UPA as best we can.

In order to grow, India needs energy. In order to become a world power, India needs help. The Indo-US nuclear deal will provide the energy, but more than that it will provide technology. The deal amounts to a lifting of the embargo against India that has happened since India exploded nuclear devices 10 years ago and will provide access to the latest in nuclear technologies. India will begin a “nuclear renaissance” that will make India a “nuclear superpower”, meeting its energy needs through international agreements for fuel and self-sufficiency in technology, courtesy of the US. Similarly, the economic, political, and military cooperation with the US is aimed at strengthening India’s strategic position as a global power.

The left response is basically as follows.

There is no disputing that India needs energy, and that at present Indians do not use enough energy to lift the majority of the country out of poverty. But the role of nuclear energy in the current mix is 3% and the most optimistic scenario with this deal is that it could reach 6% by 2020. While they make some allusions in this direction, solar and wind investments might make more sense, especially solar, as well as, (unfortunately from the climate perspective, which Indians will suffer from), coal.

Incidentally, the left is not necessarily against civil nuclear power, but it does criticize the technological and economic lock-in that will occur if the Indo-US deal is struck. There are other nuclear technologies India could use that would ultimately rely on local nuclear fuel (thorium) rather than imported uranium. The tens of billions India will spend on imported technologies from Westinghouse, GE, and other American firms are lost opportunities for building domestic energy technology and capacity (of course, I would argue that such opportunities should be pursued in a non-nuclear way, given that nuclear catastrophes in a country like India would be even more catastrophic).

The deal, in any case, does not amount to a lifting of the embargo. The US President has to report to the US Congress each year on whether India is properly handling its nuclear program and whether India’s foreign policy is congruent with that of the US. For example, the US medium-term strategy involves isolating Iran diplomatially, the long-term strategy involves isolating China. “Congruence” means helping the US in these programs. And what does India get from isolating Iran and China? A lost opportunity at peace and integration in its own region, increased dangers from its neighbours, and in the short term, lost energy sources for development (especially in the form of the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline).

India’s compliance will be monitored, and if it fails to comply, the US can break the deal and prevent nuclear material from even getting to India. What if the US fails to comply? Perhaps the consequences will be as bad for the US as its blowing off of the Kyoto protocol? Its blowing off of the International Criminal Court? Its blowing off of the softwood lumber agreement with Canada? (In other words, the US can and break agreements at will, without much consequence, while the US is able to make other countries suffer if they break agreements).

Finally, the strategic power India seeks is illusory. Powers do not build up other powers to rival themselves. They build up dependencies to do their bidding. There is no shortcut for India to becoming a global power by a deal with the US. There is only a way to become a client, purchasing arms and playing a regional role of creating mischief and tension in a world that needs neither. What is to be gained by trying to rival China, except forcing China into an arms race of which India’s development and people will be the first victims (and not the US)? Why should India subvert its (admittedly not always consistent) nonaligned history in order to help the US prevent rivals from emerging? To the degree that India has succeeded since independence, it has been by ignoring the advice of the developed countries on economics, politics, and foreign policy, and it has failed by adopting that advice (on agriculture, mass education, intellectual property, and neoliberalism generally). Why risk those gains now?

In any case, there is not much longer to wait. Asking the reader to keep in mind my spectacularly poor record at prediction, I venture that the government will win the confidence vote and the deal will squeak through, though I hope not. I will try to write about it tomorrow (my internet setup is not as good here).

It is interesting to be watching all this from Kerala, which is a somewhat marginal place (its main tourist attraction is literally called the backwaters), not unlike Canada in that sense. Here, in addition to the nuclear deal, there is the textbook controversy I mentioned earlier (in which a 7th grade social science textbook includes a story about a boy who writes down that he has “no religion” in a checkbox). That controversy has now become a tragedy. Reports say that Muslim Youth League activists beat to death a 40-year old school principal, James Augustine, yesterday. He was trying to go to his school and the Muslim Youth League, as well as the Congress League, were protesting outside. Secular activists vowed not to take the mobilizations meekly, and some of them beat up some Muslim Youth activists yesterday, during a dawn-to-dusk “strike”. Today there’s also a one-day education strike, to protest James Augustine’s murder.

Again a superficial impression, since I can’t read Malayalam (I speak it rather poorly) and haven’t really connected with any political people here yet, is that this is a communal agitation for political gain, intended to undermine the government. The government had agreed to back off and amend the textbook somewhat, but the religious activists didn’t back off in response. The role of this type of street agitation, including beating people to death during protests, has some relationship to politics and to the state. I don’t think the police allowed the killing to happen, the way they sometimes do during communal agitations especially in other parts of India, but I don’t actually know their capacities or sympathies – if this type of agitation continues much will depend on both. That the suspects were immediately arrested and that this seems to be widely seen as a tragedy both bode well, though the textbook was amended and that bodes badly.

Next time I’ll try to talk about energy, agriculture, and climate change problems here (for example an anomalously bad rainy season endangers Kerala’s water and hydroelectric supplies – 50% of Kerala’s electricity comes from this source), but in the meantime it’s all about the nuclear deal…