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  • Uniform Civil Code | What Kind of Uniformity, Whose Code?

    Uniform Civil Code | What Kind of Uniformity, Whose Code?

    Should India’s linguistic diversity too be given a short shrift, as has been happening for years in promoting Hindi in preference to 21 other scheduled languages?

    Though we do not have, as pointed out in this Deccan Herald opinion article, a draft Bill or a white paper on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), there is a raging debate, as well as fear in many quarters, as to the intention of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as expressed in the pronouncements of Prime Minister Narendra Modi concerning the UCC.

    Quite forthrightly, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen used decidedly strong words when he said, “I saw in the papers today that there should not be any further delay in implementation of Uniform Civil Code. Where did such a stupid thing come from? We have been without UCC for thousands of years and can also be without it in future”. Further, he asserted, “Hindu Rastra cannot be the only way in which the country can progress and one should look at these questions with a broader outlook. Certainly, there is an attempt to use… misuse the Hindu religion”.

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  • The Quagmire of Afghanistan… as Kabul, Kandahar in a Power Tussle

    The Quagmire of Afghanistan… as Kabul, Kandahar in a Power Tussle

    Afghanistan is now at the brink of a humanitarian disaster.

    Down the ages, Afghanistan, the land where many “Great Games” have been enacted, continues to baffle its rulers and neighbours as it brings misery to its impoverished and fratricidal strife-torn suffering people. In the past two years, it has been ruled by its own fundamentalist regime, the Taliban, with no succour to its people but added fatalities, hunger and deprivation, besides the growing abuse of human rights.

    Afghanistan is now at the brink of a humanitarian disaster. The hasty, inglorious American exit in August 2021 has contributed nothing but political instability for a people already plagued by various ethnic diversities. That the Taliban have reneged on most of its promises given to the US and the international community prior to the American exit, especially on freedom of speech, democracy and women’s rights is a cause of much turmoil within Afghanistan itself, apart from causing dismay to the nation’s well-wishers abroad.

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  • From Civil Wars to Gang Wars

    From Civil Wars to Gang Wars

    Depending on the context, these uprooted and redundant young people can become terrorists, child soldiers, members of youth gangs that dominate the suburbs from Paris to Rio, drug cartels, mafia gangs, or human traffickers.

    With the end of the Cold War in 1991, interstate war seemed to have said goodbye. But even then, there was no end of history, as Francis Fukuyama had assumed. Instead, interstate war was largely replaced by wars of intervention in weak states and civil wars. At the latest since the war in Ukraine, however, interstate war is back on the agenda and a new arms race has begun – the wars of the present have been nationalized. What is often overlooked, however, is that civil wars have not completely ceased to exist but have been replaced by gang wars. This will be analyzed here using the example of South American gangs, but it applies equally to large parts of Africa, Iraq, or Southeast Asia.

    A Brief Review

    In order to analyze this, a brief review is necessary. After the fall of the USSR, a return to the Middle Ages was diagnosed in security policy, and a return to pre-modern weapon carriers such as child soldiers, warlords, and private security companies. After the attacks of September 11, the fight against a new totalitarianism, this time Islamist, seemed imminent, and the “war on terror” was proclaimed. Meanwhile, China and Russia have re-emerged as serious rivals to the U.S., at least militarily, and a new arms race is on the horizon. The U.S. has been weakened by its lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which even the much-vaunted and overestimated military-technological revolution could not stop.

    While in the 19th century the Western states conquered the whole world, in the 20th century the defeated empires and civilizations had to learn to live with the victorious West, and now the resurgent empires and the West have to learn to live with each other.

    Are there long-term trends in this rapid succession of different experiences and analyses of violent events? Two immediately come to mind: the “rise of the others,” as the influential US columnist Fareed Zakaria has called it, that is, the resurgence of the great empires and civilizations submerged by European colonization and US hegemony. These are primarily China and India, but also Russia and the littoral states of the North Pacific. In short, world affairs are shifting from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. Whereas the entire 20th century was dominated by the North Atlantic littoral states (with the exception of Japan), in the 21st century there are at least two such centers: the North Atlantic littoral states and the North Pacific littoral states.  Here, the United States has the unbeatable geostrategic advantage of being located on both oceans. These former great empires and civilizations have almost one goal: to no longer be considered underdeveloped or backward by the states of the West, but as equals. While in the 19th century the Western states conquered the whole world, in the 20th century the defeated empires and civilizations had to learn to live with the victorious West, and now the resurgent empires and the West have to learn to live with each other.

    more and more people are becoming aware that Western modernity has a Janus face.   What is the hallmark of Western modernity: human rights, democracy and the emancipation of women, or colonialism, racism, two world wars?

    While until well into the 20th century many assumptions were that the values of Western modernity would spread throughout the world, more and more people are becoming aware that Western modernity has a Janus face.   What is the hallmark of Western modernity: human rights, democracy and the emancipation of women, or colonialism, racism, two world wars? And even Auschwitz was not carried out by “barbarians” but by the Germans, of all people, who are often associated abroad with Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.  The opposing interpretations either argue that this is regrettable but has nothing to do with the nature of the West. And conversely, critics of the West argue just as one-sidedly that Western values are just empty words, and that the reality of Western politics is characterized by colonialism and racism. And Donald Trump’s current polemic against female Democratic Party politicians with immigrant backgrounds is racist, colonialist, and hostile to women. And the fact that there has been no outcry from the liberal West against this polemic may even indicate a concealed complicity because we Europeans also come to terms with racist and colonialist stereotypes. Donald Trump’s racism can be summed up in the simple formula: Make America white again. People of a different skin color or origin are only tolerated as long as they fit into the new hierarchy.

    Racist polemics like those of the new right in Europe, of White Power in the U.S., or even of Bolsonaro’s movement in Brazil can really only be understood against a backdrop of fundamental insecurity and grievance. The West feels deeply offended that the “others” who were always seen as less developed no longer want to copy it, and full of fear that they could even overtake the West. Fear rules the politics of the West, fear of the end of its feeling of superiority and of the fact that nothing could then be left if one no longer feels superior to the others.  Freely according to the motto: I am nothing, I can do nothing, but I am German – and this shows its ugly grimace in hate speech and violent outbursts. But we are not alone in this respect. For alongside the resurgence of the Others, which is significant in terms of world politics, civil wars around the world are turning into gang wars – the political community is disintegrating into ever new gangs. This has not been adequately perceived in the West until today because we have not been able to describe this process adequately with our conceptual system. In Western thought, the paradigm of Thomas Hobbes from the 17th century is still valid. It states that in a theoretically constructed state of nature, which always occurs when there is no longer a functioning state, the “state of nature” of the “war of all against all” occurs. In this conception, everyone is absolutely free and has a right to everything he can take, provided he has the power to do so. This life, however, according to Hobbes, is full of violence and fear eats the soul. To overcome this self-destructive “state of nature,” all individuals transfer all violence to a single sovereign, who in return provides them with protection and security. In this simple construction the modern state was born, secured by the state monopoly of violence. Here, only the state has a right to legitimately exercise violence, and non-state violence is criminalized.

    Gang Wars

    What is not included in this construction are gangs – groups of mostly young men left over from the civil wars since the end of the Cold War, uprooted in the refugee movements, or who have lost their identity in the dramatic transformation process we trivialize as globalization. Depending on the context, these uprooted and redundant young people can become terrorists, child soldiers, members of youth gangs that dominate the suburbs from Paris to Rio, drug cartels, mafia gangs, or human traffickers. The context varies, but the cause is the same everywhere: these young people feel marginalized, superfluous, and uprooted. Approaches that have analyzed related global violence have almost always emphasized individual violence or violent enrichment. Of course, there are civil war economies, markets of violence, and state collapse, including “new wars” (Kaldor and Münkler) characterized by the privatization and economization of violence and asymmetric warfare against the weakest in societies. In such markets of violence, people are traded first and foremost, and about 79% of them are women and children, but also weapons, drugs, rare earths, and the well-known blood diamonds as a synonym for precious stones. In many countries, however, violent gangs play at least as large a role.

    A characteristic feature of these gangs is that they are not exclusively concerned with private enrichment through violence, but paradoxically give their members a sense of identity and even home through their violence. This paradox is not provided for in our conceptual system for understanding violence.  Islamist terrorism can in no way be attributed to the pursuit of material interests. It is true that the Islamic State also used oil and that the Taliban dominate the opium trade in the Golden Crescent between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This only proves that there is a link between political and economic struggles, not that the struggles for recognition and identity in these organizations are economically determined. This means that there is still a link between violence and the market, perhaps it has just become more “invisible”, more visible at the micro level. Macro-violence, on the other hand, is increasingly characterized by struggles for identity and recognition.

    If we say there is a transition to a global war of all against all, I think there is a global transition to gang wars. These may or may not be youth gangs. Drug cartels and mafia organizations can also be based on gang structures. Of course, economic interests play an important role here, but I doubt that cohesion is guaranteed by economic interests alone. One example is the Japanese Yakuza. What are gangs?  A gang is a group that originally formed spontaneously and socializes and integrates its members through fighting and conflict. Typical behaviors include meeting in person, hanging out and occupying public space, traveling in a group, and having a high propensity for conflict – such as rocker groups.

    Many children, adolescents, and young adults in Central and South America are active members of youth gangs called “maras” or “pandillas”.

    The result of this behavior is the development of a distinct tradition, an unreflective internal structure, an esprit de corps, paradoxically solidarity and morality within the group, and a sense of belonging to a unified territory.  The leader must constantly maintain a threatening gesture against his own and also constantly rekindle the waning enthusiasm of his followers; in other words, respect for him must be constantly maintained. Many children, adolescents, and young adults in Central and South America are active members of youth gangs called “maras” or “pandillas”.

    After the end of the civil wars in Nicaragua in 1990, El Salvador in 1992, and Guatemala in 1996, there was a forced migration of illegal immigrants from the U.S. to their home countries, including the deportation of Central American-born members of street gangs formed in the U.S. to their parents’ home countries.  These young people had fled poverty and civil war, formed criminal gangs (maras) primarily on the West Coast of the U.S., and were now forced to return to their home countries, which they may never have seen. Back in Latin America, the mareros regrouped and received a large influx of both young people looking for direction and demobilized security forces and guerrillas (there were about 40,000 of them at the time).

    The most important aspects of a Latin American gang member’s life are honor, drugs, and violence. This is what a pandillero’s entire daily life revolves around, and in most cases, it also determines the when, how, and why of his death. In the gangs, there is a certain code of honor that states that gang solidarity and reputation are more important than anything else.  In a sense, the honor of the gang becomes the transcendence of the members, as the collective as such is religiously exalted and the individual counts for less and less. The individual is obligated to kill unconditionally for the honor of the group or die himself. There is also a paradoxical construction in another point: on the one hand, there is an absolute hierarchy, on the other hand, there is a feeling of being a gang: “We rule the barrio so that no one tells us what to do. If someone does, we silence them. You submit because we are many. We young people rule.  The response of the pandillero in a world where he is nothing is to attack, to dominate the barrio, to submit because he is submitted, to define a territory because he lives in uprootedness, to join an institution that gives identity because he lacks it. The pandillero strives to dominate in an environment that excludes him.

    Whoever belongs to a pandilla must not only master the exercise of violence, but must also be able to accept the suffering of violence. The initiation rituals for men and women are different: men must allow themselves to be beaten by existing members of the gang for a certain period of time, which varies from gang to gang, while women must allow themselves to be raped by any member of the gang. The unimaginable extent of violence in Central American youth gangs is an indication that gangs cannot be attributed to interests alone, for although these interests may be predominant in the exercise of violence, they are unlikely to play a role in voluntary submission to the group, self-sacrifice for it, and endurance of violence. Rather, the recognition by group members of having endured violence is the central aspect of one’s identity and loyalty to the gang. This is the too often overlooked connection between the wars of states and parastatal organizations (IS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards) and the violence that takes place on a mass but individual level (Hobbes, war of all against all). They cannot be attributed to either level, but are the intermediate realm, the hybrid between the two.

    Feature Image: Salvadoran left wing revolutionary group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front

  • The myth of Magna Carta: The struggle still goes on

    The myth of Magna Carta: The struggle still goes on

    The rise of democratic, elected Parliaments in England and Scotland just 50 years after the Magna Carta is not a coincidence but a consequence of that demand to share power. It is from the Magna Carta that the English writ of habeas corpus evolved, safeguarding individuals and their freedoms against unjust and unlawful imprisonment with the right to appeal.

    We now take our liberties and rights for granted, and the way of life it guarantees us is inherent. But what we now have has come after a long evolution process, and often they flowed out of something else quite unintended. The Magna Carta is a case in point. The English-speaking world recently celebrated over 800 years of the Magna Carta or Great Charter, which is synonymous with fundamental rights and the rule of law that are the cornerstones of modern democracy. Much of the world believes the Magna Carta came out of an eruption of a long-suppressed yearning among ordinary people for protection against the monarch and nobility. But it is not so.

    The Magna Carta was thus not a grand demand for equality, basic freedoms or the rule of law, but just a narrow demand for restricting the ruler’s powers, to ring-fence the interests of the elite.

     

    It came out of an intra-elite struggle between 40 barons and their ruler. England’s King John had emptied the royal treasuries in a fruitless war with France, and the barons were unwilling to meet his demands for higher taxes. The consequence was the Magna Carta — to protect the barons from the King’s demands. The demand to be judged by their peers was another protection. It was not meant for ordinary people, but only for barons. The Magna Carta was thus not a grand demand for equality, basic freedoms or the rule of law, but just a narrow demand for restricting the ruler’s powers, to ring-fence the interests of the elite.

    But the Magna Carta’s myth endured and was invoked whenever and wherever people struggled against injustice and freedom. Mahatma Gandhi invoked it in South Africa when he fought for racial equality, and emancipators and freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Martin Luther King Jr invoked it when they were being tried for sedition by oppressive regimes. Like the English barons, they too were arguing for limiting the oppressive and unjust powers of rulers, but not just for themselves and their peers, but for all their peoples. The story of modern democracy is about the long journey from the rights of a few to the rights of all.

    Another myth that endures is that the twin notions of democracy and the rule of law somehow originated with the Magna Carta. The fact is that the King rejected the Magna Carta soon after it was presented to him. But John avoided the consequences of the barons’ indignation by dying and thereby perpetuating the myth.

    The first democracies long preceded the 1215 Magna Carta. As early as the sixth century BC several “independent republics” existed in India as sanghas and ganas. Their main characteristics were a raja, elected or hereditary, and a deliberative assembly. These assemblies met regularly and passed laws pertaining to finances, administration and justice. The raja and other officials obeyed the decisions of these assemblies. While these assemblies mostly comprised the nobility and landowners, in some cases they included all free men. But the Brahminical system prevailed, in that the monarch always had to be a Kshatriya. While Licchavis, who held sway over the Kathmandu Valley in today’s Nepal and a major part of northern Bihar, were governed by an assembly of about 7,000 rajas, who in turn were the heads of all major families, others like the Shakyas, the clan to which Gautama Buddha belonged, had assemblies open to all people, rich or poor, and noble or common.

    Socrates and his pupil, Plato, deliberated and expounded on the role of a citizen within a community and laid down the foundations of the political philosophy that flourished in Athens and spread to most of the world in the next two and a half millennia.

    The greatest contribution to the evolution of democracy as a philosophy was in Athens, where great philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle lit up public discourse with their brilliance and original thinking. Socrates and his pupil, Plato, deliberated and expounded on the role of a citizen within a community and laid down the foundations of the political philosophy that flourished in Athens and spread to most of the world in the next two and a half millennia. Aristotle, who counted among his students Alexander the Great, dwelt more on systems of government and who first qualified liberty as the fundamental principle of democracy.

    Aristotle wrote in Politics: “Now a fundamental principle of the democratic form of constitution is liberty — that is what is usually asserted, implying that only under this constitution do men participate in liberty, for they assert this as the aim of every democracy. But one factor of liberty is to govern and be governed in turn; for the popular principle of justice is to have equality according to number, not worth, and if this is the principle of justice prevailing, the multitude must of necessity be sovereign and the decision of the majority must be final and must constitute justice, for they say that each citizen must have an equal share; so it results that in democracies the poor are more powerful than the rich, because there are more of them, and whatever is decided by the majority is sovereign.”

    This principle that “whatever is decided by the majority is sovereign” has always had to contend with the rights of individuals. In the US, created after a great debate among the founding fathers as a democracy, it was by majority will that slavery flourished till the Civil War. It took another century before equal rights for black people became the majority will. This constant struggle for individual rights against the will of the collective has been the central story of the evolution of the modern democratic state.  Free India, by contrast, provided for all these rights and liberties from the beginning in its Constitution. The Magna Carta, because it sought to limit the powers of the ruler, perhaps still has a place in our hearts and minds. To most citizens in democratic states, our life is also a constant struggle against the assertion of collective will to trample individual liberties or the rights of smaller groups.

    This principle that “whatever is decided by the majority is sovereign” has always had to contend with the rights of individuals.

    The rise of democratic, elected Parliaments in England and Scotland just 50 years after the Magna Carta is not a coincidence but a consequence of that demand to share power. It is from the Magna Carta that the English writ of habeas corpus evolved, safeguarding individuals and their freedoms against unjust and unlawful imprisonment with the right to appeal. It is from this emergence of petitioning for the production of the body that Parliaments in due course became to be increasingly used as a forum to address all the concerns and grievances of ordinary people.

    Thus, whatever be Magna Carta’s first intent, its consequences greatly expanded over centuries into a charter, which guarantees individual liberties, equality and justice to all, irrespective of race, religion and class. But that struggle is far from over. It goes on, and only its forms change as human values and means change.

    This article was published earlier in the Asian Age.

    Feature Image Credit: Britannica

     

  • Milan Kundera’s ‘remarkable’ work explored oppression, inhumanity – and the absurdity of being human

    Milan Kundera’s ‘remarkable’ work explored oppression, inhumanity – and the absurdity of being human

     

    Milan Kundera, that remarkable novelist, essayist, poet, philosopher and political critic, has died at the age of 94. It feels too soon, perhaps because in everything he wrote, he opened up new ways of thinking, writing and reading. In his literary presence, the world seemed tuned to a higher frequency.

    Kundera was born with immaculate timing, on April 1 (1929): April Fool’s Day. From the start, he was exposed to, and immersed in, the absurdity of human culture. He grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, then lived under Stalinist rule, where he was an active member of the Communist Party.

    I have been reading him, quoting him and teaching from his writings for decades, after bumping into his work in 1988. I was living then on an isolated sheep station in the Western Australian outback, a world of bleak beauty.

    Someone visiting the property pressed on me a copy of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and I was immediately and utterly captivated. This, Kundera’s third novel, affirmed my own anxiety of the absence of a stable truth, and of my incapacity to resist the longing to belong, even to the most damaged society.

    In one section of the novel, a group of the Communist faithful, dancing together in a circle, rise into the air and soar over the city. They laugh the laughter of angels while below them, the executioners are killing political prisoners. Says the narrator of this section, who necessarily cannot be part of that group:

    I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.

    Interrogating totalitarianism, with humour

    Kundera knew about oppression and inhumanity. His first collection of (not very good) poetry, Man, A Wide Garden (1953) – published when he was only 24 – was decidedly Soviet in tone and content.

    But when he wrote his first novel, The Joke in 1967, then wrote Life is Elsewhere in 1969 (published in 1973), both of them shot through with political satire, and he was expelled from the Communist Party and subsequently fled into exile.

    In what is perhaps his best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) – adapted in 1988 as a movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche – he continues his interrogation of totalitarian politics, exploring the Prague Spring and the brutality of Soviet control of Czechoslavakia.

     

    This theme sounds deeply earnest. But in each novel, Kundera offers some humour – often bitter, but capable of leavening the otherwise bleak, and densely reported, content.

    In Unbearable Lightness, for example, the narrator discusses Nietszche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence – the possibility we live the same life over and over. But he also develops an erotic narrative that seems to suggest lighthearted sex can allow us to live fully in the moment. We can exchange the weight of eternal recurrence for the lightness of being alive, here and now.

    Weight and lightness, laughter and forgetting, repetition and change, politics and sex: his first four novels incorporate such dualities. Perhaps this capacity to hold contradictory thoughts can be explained by something he said to Philip Roth:

    Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise – the age old drama of a world where everybody would live in harmony.

    Author in exile

    His dream of paradise was not realised, of course. In 1975, he fled his home for exile in France, and continued writing works of fiction that mostly followed the signature structure he first developed in The Joke: multi-part, multi-voiced novels, where the narrator interpolates critique, commentary and philosophical statements in the text.

    This makes for a restless story, one that shifts to and fro across locations, times and contexts. Characters flicker in and out. The logic of beginning, middle and end is barely acknowledged. And the sorts of issues that appear so often in fiction – a quest for the self, the telling of a tale, the achievement of resolution – are set aside.

    The focus of Kundera’s novels is their wrestle with questions of knowledge, the complexity of being and a constant uncertainty. This can be an unsettling style: a disruption, rather than a simple pleasure or an aesthetic experience. For a 21st-century woman, too, his tone and style in the writing of sex scenes – and the representation of women more generally – can present as outdated masculinity.

    I vacillate between feeling offence at what feels like misogyny, and reading it as a searing critique of misogyny. And I’m not alone in this.

    ‘Things are not as simple as you think’

    Where I uncomplicatedly follow Kundera’s lead is not in his novels, but in his essays. Here, his deep understanding of the background to what we now know as the novel, or the long traditions and changes that characterise artistic practice, genuinely illuminate the field.

     

    In The Art of the Novel (1986), he outlines a history of how novelists unpacked various dimensions of existence. He starts with Miguel de Cervantes and moves through the lists of generative fiction writers to fellow Czechs Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek – who, he claims, show that a strength of fiction is that it tolerates uncertainty, in a way politics and religion cannot. For Kundera, what fiction does so well is say to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.”

    For Kundera, the novel is a technological object that allows new ways of seeing, and of making meaning. And this seeing and meaning is embedded in its context. For example, in The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (2006), he points out what fiction can do that earlier forms could not.

    Homer never wondered whether, after all their many hand-to-hand battles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth. But for Don Quixote and Sancho teeth are a perpetual concern – hurting teeth, missing teeth.

    Writers like Cervantes (author of Don Quixote), Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) and Laurence Sterne (The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman) introduce the small things of everyday life, and illuminate the meaning and import they have on us, Kundera points out.

    But, he hastens to observe, contemporary writers cannot and should not write as those giants did: rather, writing is a matter of continuity (in terms of form, voice and style in a particular period) and discontinuity (finding something new).

    In these essays, too, he offers a workshop in how to write. How to manage voice, perspective, temporality. How to have fun with language and form – and let the imagination run wild. And how to deal with thought and concept, materiality and politics.

     

    A condolence book and portrait of late writer Milan Kundera at the Milan Kundera Library in Brno Czech Republic T. Tomas Skoda/EPA

    Teller of inconvenient truths

    A writer of such gravitas and such technical brilliance should, one might imagine, have won the Nobel Prize in Literature at some point in his long life. He won other prizes, after all, among them the Jerusalem Prize in 1985 and the Herder Prize in 2000.

    Perhaps it was his writing style that meant the Nobel committee saw him nominated on a number of occasions, but never awarded him the prize.

    After the last novel he wrote in Czech – Immortality (1991), which teases out questions of sexual and personal relationships – he wrote four more novels, which garnered less attention, less critical reception. So, in Slowness (1995), Identity: A Novel (1999), Ignorance (2000) and finally The Festival of Insignificance (2014), you can see his star begin to fade.

    This is not because they are less “good” books. Robin Ashenden suggests he “had become a teller of truths inconvenient to the modern age”, and maybe there is something in that.

    He is terribly direct, very hard-hitting. And he refuses the consolations of sentimentality or morality, in favour of what he describes as the morality of knowledge: the imperative to see and say what previous writers did not/could not see, or say. And to build fresh understandings of the world.

    This article was first published in The Conversation and is republished under Creative Commons license.

  • BRICS++: The West tries playing ‘catch-up’, but it’s too late

    BRICS++: The West tries playing ‘catch-up’, but it’s too late

    Until recently, the West has largely derided the BRICS project. But it finally is awaking to the fact that the BRICS initiative possesses the potential to turn both geo-politics, and the international monetary system, upside-down.

    The seismic Geo-Political event of this era is the explosion of BRICS membership and of even bigger potential BRICS membership. This movement has crossed a key threshold. It has transited from ‘vanilla’ multipolarity to being an anti-colonial expression — a shift that should not be underestimated. It is an ethos drawing energy from deep layers of passionate feeling that was stifled in the immediate post-war years, but which is re-surfacing to invest the multi-polar framework with evident dynamism.

    There are currently eight nations that have formally applied for membership and 17 others that have expressed interest in joining. If Saudi Arabia and Russia are both members, that is two of the three largest energy producers in the one camp.

    If Russia, China, Brazil and India are all members, there will be four of the seven largest countries in the world measured by landmass — possessing 30% of the Earth’s dry surface and related natural resources — as BRICS members.

    Almost 50% of the world’s wheat and rice production, as well as 15% of the world’s gold reserves, are in the BRICS.

    Meanwhile, China, India, Brazil, and Russia are four of the nine highest-population countries on the planet with a combined population of 3.2 billion people or 40% of the Earth’s population.

    “China, India, Brazil, Russia and Saudi Arabia have a combined GDP of $29 trillion or 28% of nominal global GDP. If one uses purchasing power parity to measure GDP, then the BRICS share is over 54%. Russia and China have two of the three largest nuclear arsenals in the world”.

    “By every measure then — population, landmass, energy output, GDP, food output and nuclear weapons — BRICS is not just another multilateral debating society. They are a substantial and credible alternative to Western hegemony”, Jim Rickards asserts.

    With a new trading currency framework likely to be fore-shadowed in August at the BRICS summit, the currency will descend upon a highly receptive audience. It will fall into an increasingly sophisticated network of capital and communications. This network will greatly enhance its chances of success.

    The key mistake is the failure to distinguish between the respective roles of a payment (trading) currency and a reserve currency. Payment currencies are used in trade for goods and services. Nations can trade in whatever payment currency they want; it doesn’t have to be dollars. However, in so doing – in a large way – the demand for the dollar incrementally is drained away. Ultimately this loss of foreign demand for dollars circumscribes the ability of the US to go on spending well above its income.

    What has defined a reserve currency has been a large, well-developed sovereign bond market. No country in the world comes close to the US Treasury bond market in terms of breadth and convertibility.

    And Western finance personnel, therefore, snort in derision at the prospects of the US dollar ever losing its hegemony. But they forget perhaps that there was no US bond market until WW1 when  Woodrow Wilson authorized Liberty Bonds to help finance the war. There were bond rallies and Liberty Bond parades in every major city. It became a patriotic duty to buy Liberty Bonds. The effort worked, and it birthed the US bond market.

    In short, the way to create an instant reserve currency is to create an instant bond market using your own citizens as willing buyers. As Jim Rickards earlier noted, were the BRICS to ‘use a patriotic model’ (by drawing on today’s anti-colonial spirit sweeping the BRICS countries) it would be possible to create international reserve assets denominated in the BRICS+ (trading) currency.

    Also, the recent Bank for International Settlements (BIS)-led experiments in real-time and digital Central Bank foreign exchange transactions promises to transform such a project – and to lessen substantially the need for a large reserve-asset reservoir.

    Until recently, the West has largely derided the BRICS project. But it finally is awaking to the fact that the BRICS initiative possesses the potential to turn both geo-politics and the international monetary system, upside-down.

    This month, the Chair of the Eurasia Group, Cliff Kupchan, wrote in Foreign Policy that “6 Swing States Will Decide the Future of Geopolitics”

    “Middle powers today have more agency than at any time since World War II. These are countries with significant leverage in geopolitics. Much more interesting [however] are the six leading middle powers of the global south: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey. These swing states of the global south are not fully aligned with either superpower and are therefore free to create new power dynamics. These six also serve as a good barometer for broader geopolitical trends”.

     

    “… the question remains whether the BRICS states are going to become a more formal institution under China’s direction … that prospect is a clear challenge to the West…But the threat is unlikely to materialize. These countries may have tacked away from the United States — but that’s different from joining a Chinese-directed, Russian-assisted body actively opposing the United States. As of now, BRICS has not shown the ability to develop and implement a common agenda, so there is very little institutional strength for China to co-opt”

    The blinkers are on. The Western Establishment just doesn’t ‘get it’. Kupchan’s article’s conclusion: “the US has been playing catch-up – and not doing very well at even that”. It needs a well-crafted strategy toward each of the key Swing States (to halt their ‘tacking away’ from the US, towards the Russia-China axis), he warns. Arm-twisting, threats and coercion, presumably, as usual.

    ‘Catching-up’?  The horse already has bolted. The stable is empty.

     

    Feature Image: Indian Express

    This article was published earlier in Al Mayadeen English.

  • Indian Ruler’s Predicament Limits their Understanding of Education’s Wider Role

    Indian Ruler’s Predicament Limits their Understanding of Education’s Wider Role

    Mr. Fadnavis, Dy. CM of Maharashtra has exhorted the youth to come forward in foiling the attempts of urban naxals from getting into universities. Since anyone differing from the establishment is being called urban naxal these days, this is a call to curb dissent in the
    universities.

    Earlier, Delhi’s Lt. Governor V K Saxena is reported to have said, “… degreeyan toh padahi ke kharch ki raseedein hoti hain. …” (… degrees are mere receipts of money spent on studies …). This was in response to the Delhi CM, Kejriwal’s reported barb that India needs an “… educated PM for the nation’s well-being”.  So, the educational qualifications of leaders have become an issue.

    These statements reflect the current Indian rulers’ skewed vision of education. For one dissent is not acceptable and for the other education is only about money spent and not the larger role it plays in society.

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  • What Might be Leading to the Rise of Conflict in Man-Woman Relationship

    What Might be Leading to the Rise of Conflict in Man-Woman Relationship

    Today due to the educational, economic and social changes, the erstwhile restricted spaces in terms of exclusive residential habitations and private caste-determined spaces are not functional any more. As a result, interactions between different caste and religious groups have indeed changed and increased.

    During recent times the collective conscience of civil society and the public, in general, has been severely shaken due to the occurrence of a number of bone-chilling incidents wherein husbands, boyfriends, or live-in male partners have brutally killed the women they cohabited with. These incidents have not just been plain killings but have led to the ruthless dismembering of the bodies of the women killed. The killers have done various things post the killings from refrigerating the dismembered pieces to throwing them into a tandoor. One wonders if apartment buildings have aided in providing privacy and anonymity that would not have been possible otherwise to indulge in such acts.

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  • An Asia-Pacific NATO: fanning the flames of war

    An Asia-Pacific NATO: fanning the flames of war

     

    Former President Trump sidelined NATO to such an extent that European members were disillusioned with American leadership and NATO was in a state of fragmentation. With Biden’s presidency unleashing its Ukraine strategy and war against Russia, NATO has solidified with blind subservience to American leadership. Building on imagined threats from Russia and China, the US is now seeking to make a NATO alliance format for security across Asia as well. On the eve of the 33rd summit at Vilnius on 11-12 July 2023, Türkiye dropped its objections for Sweden to become the 33rd member of NATO, abandoning its 150-year tradition of proud neutrality and peace in favour of war-mongering. With an eye on Asia, the summit invited four Asian countries – Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand – as observers at the summit. The summit statement is, as expected, replete with anti-Russian rhetoric but more importantly extensive in its focus on the ‘China threat’ thus paving the way for NATO’s role in Asia. Jeffrey Sachs, in a speech in Australia in early July (reproduced below), has warned forcefully about the peril that NATO poses to global peace and security.                                           – TPF Editorial Team

    “My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable. I’m not sure who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president.”, says Jeffrey Sachs in a speech at a Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE) seminar, Melbourne, Australia. “U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that U.S. actions did in Ukraine.”

    “the idea of opening NATO offices in Asia is mind-boggling in its foolishness. Please tell the Japanese to stop this reckless action.”

    Jeffrey Sachs
    Speech to Shape (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth)
    July 5, 2023

    Good afternoon to everybody. I want to thank you for inviting me and to thank SHAPE for its leadership. I just had the privilege to listen to Alison Broinowski and Chung-in Moon. We have been treated to brilliant and insightful statements. I absolutely agree with all that has been said. The world has gone mad but especially the Anglo-Saxon world, I’m afraid. I don’t know whether there is any sense in our little English-speaking corner of the world. I’m of course speaking of the United States, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

    There’s something profoundly disheartening about the politics of our countries right now. The deep madness, I’m afraid, is British Imperial thinking that has been taken over by the United States. My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable now compared even to 20 or 30 years ago. I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president of the United States right now. We are run by generals, by our security establishment. The public is privy to nothing. The lies that are told about foreign policy are daily and pervasive by a mainstream media that I can barely listen to or read anymore. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the main television outlets are 100 per cent repeating government propaganda by the day, and it’s almost impossible to break through.

    it’s about a madness of the United States to keep U.S. hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense because their only modus operandi is to make war.

    What is this about? Well, as you’ve heard, it’s about a madness of the United States to keep U.S. hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense because their only modus operandi is to make war.

    And they are cheer-led by Britain, which is unfortunately, in my adult life, increasingly pathetic in being a cheerleader for the United States for U.S. hegemony and for war. Whatever the U.S. says, Britain will say it ten times more enthusiastically. The U.K. leadership could not love the war in Ukraine more. It is the great Second Crimean War for the British media and for the British political leadership.

    Now, how Australia and New Zealand fall for this idiocy is really a deep question for me and for you. People should know better. But I’m afraid that it is the Five Eyes and the security establishment that told the politicians, to the extent that the politicians are involved in this, ‘well this is how we have to do it’. This is our Security State and I don’t think our politicians necessarily have much role in this. By the way, the public has no role in U.S. foreign policy at all. We have no debate, no discussion, no deliberation, no debates over voting the hundred, now $113 billion, but in fact much more money spent on the Ukraine War.

    So far there’s not been an hour of organised debate even in the Congress on this, much less in the public, but my guess is that your security establishment is really the driver of this in Australia, and they explain to the Prime Minister and others: ‘you know this is the utmost National Security, and this is what America has told us. Let us, your security apparatus, explain what we’re seeing. Of course, you cannot divulge this to the broader public, but this is, at the essence, a struggle for survival in the world’.

    Everything I see myself, and I’m now 43 years in this activity as an economic advisor all over the world, suggests that this message is nonsense. One thing that would be interesting for people to look at, in order to understand these developments, is a very telling article by a former colleague of mine at Harvard, Ambassador Robert Blackwell and Ashley Tellis, written for the Council on Foreign Relations in March 2015. I want to read a couple excerpts from it because it laid out the plan of what’s happening right now pretty directly. This is how things work in the U.S., in which future plans are laid out to the establishment in such reports.

    “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. First on the North American continent, then in the Western Hemisphere, and finally, globally. Preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the 21st century.”    

     – Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis in a March 2015 article for Council on Foreign Relations.

    We’re basically told in 2015 what’s going to happen in US-China relations. The deterioration of relations was planned — it’s not ad hoc. So, here’s what Blackwell and Tellis wrote in 2015. First, “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. First on the North American continent, then in the Western Hemisphere, and finally, globally.” And then they argue that “preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the 21st century.”

    So, what’s the U.S. goal? The goal is very straightforward, it is the primacy of the United States globally. Blackwell and Tellis lay out the game plan for China. They tell us what to do.

    Here’s the list, though I’m only excerpting: “Creating new preferential trading arrangements among U.S. friends and allies to increase their mutual gains through instruments that consciously exclude China.” This is the game that Obama already started with TPP, though he couldn’t get it through domestic political opposition. Second, “create, in partnership with U.S. allies, a technology control regime vis-à-vis Beijing,” to block China’s strategic capabilities. Third, build up “power-political capacities of U.S. friends and allies on China’s periphery,” and “improving the capability of U.S. military forces to effectively project power along the Asian rimlands despite any Chinese opposition.”

    This foreshadowing of US policies by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is well-known in recent history.

    What I find especially remarkable about this list is that it was made in 2015. It’s the step-by-step plan of action actually being carried out. This foreshadowing of US policies by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is well-known in recent history. In 1997 in the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out with precision the intended timeline for NATO enlargement and specifically the intention to include Ukraine in that NATO enlargement. Of course, that NATO enlargement plan has led us directly to the Ukraine War, which is indeed a proxy Russia-US war over NATO enlargement.

    Now the friends and geniuses that brought you the Ukraine War are on their way to bringing you a new war in your neighbourhood. As Professor Moon noted, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is starting to open its offices in East Asia, which is not exactly the North Atlantic.

    So, this is where we are. It’s not absolutely simple to see through for one main reason, at least in the U.S. I’m not sure what it’s like in Australia but I expect that it’s pretty much the same as in the U.S., where we have no honesty or public deliberation about any of this. The policies are owned entirely by the security establishment, the military-industrial complex, the network of “think tanks” which are in fact non-think tanks in Washington, with almost all funded by the military-industrial complex.

    The military-industrial complex and its corporate lobby have taken over the East Coast universities where I teach. I taught at Harvard for more than 20 years, and now I teach at Columbia University. The influence of the intelligence agencies on the campuses is unprecedented, in my experience. All of this has happened without much public notice, almost a silent coup. There is no debate, no public politics, no honesty, no documents revealed. Everything is secret, confidential and a bit mysterious. Since I happen to be an economist who engages with the heads of state and ministers around the world, I hear a lot of things and see a lot of things that help me to pierce through the official “narratives” and pervasive lies.

    You will not find any of this in our public discourse. And just a word, if I may, about the Ukraine War. The war was completely predictable, and resulted from a U.S. plan for hegemony based on NATO enlargement that dates back to the early 1990’s. The U.S. strategy was to bring Ukraine into the U.S. military orbit. Brzezinski, again in 1997 in his book The Global Chess Board, laid out the strategy. Russia without Ukraine is nothing, he argued. Ukraine, he wrote, is the geographical pivot for Eurasia. Interestingly, Brzezinski warned American policymakers to ensure that they don’t push Russia and China into an alliance. In fact, that would be so antithetical to U.S. interests that Brzezinski clearly believed that it would never happen. But it has, because U.S. foreign policy is incompetent as well as profoundly dangerous and misconceived.

    During 1990-91, I happen to have been an advisor to Gorbachev, and during 1991-94, to Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma, spanning the late days of perestroika and the early days of Russian and Ukrainian independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I watched very closely what was happening. I saw that the United States was absolutely uninterested in any way in helping Russia to stabilise.

    The idea of the U.S. security establishment from the early 1990s was U.S.-led unipolarity or U.S. hegemony. In the early 1990s, the U.S. rejected measures to help stabilise the Soviet economy and then the Russian economy, while it also began planning NATO enlargement, in direct contradiction to what the U.S. and Germany had promised Gorbachev and Yeltsin. So, the issue of NATO enlargement, including to Ukraine, is part of a U.S. game plan that started in the early 1990s, and eventually led to the Ukraine war.

    By the way, the U.S. was deeply involved in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president in 2014. Yes, this was a coup, and to an important extent, a regime change operation of the United States. I happen to have seen a part of it, and I know that U.S. money poured into supporting the Maidan. Such U.S. meddling was disgusting and destabilising, and all part of the game plan to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and Georgia.

    When one looks at the map it’s indeed Brzezinski’s 1997 idea: surround Russia in the Black Sea region. Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia would all be members of NATO. That would be the end of Russian power projection in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. So it went for these “security” geniuses.

    Putin put forward diplomatic responses that were repeatedly rejected by the U.S. and its NATO allies, including the Minsk II Agreement endorsed by the U.N Security Council, but then ignored by Ukraine.

    On December 17, 2021, Putin put on the table a perfectly reasonable document as the basis for negotiation, A Draft U.S.-Russia Security Agreement. At the core was Russia’s call for an end to NATO expansion. Tragically, the U.S. blew it off. I called the White House at the end of December 2021, spoke with one of our top security officials, and pleaded, “Negotiate. Stop the NATO enlargement. You have a chance to avoid war.” Of course, to no avail. The United States’ formal response to Putin was that NATO enlargement was non-negotiable with Russia, a matter in which Russia has absolutely no say.

    This is a mind-boggling way to pursue foreign affairs because it is a direct road to war. I hope everybody understands this war in Ukraine was close to ending as early as March 2022 with a negotiated agreement just one month after Russia invaded on February 24th. The negotiated agreement was stopped by the U.S. because it was based on Ukraine’s neutrality. The U.S. told Ukraine to fight on, end negotiations, and reject neutrality.

    And so we are in a war that continues to escalate towards possible nuclear war, which is what would happen if Russia were to suffer deep defeats on the battlefield. Russia is not losing on the battlefield just now, but if it did, it would likely escalate to nuclear war. Russia is not going to be pushed out of the Donbas and Crimea and meekly go home with apologies. Russia is going to escalate if it needs to escalate. So, we are right now in a spiral that is extremely dangerous.

    Japan plays utterly into this spiral. And Australia does as well. It’s so sad to watch Australia accepting to be used in this reckless way. To pay a fortune for new military bases in a reckless, provocative, and costly way, that will feed the U.S. military-industrial complex while weighing heavily on Australia.

     

    Such U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that U.S. actions did in Ukraine. Only an Asia-Pacific war would be even more disastrous. The whole idea of the U.S. and its allies fighting China is mind-boggling in its implications, its stupidity and its recklessness. All of this is utterly divorced from Australia’s real security interests. China is not a threat to Australia. It is not a threat to the world.

    I don’t know of a single Chinese overseas invasion in its history, by the way, except when the Mongols briefly ruled China and tried to invade Japan. Other than the Mongol invasion, defeated by a typhoon, China has not launched overseas wars. It’s just not part of China’s statecraft, nor would such wars be in China’s national interest.

    What worries me about the world is a deeply neurotic United States (in)security leadership that aims to be number one, but that can’t be number one in the way that it believes. This is pathetic, yet is applauded each day in London, a place that still dreams of the glory of global empire from a long bygone era.

    RCEP is the correct concept for the region to bring together China, Korea, Japan, the ten ASEAN countries, Australia and New Zealand in a coherent framework, especially around the climate challenge, energy policy, trade policy, and infrastructure and investment policy. A well-functioning RCEP would do a world of good, not only for the 15 countries in RCEP but for the entire world.

    Permit me, in conclusion, to take one minute to say what should be done.

    First, the war in Ukraine could end the day Biden steps up and says NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. The basis for a negotiated security arrangement has been there for 30 years, but has been rejected so far by the U.S.

    Second, the idea of opening NATO offices in Asia is mind-boggling in its foolishness. Please tell the Japanese to stop this reckless action.

    Third, the U.S. approach to arming Taiwan is profoundly dangerous, provocative and deliberately so.

    Fourth, what is needed most in the Asia-Pacific is regional dialogue amongst Asia-Pacific nations.

    Fifth, the Asia-Pacific should build on RCEP [Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement]. RCEP is the correct concept for the region to bring together China, Korea, Japan, the ten ASEAN countries, Australia and New Zealand in a coherent framework, especially around the climate challenge, energy policy, trade policy, and infrastructure and investment policy. A well-functioning RCEP would do a world of good, not only for the 15 countries in RCEP but for the entire world.

    Sorry to have run on so long but it’s so important what SHAPE is doing. You’re completely on the right track and all best wishes to your efforts.

     

    This transcript of Jeffrey Sach’s speech was published earlier in Pearls and Irritations.

    Feature Image Credit: bnn.network

    Cartoon Credit: Global Times

  • Manipur Violence: Understanding North East India is essential for viable Solutions

    Manipur Violence: Understanding North East India is essential for viable Solutions

    Whenever an ethnic clash or terrorist attack occurs in India’s Northeast, there is a beeline of “national media” reporters to the region for a quick report. Many energetic journalists move to the site of the incident to get “firsthand” information while many others air all kinds of” Breaking News” from cities like Guwahati or even from the national capital. In such a situation one can even see the emergence of “experts” who give their views from the comfort of their homes. These experts who had gained experience by serving in the region at some time in their careers do have adequate background knowledge, but they are at times out of sync with the ground realities. Ministers and political leaders also descend on the violence-hit region but many have political agenda and very often end up making unsolicited, unrealistic, and even provocative remarks. This trend is not new and is an increasing tendency for the past several decades.

    Unfortunately, such flying visits do not help. Sometimes such reporting that makes headlines in electronic and print media and is generally accepted as authentic may not convey the ground reality as some inputs may be biased or doctored depending upon the source of the information.

     

    Unlike other states of the country, the Northeast of India is unique with its cultural and geopolitical characteristics. The region shares 96% of its border internationally with four countries including China, and is an extremely complex region with more than 200 ethnic groups with distinct cultures, food habits, languages, or dialects. Amongst all the northeastern states, Manipur is the most complex state with more than thirty-five ethnic groups. The state shares a large part of its boundary with Myanmar (398 Kilometers) presently ruled by the Military junta.  Manipur also shares a boundary of 96 Km with Mizoram,205 km with Assam and 204km with Nagaland. The state has a diverse demography.  Nagas (24%) and Kukis (16%) are mostly Christians whereas Hindu Meities and Muslims constitute 53% and 6% of the population respectively.

     While India’s border with Pakistan and Bangladesh is fenced, the border with Myanmar is not. There is also a policy of Free Move Regime (FMR) which allows Citizens of both countries to come up to 16 Kilometers within each other’s territory without a visa or passport documentation. Though the aim of FMR is noble as it allows better interaction amongst people who are mostly from the same ethnic tribe,  it is prone to exploitation by militants, as well as smugglers.

    Myanmar military’s operations against rebel groups have forced many tribals particularly Chin-Kuki to enter Indian states particularly Mizoram and Manipur for safety. However, Meities allege that infiltration of Chin-Kuki, as well as rebels to Manipur from Myanmar, is part of a grand design to occupy land and carry out nefarious activities like land grabbing, arms smuggling, drug trafficking etc.  As per an unconfirmed report, approximately 35000 Chin/Kuki refugees from Myanmar have taken shelter in Mizoram and another about 5000 have taken refuge in Manipur.

    The smuggling of drugs, timber, areca nut, cheap Chinese clothes, and electronic items from Myanmar into Manipur and further to other parts of the country is a lucrative business. There is fierce competition to control the lucrative drug trade. While Kuki tribes are primarily involved in poppy cultivation, almost all other ethnic groups are involved in the drug trade in some form or other. It is learnt that fertilizer (urea) provided for distribution to farmers is diverted for poppy cultivation by vested interests with the connivance of Government officials.

     There are a large number of small or big militant groups active in Manipur, each vying for influence and claiming to be the “protectors” of the interest of the respective ethnic groups. Many of these groups, particularly Kuki militant groups, are under Suspension of Operation (SoO) with the Central Government.  Approximately 2000 Kuki militants representing about 26 different Kuki Militant groups are lodged in Designated Camps set up in various Hill districts of the state. The allegations by Meities that the Kuki militants are abetting and instigating Kukis to carry out violence against them cannot be ruled out. Similarly, Kukis allege the involvement of Meitei militants in the ongoing ethnic violence. The ethnic violence which has been continuing since 3rd May 2023 has not seen a substantial reduction despite Union Home Minister Amit Shah and others’ appeal. The Nagas are closely observing the emerging situations. In such a delicate environment all that is needed is just a spark to aggravate an already volatile situation.

    Despite many differences, the various ethnic groups have learnt to live together in Manipur. However, a number of actions in the recent past by the present ruling dispensation in the state has led to resentment amongst tribals mainly Kukis. These include eviction of Kuki encroachers from forest land, action against Kukis involved in poppy cultivation etc.    While these appear to be genuine actions of an elected Government, Kukis feel that they have been deliberately targeted. A section of Meities has now demanded that NRC (National Register of Citizens) should be made for Manipur state as they feel that immigration of Chin/Kukis from Myanmar has substantially increased. Thus, the trust deficit between Kuki and Meities had already reached a peak. It will take substantial effort from everyone from the Government machinery to the common citizen to restore confidence and goodwill amongst the ethnic tribes.

     The direction of the Imphal High Court on 27 March 2023  given out publicly on 19th April directing the Manipur Government to consider  ST status for Meities triggered a  large-scale violence on 3rd May. Incidentally, Muralidaran who was appointed Acting Chief Judge of Manipur High Court on 6th February 2023 had given the very important judgment within two months of his assuming office. The Supreme Court however on 17th May 2023, criticizing the Manipur High Court judgement as ‘factually wrong’, expressed the need to nullify the order of the Manipur High Court. It is worth noting that the President of the country is the constitutional authority vested with the power of declaring a Caste or Tribe as SC or ST. The case to declare Meities as ST was first filed in 2013 (MutumChuramaniMetitei versus the State of Manipur).

    According to the census records of 1891, 1901 and 1931, the Meitei was listed as a Scheduled Tribe, however, since 1951 were removed from the ST list of the Indian Union without any information or communication to the people of Manipur. In 1949, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India constituted a minority commission to verify the social status of Meities. There are reasons to believe that many Meities were not keen on the ST tag as they probably felt that they were of a higher class and being accepted as tribal will lower their social status. However, a faction of low caste Meities enjoys OBC and SC status.

    Meities are probably now realizing the folly committed by their elders for not advocating for ST status.  Incidentally, like Nagas and Kukis, Meities are also from Mongoloid genetic backgrounds. However, in the 19th century, under the influence of Bengali Hindus, Meities adopted Hindu culture, accepted Vaishnavism, and hence, are influenced by caste and social stratification patterns.

    The pressure on land in the Manipur valley where other tribes (being ST) could own land as well as enjoy other benefits in terms of education and employment made the present generation of Meities feel insecure.  They realized that only if they were granted ST status could they buy land in the hills or compete in jobs with other tribes. In a civil writ petition filed by a section of Meites in Manipur High Court in April 2022, the High Court on 27th March 2023 had directed the state government to submit the recommendation to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs to include the Meities in the ST list.

    While both the tribes, namely Kukis and Nagas protested on 3rd May against the High Court’s directions, the protest by Kukis turned violent. It is also a singular failure of Biren Singh’s Government for not anticipating the law-and-order breakdown and accordingly taking effective measures to prevent the chaos.

    In Manipur, the tribals enjoy some benefits under Article 371C of the constitution as well as the Manipur Hill Area District Autonomous Council Act of 1972. However, Kukis have been demanding a separate Autonomous Council on similar lines of the Bodoland Territorial Council operative in Bodo-dominated areas of Assam.  Some Kukis have gone to the extent of demanding “Kuki land”, a separate state to be carved out of Manipur.  On the other hand, the demand of the Nagas is for the integration of Naga Areas of Manipur with Nagaland (Greater Nagaland). Therefore, the issues in Manipur are very complex.   Many other tribes in the Northeast have been raising demand either for ST status or Autonomous council or even for separate states.  Hence, the Centre needs to be very cautious in resolving the current Manipur imbroglio as the decisions can have ramifications in the other Northeast states.

    The Central Government, though sincere in its efforts at solving the problems of the Northeast, has made many mistakes in the past simply because of the politicians’ lack of patience to understand the intricacies of the region. One glaring example was the extension of the Ceasefire with NSCN (IM) to the state of Manipur in 2001. The Government had signed a Ceasefire agreement with dominant NSCN (IM) groups in 1997 which was confined to the state of Nagaland. However, under pressure from the NSCN (IM), the Govt in 2001 extended the Ceasefire to Manipur by incorporating the words “Without Territorial Limits”.  The Central Government’s decision, taken without understanding the psyche of Meities and without consulting the Manipur government, led to large-scale violence leading to the killing of thirteen protestors in police firing on 18 June 2001. The Government had no option but to withdraw the Ceasefire from Manipur. However, it took decades to normalize the relations between the Nagas and the Meities.

    Similarly, the “Assam Accord” signed by the Central Government with the All-Assam Student Union (AASU) in 1985 has been a non-starter even after almost forty years of signing the accord. The Assam Accord talks of “Detection, Deletion (from Voters List) and Deportation of illegal Bangladeshis who have entered Assam post-1971.  These illegal Bangladeshis cannot be deported to Bangladesh as there is no deportation agreement with Bangladesh. Moreover, Bangladesh denies that her citizens have infiltrated Assam or any other state. The government has signed an accord which it finds difficult to implement.

    The Manipur situation is becoming tricky with neighbouring state Mizoram getting involved in the Manipur issue. Mizos belonging to Chin tribes just as Kukis are providing all help to their brethren who have taken refuge in that state. Now a section of the people particularly from Mizoram are trying to bring a religious angle to the issue saying that Christians have been deliberately targeted in Manipur.   A section of Mizo politicians is now supporting the Kukis’ demand for Autonomous Council/ separate state that will further complicate the issue. Incidentally, a few newspapers published in Israel have also talked about the safety and security of the Jews in Manipur. Similarly, the role of RSS in the present violence has become conspicuous.

     Both Kukis and Meiteis are attempting to internationalise the issue which is essentially an internal issue of the country. On 30th June 2023, World Kuki-Zo Intellectual Council (WKZIC) submitted a memorandum to the Prime Minister of Israel seeking urgent intervention for the protection of the Kuki people. On 6th July 2023, the US Ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, stated that the United States is ready to assist India in resolving the current ongoing issue.

     It is creditable that other ethnic tribes, particularly Nagas of Manipur have shown great restraint however, they are concerned about the possible political fallout of the ethnic clashes.  Their concern is that any solution between Kukis and Meities should not in any way put the Nagas in any disadvantageous position.

     The allegation by a section of Meitie leaders that Assam Rifles has been partial to Kukis appears to be politically motivated to malign India’s oldest Para Military Force.  The security forces, particularly the Assam Rifles, have been working round the clock to maintain peace in the state.  Assam Rifles has rescued Meities from Kuki-dominated hill districts and similarly had rescued Kukis from Meitei-dominated valleys. It is hoped that the Central Government does not give in to the demand of some BJP leaders of Manipur to withdraw Assam Rifles from the state. On the contrary, there are allegations that at times Manipur Administration, in particular, the state police have been biased. It is pertinent to note that sizeable arms were looted from many police stations by miscreants which indicates the nexus of police with the miscreants, especially at the lower level.

      Despite Home Minister’s appeal to surrender arms looted from many police stations, only a few have been deposited. COCOMI (Coordinating Committee of Manipur Integrity), in a statement on 07th June 2023, rejected Home Minister Amit Shah’s appeal to surrender looted arms and resolved not to allow Security Forces to launch operations to recover looted weapons. Such actions at this critical time are bound to aggravate the situation. The organization COCOMI has recently declared “Manipuri’s National War against Chin Kuki Narco terrorism”. Terming the entire Chin- Kukis as a narco-terrorist group will further widen the gap.  It is to be noted that the spoils of the drug trade are enjoyed by most of the tribes including smugglers based in places outside the Northeast region,

    The immediate aim, particularly of the Governments at the Centre as well as at the State, should be to win back the trust and confidence of people of all communities.  The civil society, the media and common Meitei as well as the Kuki people must play a responsible role keeping in mind the sensitivities of all communities. Panel discussions are good but putting one tribal group against another in the TV debate will further antagonize the common people. Similarly, people on social media must exercise utmost restraint.   A long-term solution will need great deliberation.  Patience and restraint are the key words at his juncture.

     

    The views expressed are the author’s own.