Name of Source: Asian Age

December 15, 2011

Even though it has been more than a year since I left the service of the United Nations, the one question people have not stopped asking me here in India is when our country, with 1.2 billion people and a booming economy, is going to become a permanent member of the Security Council. The short answer is “not this year, and probably not the next.” But there are so many misconceptions about this issue that a longer answer is clearly necessary.

The problem of reforming the Security Council is rather akin to a situation in which a number of doctors gather around a patient and all agree on the diagnosis, but they cannot agree on the prescription. The diagnosis is clear: the Security Council (SC) reflects the geopolitical realities of 1945 and not of today. This situation can be anatomized mathematically, geographically, and politically, as well as in terms of equity.

Mathematically: When the UN was founded in 1945, the Council consisted of 11 members out of a total UN membership of 51 countries; in other words, some 22 percent of the member states were on the Security Council. Today, there are 192 members of the UN, and only 15 members of the Counci—fewer than 8 percent. So many more countries, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the membership, do not feel adequately represented on the body.

Geographically: The current composition of the Council also gives undue weight to the balance of power of at least a half century ago. Europe, for instance, which accounts for barely 5 percent of the world’s population, still controls 33 percent of the SC seats in any given year (and that does not count Russia, regarded by much of the world as another European power).

Politically: The Council’s five permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China) enjoy their position, as well as the privilege of a veto over any Council resolution or decision, by virtue of having won a war sixty-six years ago. (In the case of China, the word “won” needs to be placed within quotation marks.)

In terms of simple considerations of equity, this situation is unjust to those countries whose financial contributions to the United Nations outweigh those of four of the five permanent members. Specifically, Japan and Germany have for decades been the second- and third-largest contributors to the UN budget, at roughly 19 percent and 12 percent, respectively, while still being referred to as “enemy states” in the United Nations Charter (since the UN was set up by the victorious Allies of World War II). Further, the current Council membership denies opportunities to other states that have contributed in kind (through participation in peacekeeping operations, for example) or by size, or both, to the evolution of world affairs in the more than six decades since the organization was born. India and Brazil are notable examples of this latter case.

So the Security Council is clearly ripe for reform to bring it into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The UN recognized the need for action as early as 1992, when the Open-Ended Working Group of the General Assembly was established to look into the issue, in the hope—or so then secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared—of finding a formula for SC reform in time for the organization’s fiftieth anniversary in 1995. But the Open-Ended Working Group soon began to be known in the UN corridors as the Never-Ending Shirking Group. Rather than identifying a solution or moving toward compromise, the group remains in existence to this day, having missed not only the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations but the sixtieth and now the sixty-fifth. Left to their own devices, they will be arguing the merits of the case well past the UN’s centenary.

For a decade now, the Group of Four (or G-4)—Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan—have been in the forefront of an attempt to win passage of Security Council reform, fully expecting to be the beneficiaries of any expansion in the category of permanent members. They have been repeatedly thwarted. The problem is quite simple: for every state that feels it deserves a place on the Security Council, and especially the handful of countries that believe their status in the world ought to be recognized as being in no way inferior to at least three if not four of the existing permanent members, there are several who know they will not benefit from any reform. The small countries, which make up more than half the UN’s membership, accept this reality and are content to compete occasionally for the five nonpermanent Council seats that come up for a vote every year. (These five seats are voted on by all members of the General Assembly, and the candidates are generally regarded as representing their various regions—thus, often creating vigorous lobbying and campaigning among the nations within a given region.)

At the same time, the medium-sized and large countries that are the rivals of the prospective beneficiaries (that is, the G-4) deeply resent the prospect of a select few breaking free of their current second-rank status in the world body. Some of the objectors, such as Canada and Spain, are genuinely motivated by principle: they consider the very existence of permanent membership to be wrong, and they have no desire to compound the original sin by adding more members to a category they dislike. Many others, however, are openly animated by a spirit of competition, historical grievance, or simple envy. Together, they have banded into an effective coalition—first called the “coffee club” and now, more cynically, “Uniting for Consensus”—to thwart reform of the permanent membership of the Council. They say they would accept some other formula that does not give a few countries privileges that they do not currently enjoy.

Let us remember that the bar to amending the UN Charter has been set rather high. Any amendment requires a two-thirds majority of the overall UN membership—in other words, 128 of the 192 states in the General Assembly. An amendment would further have to be ratified by two-thirds of the member states (and ratification is usually a parliamentary procedure, so in most countries this means it is not enough for the government of the day to be in favor of a reform; its Parliament or Congress must also agree to the change). Thus, the only “prescription” that has any chance of passing is one that will both (1) persuade two-thirds of the UN member states to support it and (2) not attract the opposition of any of the existing “Perm Five” (or even that of a powerful U.S. senator who could block ratification in Washington). That has proved to be a tall order, indeed.

After all, what countries would the world want to see on an expanded Security Council? Obviously, states that displace some weight in the world and have a record of making major contributions to the UN system. But when Japan and Germany began pressing their claims to permanent seats, the then foreign minister of Italy, Susanna Agnelli, wisecracked, “What’s all this talk about Japan and Germany? We lost the war, too!” (Other historical factors intrude: neither China nor South Korea is keen on seeing Japan rewarded today, given its record of atrocities seven decades ago.) Even assuming such objections (notably from Italy, Spain, Canada, and Korea, and among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries) could be overcome, adding these two security council reform to the Council would, of course, further skew the existing North-South imbalance. So they would have to be balanced by new permanent members from the developing world. But which would these be?

In Asia, India, as the world’s largest democracy, its fifth-largest economy, and a long-standing contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, seems an obvious contender. But Pakistan, which fancies itself India’s strategic rival on the subcontinent, is unalterably opposed, and to some extent Indonesia seems to feel threatened by the prospect of an Indian seat. Similarly, in Latin America, Brazil occupies a place analogous to India’s, but Argentina and Mexico have other ideas, pointing to Portuguese-speaking Brazil’s inferior credentials in representing largely Hispanic Latin America. And in Africa, how is one to adjudicate the rival credentials of the continent’s largest democracy, Nigeria, its largest economy, South Africa, and its oldest civilization, Egypt?

No wonder the search for a reform prescription—a formula that is simultaneously acceptable to a two-thirds majority and not unacceptable to the Perm Five—has proved so elusive. And while composition is the central challenge, it is not the only one. Questions of the eventual size of a reformed Council are also raised and further complicate the discussion. This is because it is generally agreed that once additional permanent members have been added to the Council, they must also be joined by additional nonpermanent ones in order to give more representation to such regions as Latin America and Eastern Europe, which would otherwise risk being marginalized in the new body. Might the Council, then, become too large to function effectively?

And what about the veto? Permanent membership currently comes with the privilege of a veto, but there appears to be less support across the full UN membership for new veto wielders than there is for the abolition of the veto altogether. The G-4, sensing the mood, announced they would voluntarily forgo the privilege of a veto for ten years, but this did not noticeably add momentum to their cause.

For all of these impediments, I do still believe the Security Council has to change sooner or later. The best argument for reform is that the absence of reform could discredit the United Nations itself. Britain and France have become converts to this point of view. I remember the late British foreign secretary Robin Cook saying in 1997 (on his first UN visit in that capacity) that if the Council was not reformed without delay, his own voters would not understand why. Mr. Cook, a fine statesman and a man of principle, did not realize that he was not destined to see any Council reform in his lifetime, let alone during his term of office. And yet he understood that reform was essential, because what merely looks anomalous today will seem absurd tomorrow. Imagine in 2020 a British or French veto of a resolution affecting South Asia with India absent from the table, or of one affecting southern Africa with South Africa not voting: who would take the Council seriously then?

There is perhaps another reason why the British and the French are genuinely keen on seeing the Council reformed right now. Currently, everyone is speaking only of expanding the permanent membership of the Council, not replacing the existing permanent members. If reform is delayed by another decade, there is a real risk that the position of London and Paris will no longer be so secure, and the clamor for replacing them with one permanent European Union seat could prove irresistible.

To date, the other three permanent members have been somewhat more lukewarm about reform. Russia has officially pledged to support it, and has explicitly backed the claims of Germany, Japan, and India to new permanent seats, but it is a matter for debate as to how enthusiastic Moscow really is. Its permanent seat on the Council was the one asset that, even during the shambolic years of the 1990s, allowed Russia to punch above its weight in international affairs. Few Russians really want to see that position of privilege diluted by having to be shared with several new countries.

The United States and China are even more skeptical. China shares Moscow’s reluctance to see its stature diminished, but this is all the more true since it now sees itself, quite justifiably, as having no peer in the world other than the United States, whose economy it is on course to overtake within the next two decades. The thought of sharing permanent status with India and Japan is not one that evokes much joy in Beijing. As for the United States, it is still the sole superpower, and its isolation in recent years on various issues, notably relating to the Middle East, made the Bush administration profoundly wary of giving new powers to countries that may stand in its way. It was striking that Washington’s support of a seat for Germany faded away in the wake of Germany’s vocal opposition to the 2003 Iraq War, and it took years for the United States to formally endorse India’s bid, because it was conscious that New Delhi votes more often against Washington in UN forums than with it. That reluctance was finally removed in November 2010 during a visit to New Delhi by President Obama that was aimed at sealing a strategic partnership, the credibility of which would have been undermined by continued reticence on a Security Council seat for New Delhi. In addition, the United States likes a Council it can dominate; Washington is conscious that a larger body would be more unwieldy and a bigger collection of permanent members more difficult to manage. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” American diplomats like to say.

But to much of the rest of the world, the Security Council is indeed “broke,” and the more decisions it is called upon to make that affect many countries—authorizing wars, declaring sanctions, launching peacekeeping interventions—the greater the risk that its decisions will be seen as made by an unrepresentative body and, therefore, rejected as illegitimate. The United Nations is the one universal body we all have, the one organization to which every country in the world belongs; if it is discredited, the world as a whole will lose an institution that is truly irreplaceable.

And that could happen. My worry, as an old UN hand, is that if Security Council reform drags on indefinitely and inconclusively, key countries could begin to look for an alternative. Five years ago, as a candidate for secretary-general, I asked in a speech: “What if the G-8, which is not bound by any charter and writes its own rules, decided one day to expand its membership to embrace, say, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa?” That is precisely what has happened since, with the establishment of the G-20, albeit as the premier global macroeconomic forum, rather than the peace and security institution that the Security Council is. Nonetheless, China aside, the other countries could well say, “Well, we’re now on the high table at last—why not focus our energies on this body and ignore the one that refuses to seat us?” The result could be a United Nations dramatically diminished by the decision of some of its most important members to ignore or neglect it, while the G-20 could well arrogate political responsibilities to itself, unrestricted by any charter constraint other than its own self-restraint.

If that were to occur, the loss will be that of the rest of the world, which at least today has a universal organization to hold it together under the rules of international law—something vastly preferable to a directoire of self-appointed oligarchs that an expanded G-8 could become. So those small and medium-sized countries that are throwing up petty obstacles to reform are being rather shortsighted, not only because they fail to address the fundamental problem that I described above but because their opposition, if it succeeds, could potentially undermine the very institution that many of these countries, now in the forefront of opposition to reform, have long seen as a bulwark for their own security and safety in an unequal world.

So what’s the answer? In 2010 the G-4 took the debate away from the feckless Open-Ended Working Group and into the General Assembly plenary, and persuaded the facilitator of the process, the ambassador of Afghanistan, to come up with a text for discussion. Though his efforts have been hailed by enthusiasts as heralding a genuine breakthrough in the process, his text is still replete with square brackets indicating unresolved language, and thus revealing entrenched and irreconcilable positions.

Tinkering with a reform resolution will continue, but no resolution can attract enough votes unless the 54-member African Union (AU) is persuaded to step off the fence that it has been straddling for years. African opponents of Council reform have adroitly maneuvered the African Union into an impossible position under the label “the Ezulwini Consensus” (named for the Swazi town in which the formula was agreed). The Ezulwini Consensus demands two veto-wielding permanent seats for Africa in a reformed Council, a demand couched in terms of African self-respect but pushed precisely by those countries that know it is unlikely ever to be granted. The AU’s rules mean that African positions are adopted by consensus, thus taking 54 potential votes out of the equation in favor of a political compromise. (As an Indian minister of state lobbying in Addis Ababa for Security Council reform, I pointed out privately that “Ezulwini” meant “Paradise”; but that after years of insisting upon, and failing to obtain, Paradise, it was necessary for African countries to settle for what could be achieved on earth.) Africa’s naysayers also know that insisting on a consensus decision makes it difficult for the majority favoring reform to move the process forward. After years of accepting this approach, such countries as South Africa appear to be challenging the timehonored emphasis on consensus. If the African Union were to agree to a free vote in the General Assembly, the prospects of a reform resolution attracting the necessary 128 votes would brighten immeasurably.

As with most global issues, the key to breaking the logjam lies in Washington. Most of the naysayers are U.S. allies who have been given a free hand by Washington’s own lack of enthusiasm for reform. If a new U.S. administration could be persuaded that it is in America’s self-interest to maintain a revitalized United Nations, credible enough for its support to be valuable to the United States and legitimate enough to be a bulwark of world order in the imminent future when the United States is no longer the world’s only superpower, Washington could bring enough countries in its wake to transform the debate.

That is a task that the Security Council “aspirants”—and notably the government of a transforming India now entering into a strategic partnership with Washington—are well positioned to perform. India clearly feels very strongly that there is a definite need for an expansion of the Security Council in both categories, permanent and nonpermanent. But it also sees the Security Council as part of a broader process of renewing the United Nations—not because it has failed, but because it has succeeded often enough to be worth reforming. Like many developing countries, India would like to see the General Assembly strengthened as the primary intergovernmental legislative body, which it is not yet; it has become too often a rhetorical forum, prone to declaratory effulgence without effect, rather than one that acts as a legislative body driving the action of the UN organization. The UN’s Economic and Social Council, too, should become a more meaningful development-oriented body and a serious instrument of development governance. A greater sharpening is also required in the focus and the operational efficiency of the UN funds, agencies, and programs, whose effectiveness is so important for so many of the world’s vulnerable people.

India is conscious, too, that the international financial institutions set up at Bretton Woods in 1944 are also in need of reform, since they too reflect the realities of a vanished era; till last year, for instance, Belgium disposed of the same weighted vote as China in these institutions. The G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in September 2009 set in motion a process for global redesign of the international financial and economic architecture, and is thus emerging as the premier forum for international economic cooperation. The G-20 has become a meaningful platform for North-South dialogue precisely because the South is not completely outweighed by the North in the composition of the G-20. In the years ahead, India will use its position in this grouping to pursue a long-term objective of broad parity between the developed countries and the developing and transitional economies in the international financial institutions. After all, the recent global financial crisis showed that the surveillance of risk by international institutions and early-warning mechanisms are needed for all countries. In other words, it is important that, in the context of global governance, the developing countries should have a voice in overseeing the global financial performance of all nations, rather than it simply being a case of the rich supervising the economic delinquency of the poor.

A reform package that incorporates both the Security Council and Bretton Woods institutions could transform global governance, whereas failure to reform could doom the prospects for an effective and equitable world order. The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2030 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a transformed global economy, a real transfer of relative wealth and economic power from the West (or the North) to other countries in the global South, and the growing influence of nonstate actors, including terrorists, multinational corporations, and criminal networks. Over the next two decades this new international system will be coping with the issues of aging populations in the developed world; increasing energy, food, and water constraints; and worries about climate change and migration. Global changes, including India’s own transformation, will mean that resource issues—including energy, food, and water, on all of which demand is projected to outstrip easily available supplies over the next decade or so—will gain prominence on the international agenda. The need for increased, more democratic, and more equitable global governance will therefore be even greater.

Let us look even further than the next two decades. Growth projections for Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC countries) indicate they will collectively match the original G-7′s share of global gross domestic product by 2040–2050. All four, probably, will continue to enjoy relatively rapid economic growth and will strive for a multipolar world in which their capitals are among the poles. The experts tell us that historically emerging multipolar systems have been more unstable than bipolar or unipolar ones. The recent, indeed ongoing, global financial crisis underlines that the next twenty years of transition to a new system are fraught with risks. Global policy-makers will have to cope with a growing demand for multilateral cooperation when the international system will be stressed by the incomplete transition from the old to the new order. And the new players will not want to cooperate under the old rules.

The multiplicity of actors on the international scene could, if properly accommodated, add strength to our aging post–World War II institutions, or they could fragment the international system and reduce international cooperation. Such countries as India have no desire to challenge the international system, as did such other rising powers as Germany and Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But they certainly wish to be given a place at the global high table. Without that, they would be unlikely to volunteer to share the primary burden for dealing with such issues as terrorism, climate change, nuclear proliferation, and energy security—all of which concern the entire globe.

As someone who has devoted three decades of his life to multilateral cooperation at the United Nations, I will say very strongly that my big fear remains that if reform does not come, many countries will despair and lose interest in the working of the world body. Alternative structures of world governance could emerge that would in the end undermine the one truly effective universal organization the world has built up since 1945. “Reform or die” is a cliché that has been inflicted on many institutions. For the United Nations, at this time and on this issue, the hoary phrase has the merit of being true.

The series between Australia and South Africa was notable for featuring two world-class all-rounders on opposite sides. Jacques Kallis and Shane Watson — the former for more than a decade, the latter for just over three years — are stand-out performers for their teams with both bat and ball. Each is a vital element of his team’s bowling mix, but if they were suddenly unable to bowl, both are good enough batsmen to be picked in their country’s first-choice XI for their batting alone. Their availability to ply both trades at Test level is a huge bonus for their teams, giving them, in effect, 12 players for the price of eleven. What is striking about seeing Kallis and Watson in the same Test is the realisation of how rare Test all-rounders have become. Look around the global arena, and you would be hard-pressed to find their peers.

Sri Lanka seemed to have unearthed one in Angelo Matthews, but he hasn’t been bowling this year; and though Tillakaratne Dilshan is undoubtedly a useful all-round player, if he suddenly lost his batting ability he would not be able to command a place in the side for his bowling alone. India hasn’t had a top-class all-rounder since Kapil Dev; Irfan Pathan seemed to be shaping up into one, with a Test century and a hat-trick under his belt, before he abruptly lost his mojo on a tour of South Africa and failed to rediscover it since. Pakistan’s Shahid Afridi no longer plays Test cricket, and Shoaib Malik has lost his place (though his off-spin had long fallen away before then). New Zealand’s Daniel Vettori has turned in some sterling performances with the bat but wouldn’t be picked if his bowling disappeared. England’s Paul Collingwood has retired from Test cricket; and the West Indies’ skipper Darren Sammy is the kind of all-rounder who isn’t good enough to command a place in the side as either a bowler or a batsman, but does so because he can do a bit of both (and he’s the captain, to boot.)

Only Bangladesh’s Shakib Al-Hasan seems to merit the designation — an indispensable bowler and reliable middle-order bat, he’d be picked for either skill in his country’s first-choice side. If you accept my definition of an all-rounder as one who is worthy of a Test place for any one skill but can master two, Kallis, Watson and Al-Hasan are the only three contemporary Test cricketers who merit the label. There are dozens of cricketers who are excellent at one skill and can manage an occasional triumph with the other, but that doesn’t make them true all-rounders. Vettori and Dilshan aside, India’s Yuvraj Singh, Pakistan’s Mohammed Hafeez and New Zealand’s Jesse Ryder (who has announced that he is giving up bowling) have played useful roles with the ball, but none would be picked for their bowling alone.

An occasional brilliant performance in the secondary discipline doesn’t make you an all-rounder: after all, Jason Gillespie has a Test double-century to his name but wouldn’t be relied upon as a batsman in nine innings out of ten, and Allan Border’s sensational 7/46 and 4/50 in his 100th Test in Sydney (against the West Indies in 1988-89) didn’t suddenly give the lie to a record of 16 wickets in his previous 909 Tests, hardly all-rounder material. Though both Ajit Agarkar and Anil Kumble have Test centuries in England to their names, neither would have been picked by India for their batting (and Harbhajan Singh has been dropped by India despite two Test centuries less than a year ago, since he is judged purely as a bowler). Consistent all-round quality is required, and there isn’t much of that around these days. What’s intriguing is that all-round excellence used to be a good deal less uncommon. It’s startling to realise that Ian Botham, Kapil Dev, Imran Khan and Richard Hadlee — four of the finest all-rounders to grace the game — all had roughly contemporaneous careers, with the likes of Wasim Akram and Shane Pollock not far behind a few years later.

A couple of decades earlier, the world enjoyed the magic of Vinoo Mankad, who scored 72 and 184 and took 5 for 196 in the 1952 Lords Test (and attained the ‘double’ of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in only his 23rd Test, despite making a late debut at 30 because of World War Two); and there were, as well, the contrasting talents of Trevor Bailey and Keith Miller. The greatest of them all, Sir Gary Sobers, was arguably in the top five of any category you could imagine — one of the five best batsmen in world cricket, one of the five best left-arm swing bowlers, one of the five best left-arm spinners, one of the five best slip fielders, and one of the five best captains. About all he couldn’t do was keep wickets, but with Jackie Hendricks and David Murray around, he didn’t need to. And alongside these great players were lesser mortals who were also genuine all-rounders: Sobers’s cousin David Holford was the West Indies’ first-choice leg-spinner and a Test-class batsman; Kapil Dev brought in his wake Manoj Prabhakar, who could open both the bowling and the batting for India; Hadlee was followed by Chris Cairns and Botham by Andrew Flintoff. Where have all these riches gone?

One plausible theory is that we have entered an era of specialisation in all walks of life, and cricket is no exception: The age of the gifted generalist has passed. The demands of the modern game, as with any other profession today, are too great for one to be able to devote the time and energy to mastering different skills at the level of competence required to hold one’s own in a competitive global environment. It is only the rare genius who can be both a good enough bowler and a good enough batsman to qualify as a top all-rounder in such a context, and with the amount of cricket being played today, few sportsmen can maintain the physical fitness required over the course of a career (for Exhibits A and B, look at Matthews and Ryder). There will be fewer Kallises, Watsons and Al-Hasans in the years to come.

It’s plausible, but there’s one thing wrong with that analysis: It denies the romance of the game; the astonishing capacity cricket has for bringing out the ineffable in human sporting talent. After all, what rational analysis could have predicted a Bradman, scoring triple-century after triple-century and averaging 99.94 over more than two decades, or a Lara, making 400 in a Test and 501 in a first-class match, or a Tendulkar, debuting at 16 and crossing the 15,000-run mark at the ripe young age of 38? What index of plausibility could have given us the supple-wristed Muralitharan, with his unbelievable 800 Test wickets, the indefatigable Boucher, with his 500 wicket-keeping dismissals, or the astonishing Gilchrist, bludgeoning centuries at a run a ball after hours spent behind the stumps?

Why not, then, hope for a new era of all-round excellence, impossible to predict on the basis of evidence, but emerging from the mysterious spirit that suffuses and uplifts our wonderful sport? Why not, indeed? I would prefer to imagine some child being born in a cricketing manger, in Zimbabwe, perhaps, or Bangladesh, with a glint in his eye, a ball in his palm, and a bat behaving like an extension of his other arm. Till he grows up, though, let us content ourselves with Kallis, Watson and Al-Hasan, hope for a Matthews revival and pray for a Pathan resurrection.

It may be a while before we see their like again.

Source: Rediff

THE RECENT political shenanigans in New Delhi, notably the repeated paralysis of Parliament by slogan-shouting members violating (with impunity) every canon of legislative propriety, have confirmed once again what some of us have been arguing for years: that the parliamentary system we borrowed from the British has, in Indian conditions, outlived its utility. Has the time not come to raise anew the case — long consigned to the back burner — for a presidential system in India?

The basic outlines of the argument have been clear for some time: our parliamentary system has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change.

Let me elaborate. Every time Parliament grinds to a screaming halt, the talk is of holding, or avoiding, a new general election. But quite apart from the horrendous costs incurred each time, can we, as a country, afford to keep expecting elections to provide miraculous results when we know that they are all but certain to produce inconclusive outcomes and more coalition governments? Isn’t it time we realised the problem is with the system itself?

Pluralist democracy is India’s greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is the source of our major weaknesses. India’s many challenges require political arrangements that permit decisive action, whereas ours increasingly promote drift and indecision. We must have a system of government whose leaders can focus on governance rather than on staying in power. The parliamentary system has not merely outlived any good it could do; it was from the start unsuited to Indian conditions and is primarily responsible for many of our principal political ills.

To suggest this is political sacrilege in New Delhi. Barely any of the many politicians I have discussed this with are even willing to contemplate a change. The main reason for this is that they know how to work the present system and do not wish to alter their ways.

BUT OUR reasons for choosing the British parliamentary system are themselves embedded in history. Like the American revolutionaries of two centuries ago, Indian nationalists had fought for “the rights of Englishmen”, which they thought the replication of the Houses of Parliament would both epitomise and guarantee. When former British prime minister Clement Attlee, as a member of a British constitutional commission, suggested the US presidential system as a model to Indian leaders, he recalled, “They rejected it with great emphasis. I had the feeling that they thought I was offering them margarine instead of butter.” Many of our veteran parliamentarians — several of whom had been educated in England and watched British parliamentary traditions with admiration — revelled in their adherence to British parliamentary convention and complimented themselves on the authenticity of their ways. Indian MPs still thump their desks in approbation, rather than applauding by clapping their hands. When Bills are put to a vote, an affirmative call is still “aye”, rather than “yes”. Even our communists have embraced the system with great delight: an Anglophile Marxist MP, Hiren Mukherjee, used to assert proudly that British prime minister Anthony Eden had felt more at home during Question Hour in the Indian Parliament than in the Australian.

But six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India’s natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some state Assemblies in our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overturned, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles. While things have not yet come to such a pass in the national legislature, the code of conduct that is imparted to all newly-elected MPs — including injunctions against speaking out of turn, shouting slogans, waving placards and marching into the well of the House — is routinely honoured in the breach. Equally striking is the impunity with which lawmakers flout the rules they are elected to uphold.

There was a time when misbehaviour was firmly dealt with. Many newspaper readers of my generation (there were no cameras in Parliament then) will recall the photograph of the burly socialist MP, Raj Narain, a former wrestler, being bodily carried out of the House by four attendants for shouting out of turn and disobeying the Speaker’s orders to remain seated. But over the years, standards have been allowed to slide, with adjournments being preferred to expulsions. Last year, five MPs in the Rajya Sabha were suspended from membership for charging up to the presiding officer’s desk, wrenching his microphone and tearing up his papers — but after a few months and some muted apologies, they were quietly reinstated. Perhaps this makes sense, out of a desire to allow the Opposition its space in a system where party-line voting determines most voting outcomes, but it does little to enhance the prestige of Parliament.

Yet there is a more fundamental critique of the parliamentary system than the bad behaviour of some MPs. The parliamentary system devised in Britain — a small island nation with electorates initially of a few thousand voters per MP, and even today less than a lakh per constituency — assumes a number of conditions that simply do not exist in India. It requires the existence of clearly- defined political parties, each with a coherent set of policies and preferences that distinguish it from the next, whereas in India, a party is all too often a label of convenience a politician adopts and discards as frequently as a film star changes costumes. The principal parties, whether “national” or otherwise, are fuzzily vague about their beliefs: every party’s “ideology” is one variant or another of centrist populism, derived to a greater or lesser degree from the Nehruvian socialism of the Congress. We have 44 registered political parties recognised by the Election Commission, and a staggering 903 registered but unrecognised, from the Adarsh Lok Dal to the Womanist Party of India. But with the sole exceptions of the BJP and the communists, the existence of the serious political parties, as entities separate from the “big tent” of the Congress, is a result of electoral arithmetic or regional identities, not political conviction. (And even there, what on earth is the continuing case, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the reinvention of China, for two separate recognised communist parties and a dozen unrecognised ones?)

PRESIDENT PRECEDENTS
Blasts From The Past

The debate for a presidential form of government over the parliamentary form has been on for some time now

• Former president R Venkataraman, as minister in the Tamil Nadu government, had sent a draft resolution to the AICC in 1965 recommending constituting a committee to examine an executive directly elected by the people for a fixed term.

• In 1967, the India International Centre conducted a colloquium on the subject with contributions from British peer Max Beloff, among others. During the next few years JRD Tata, GD Birla, Justice KS Hegde and former CJI BP Sinha advocated a fixed executive.

• The first paper advocating a presidential form was prepared by AR Antulay in 1975 during the Emergency, which met with resistance from Jayaprakash Narayan. Indira Gandhi said it was “an inspired document circulated by mischievous people to create a scare”.

• Jayaprakash Narayan opposed it saying “temptation would be too great for a president, if he were strong, to usurp people’s rights”. The socialist and communist parties consistently opposed a presidential system.

• The Swaran Singh Committee report submitted in 1976 looked into the issue and declared the parliamentary system “best suited” for the country because it “ensures greater responsiveness to voice of the people”. Antulay and Vasant Sathe, members of the committee framing the report, argued vigorously to the contrary.

SOURCE: Granville Austin’s Working a Democratic Constitution – The Indian Experience

THE LACK of ideological coherence in India is in stark contrast to the UK. With few exceptions, India’s parties all profess their faith in the same set of rhetorical clichés, notably socialism, secularism, a mixed economy and non-alignment, terms they are all equally loath to define. No wonder the communists, when they served in the United Front governments and when they supported the first UPA, had no difficulty signing the Common Minimum Programme articulated by their “bourgeois” allies. The BJP used to be thought of as an exception, but in its attempts to broaden its base of support (and in its apparent conviction that the role of an Opposition is to oppose everything the government does, even policies it used to advocate itself ), it sounds — and behaves — more or less like the other parties, except on the emotive issue of national identity.

So our parties are not ideologically coherent, take few distinct positions and do not base themselves on political principles. As organisational entities, therefore, they are dispensable, and are indeed cheerfully dispensed with (or split/reformed/merged/dissolved) at the convenience of politicians. The sight of a leading figure from a major party leaving it to join another or start his own — which would send shock waves through the political system in other parliamentary democracies — is commonplace, even banal, in our country. (One prominent UP politician, if memory serves, has switched parties nine times in the past couple of decades, but his voters have been more consistent, voting for him, not the label he was sporting.) In the absence of a real party system, the voter chooses not between parties but between individuals, usually on the basis of their caste, their public image or other personal qualities. But since the individual is elected in order to be part of a majority that will form the government, party affiliations matter. So voters are told that if they want an Indira Gandhi as prime minister, or even an MGR or NTR as their chief minister, they must vote for someone else in order to indirectly accomplish that result. It is a perversity only the British could have devised: to vote for a legislature not to legislate but in order to form the executive.

So much for theory. But the result of the profusion of small parties is that today we have a coalition government of a dozen parties, some with just a handful of MPs, and our Parliament has not seen a single-party majority since Rajiv Gandhi lost his in 1989. And, as we have just seen in the debacle over FDI in retail, and as also happened three years ago on the Indo-US nuclear deal, dissension by a coalition partner or supporting party can hamstring the government. Under the current system, India’s democracy is condemned to be run by the lowest common denominator — hardly a recipe for decisive action.

The disrepute into which the political process has fallen in India, and the widespread cynicism about the motives of our politicians, can be traced directly to the workings of the parliamentary system. Holding the executive hostage to the agendas of a range of motley partners is nothing but a recipe for governmental instability. And instability is precisely what India, with its critical economic and social challenges, cannot afford.

The fact that the principal reason for entering Parliament is to attain governmental office creates four specific problems. First, it limits executive posts to those who are electable rather than to those who are able. The prime minister cannot appoint a Cabinet of his choice; he has to cater to the wishes of the political leaders of several parties. (Yes, he can bring some members in through the Rajya Sabha, but our Upper House too has been largely the preserve of fulltime politicians, so the talent pool has not been significantly widened.)

Second, it puts a premium on defections and horsetrading. The Anti-Defection Act of 1985 was necessary because in many states (and, after 1979, at the Centre) parliamentary floor-crossing had become a popular pastime, with lakhs of rupees, and many ministerial posts, changing hands. That cannot happen now without attracting disqualification, so the bargaining has shifted to the allegiance of whole parties rather than individuals. Given the present national mood, I shudder to think of what will happen if the next election produces a Parliament of 30-odd parties jostling to see which permutation of their numbers will get them the best rewards.

We need strong executives not only at the Centre and in the states, but also at local levels, like towns and panchayats

THIRD, LEGISLATION suffers. Most laws are drafted by the executive — in practice by the bureaucracy — and parliamentary input into their formulation and passage is minimal, with very many Bills passing after barely five minutes of debate. The ruling coalition inevitably issues a whip to its members in order to ensure unimpeded passage of a Bill, and since defiance of a whip itself attracts disqualification, MPs loyally vote as their party directs. The parliamentary system does not permit the existence of a legislature distinct from the executive, applying its collective mind freely to the nation’s laws.

Fourth, for those parties that do not get into government and realise that the outcome of most votes is a foregone conclusion, Parliament itself serves not as a solemn deliberative body, but as a theatre for the demonstration of their power to disrupt. The well of the House — supposed to be sacrosanct — becomes a stage for the members of the Opposition to crowd and jostle, waving placards and chanting slogans until the Speaker, after several futile attempts to restore order, adjourns in despair. In India’s Parliament, many Opposition members feel that the best way to show the strength of their feelings is to disrupt the lawmaking rather than debate the law. Last year, an entire session was lost to such daily disruptions; this year’s winter session has seen two weeks of daily adjournments, many in the presence of bemused visiting members of other countries’ legislatures.

Apologists for the present system say in its defence that it has served to keep the country together and given every Indian a stake in the nation’s political destiny. But that is what democracy has done, not the parliamentary system. Any form of genuine democracy would do that — and ensuring popular participation and accountability between elections is vitally necessary. But what our present system has not done as well as other democratic systems might, is ensure effective performance.

The case for a presidential system of either the French or the American style has, in my view, never been clearer.

The French version, by combining presidential rule with a parliamentary government headed by a prime minister, is superficially more attractive, since it resembles our own system, except for reversing the balance of power between the president and the council of ministers. This is what the Sri Lankans opted for when they jettisoned the British model. But, given India’s fragmented party system, the prospects for parliamentary chaos distracting the elected president are considerable. An American or Latin American model, with a president serving both as head of state and head of government, might better evade the problems we have experienced with political factionalism. Either approach would separate the legislative functions from the executive, and most important, free the executive from dependence on the legislature for its survival.

A LEGISLATIVE YEAR LOST

Lok Sabha
Bills introduced

Session
Planned hours
Actual sitting
Time lost (%)
Plan
Performance

Winter 2010
144
8
90%
32
9

Budget 2011
138
117
18%
34
9

Monsoon 2011
156
104
33%
34
13

Rajya Sabha

Session
Planned hours
Actual sitting
Time lost (%)
Plan
Performance

Winter 2010
120
3
89%
31
0

Budget 2011
115
80
17%
33
3

Monsoon 2011
130
81
41%
37
10

SOURCE: Session 1-4: Statistical Handbook; 2010 Session 5-7: Resume of work; Session 8: Statement of work, Lok Sabha, Resume of work Rajya Sabha

NOTE: Time of sitting of Lok Sabha has been taken as 11 am to 6 pm. Time of sitting of Rajya Sabha has been taken as 11 am to 5 pm. Parliament often compensates for lost time by sitting overtime. The above data does not take this into account. Financial and Appropriation Bills are not included.

(prepared by PRS Legislative)

A directly-elected chief executive in New Delhi, instead of being vulnerable to the shifting sands of coalition-support politics, would have stability of tenure free from legislative whim, be able to appoint a Cabinet of talents, and above all, be able to devote his or her energies to governance, and not just to government. The Indian voter will be able to vote directly for the individual he or she wants to be ruled by, and the president will truly be able to claim to speak for a majority of Indians rather than a majority of MPs. At the end of a fixed period of time — let us say the same five years we currently accord to our Lok Sabha — the public would be able to judge the individual on performance in improving the lives of Indians, rather than on political skill at keeping a government in office. It is a compelling case.

At the most basic level, our parliamentarians’ fondness for the parliamentary system rests on familiarity: this is the system they know. They are comfortable with it, they know how to make it work for themselves, they have polished the skills required to triumph in it. Most non-politicians in India would see this as a disqualification, rather than as a recommendation for a decaying status quo.

The more serious argument advanced by liberal democrats is that the presidential system carries with it the risk of dictatorship. They conjure up the image of an imperious president, immune to parliamentary defeat and impervious to public opinion, ruling the country by fiat. Of course, it does not help that, during the Emergency, some around Indira Gandhi contemplated abandoning the parliamentary system for a modified form of Gaullism, thereby discrediting the idea of presidential government in many democratic Indian eyes. But the Emergency is itself the best answer to such fears: it demonstrated that even a parliamentary system can be distorted to permit autocratic rule. Dictatorship is not the result of a particular type of governmental system.

In any case, to offset the temptation for a national president to become all-powerful, and to give real substance to the decentralisation essential for a country of India’s size, an executive chief minister or governor should also be directly elected in each of the states, most of which suffer from precisely the same maladies I have identified in our national system. The case for such a system in the states is even stronger than in the Centre. Those who reject a presidential system on the grounds that it might lead to dictatorship may be assured that the powers of the president would thus be balanced by those of the directly-elected chief executives in the states.

I would go farther: we need strong executives not only at the Centre and in the states, but also at the local levels. Even a communist autocracy like China empowers its local authorities with genuine decentralised powers: if a businessman agrees on setting up a factory with a town mayor, everything (from the required permissions to land, water, sanitation, security and financial or tax incentives) follows automatically, whereas in India, a mayor is little more than a glorified committee chairman, with little power and minimal resources. To give effect to meaningful self-government, we need directly elected mayors, panchayat presidents and zilla presidents, each with real authority and financial resources to deliver results in their own geographical areas.

INTELLECTUAL DEFENDERS of the present system feel that it does remarkably well in reflecting the heterogeneity of the Indian people and “bringing them along” on the journey of national development, which a presidential system might not. But even a president would have to work with an elected legislature, which — given the logic of electoral arithmetic and the pluralist reality of India — is bound to be a home for our country’s heterogeneity. Any president worth his (democratic) salt would name a Cabinet reflecting the diversity of our nation: as Bill Clinton said in his own country, “My Cabinet must look like America.” The risk that some sort of monolithic uniformity would follow the adoption of a presidential system is not a serious one.

Democracy, as I have argued in my many books, is vital for India’s survival: our chronic pluralism is a basic element of what we are. Yes, democracy is an end in itself, and we are right to be proud of it. But few Indians are proud of the kind of politics our democracy has inflicted upon us. With the needs and challenges of one-sixth of humanity before our leaders, we must have a democracy that delivers progress to our people.

Is that the most important thing for India, some ask. BR Ambedkar had argued in the Constituent Assembly that the framers of the Constitution felt the parliamentary system placed “responsibility” over “stability” while the presidential did the opposite; he did not refer to “accountability” and “performance” as the two choices, but the idea is the same. [See box for Ambedkar’s remarks.] Are efficiency and performance the most important yardsticks for judging our system, when the inefficiencies of our present system have arguably helped keep India united, “muddling through” as the “functioning anarchy” in Galbraith’s famous phrase? To me, yes: after six-and-a-half decades of freedom, we can take our democracy and our unity largely for granted. It is time to focus on delivering results for our people.

Some ask what would happen to issues of performance if a president and a legislature were elected from opposite and antagonistic parties: would that not impede efficiency? Yes, it might, as Barack Obama has discovered. But in the era of coalitions that we have entered, the chances of any party other than the president’s receiving an overwhelming majority in the House — and being able to block the president’s plans — are minimal indeed. If such a situation does arise, it would test the mettle of the leadership of the day, but what’s wrong with that?

THE PRESIDENTIAL system of America is based upon the separation of the executive and the legislature. So that the president and his secretaries cannot be members of the Congress. The Draft Constitution does not recognise this doctrine.

The ministers under the Indian Union are MPs. Only MPs can become ministers. Ministers have the same rights as other members of Parliament, namely, that they can sit in Parliament, take part in debates and vote in its proceedings.

Both systems of government are, of course, democratic and the choice between the two is not very easy. A democratic executive must satisfy two conditions:
1. It must be a stable executive, and
2. It must be a responsible executive

Unfortunately, it has not been possible so far to devise a system which can ensure both in equal degree. You can have a system which can give you more stability but less responsibility or you can have a system, which gives you more responsibility but less stability.

The American and the Swiss systems give more stability but less responsibility. The British system, on the other hand, gives you more responsibility but less stability. The reason for this is obvious.

The American executive is a non-parliamentary executive, which means that it is not dependent for its existence upon a majority in the Congress, while the British system is a parliamentary executive, which means that it is dependent upon a majority in Parliament.

Being a non-parliamentary executive, the Congress of the United States cannot dismiss the executive. A parliamentary government must resign the moment it loses the confidence of a majority of the members of Parliament.

Looking at it from the point of view of responsibility, a non-parliamentary executive being independent of Parliament tends to be less responsible to the legislature, while a parliamentary executive being more dependent upon a majority in Parliament become more responsible.

The parliamentary system differs from a non-parliamentary system in as much as the former is more responsible than the latter but they also differ as to the time and agency for assessment of their responsibility.

Under the non-parliamentary system, such as the one that exists in USA, the assessment of the responsibility of the executive is periodic. It is done by the electorate.

In England, where the parliamentary system prevails, the assessment of responsibility of the executive is both daily and periodic. The daily assessment is done by members of Parliament, through questions, resolutions, no-confidence motions, adjournment motions and debates on addresses. Periodic assessment is done by the electorate at the time of the election, which may take place every five years or earlier.

The daily assessment of responsibility that is not available under the American system is it is felt far more effective than the periodic assessment and far more necessary in a country like India. The draft Constitution in recommending the parliamentary system of executive has preferred more responsibility to more stability.”

What precisely would the mechanisms be for popularly electing a president, and how would they avoid the distortions that our Westminster-style parliamentary system has bequeathed us?

In my view, the virtue of a system of directly-elected chief executives at all levels would be the straightforward lines of division between the legislative and executive branches of government. The electoral process to get there may not initially be all that simple. When it comes to choosing a president, however, we have to accept that elections in our country will remain a messy affair: it will be a long while before Indian politics arranges itself into the conveniently tidy two-party system of the US. Given the fragmented nature of our party system, it is the French electoral model I would turn to.

Under parliamentary system, we are defined by narrowness. A presidential set-up will renew demand for an India for Indians

As in France, therefore, we would need two rounds of voting. In the first, every self-proclaimed netaji, with or without strong party backing, would enter the lists. (In order to have a manageable number of candidates, we would have to insist that their nomination papers be signed by at least 10 parliamentarians, or 20 members of a state Assembly, or better still, both.) If, by some miracle, one candidate manages to win 50 percent of the vote (plus one), he or she is elected in the first round; but that is a far-fetched possibility, given that even Indira Gandhi, at the height of her popularity, never won more than 47 percent of the national vote for the Congress. More plausibly, no one would win in the first round; the two highest vote-getters would then face each other in round two, a couple of weeks later. The defeated aspirants will throw their support to one or the other survivor; Indian politicians being what they are, there will be some hard bargaining and the exchange of promises and compromises; but in the end, a president will emerge who truly has received the support of a majority of the country’s electorate.

Does such a system not automatically favour candidates from the more populous states? Is there any chance that someone from Manipur or Lakshadweep will ever win the votes of a majority of the country’s voters? Could a Muslim or a Dalit be elected president? These are fair questions, but the answer surely is that their chances would be no better, and no worse, than they are under our present system. Seven of India’s first 11 prime ministers, after all, came from Uttar Pradesh, which surely has no monopoly on political wisdom; perhaps a similar proportion of our directly-elected presidents will be from UP as well. How does it matter? Most democratic systems tend to favour majorities; it is no accident that every president of the United States from 1789 to 2008 was a white male Christian (and all bar one a Protestant), or that only one Welshman has been prime minister of Great Britain. But then Obama came along, proving that majorities can identify themselves with the right representative even of a visible minority.

Democracies favour majorities; every US president from 1789 to 2008 was a white Christian. But then Obama came along

I dare say that the need to appeal to the rest of the country will oblige a would-be president from UP to reach across the boundaries of region, language, caste and religion, whereas in our present parliamentary system, a politician elected in his constituency on the basis of precisely such parochial appeals can jockey his way to the prime ministership. A directly-elected president will, by definition, have to be far more of a national figure than a prime minister who owes his position to a handful of political kingmakers in a coalition card-deal. I would also borrow from the US the idea of an Electoral College, to ensure that our less populous states are not ignored by candidates: the winner would also be required to carry a majority of states, so that crushing numbers in the cow belt alone would not be enough.

And why should the Indian electorate prove less enlightened than others around the world? Jamaica, which is 97 percent black, has elected a white Prime Minister (Edward Seaga). In Kenya, President Daniel arap Moi hailed from a tribe that makes up just 11 percent of the population. In Argentina, a voting population overweeningly proud of its European origins twice elected a son of Syrian immigrants, Carlos Saul Menem; the same phenomenon occurred in Peru, where former president Alberto Fujimori’s ethnicity (Japanese) covers less than one percent of the population. The right minority candidate, in other words, can command a majority; to choose the presidential system is not necessarily to make future Narasimha Raos or Manmohan Singhs impossible. Indeed, the voters of Guyana, a country that is 50 percent Indian and 47 percent black, elected as president a white American Jewish woman, who happened to be the widow of the nationalist hero Cheddi Jagan. A story with a certain ring of plausibility in India…

The adoption of a presidential system will send our politicians scurrying back to the drawing boards. Politicians of all faiths across India have sought to mobilise voters by appealing to narrow identities; by seeking votes in the name of religion, caste and region, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. Under our parliamentary system, we are more and more defined by our narrow particulars, and it has become more important to be a Muslim, a Bodo or a Yadav than to be an Indian. Our politics has created a discourse in which the clamour goes up for Assam for the Assamese, Jharkhand for the Jharkhandis, Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians. A presidential system will oblige candidates to renew the demand for an India for the Indians.

Any politician with aspirations to rule India as president will have to win the people’s support beyond his or her home turf; he or she will have to reach out to other groups, other interests, other minorities. And since the directly-elected president will not have coalition partners to blame for any inaction, a presidential term will have to be justified in terms of results, and accountability will be direct and personal. In that may lie the presidential system’s ultimate vindication.

Name of Source: TEHELKA

India has a long history of relations with Europe, going back to the days of the Roman Empire. Its southwestern state of Kerala boasted a Roman port, Muziris, centuries before Jesus Christ was born; excavations are now revealing even more about its reach and influence.

The discovery of ancient amphorae has confirmed that India used to import products such as olive oil, wine, and glass from Italy, in exchange for exotic items like ivory and spices. Interestingly, an ivory statue of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, dating back to the first century BC, was found during excavations of the ruins of Pompeii in southern Italy.

After languishing for centuries, trade is once more shaping the relationship between these two world regions. The EU is India’s second-largest trading partner, with turnover reaching €68 billion ($93.5 billion) in 2010, accounting for 20% of India’s global trade. Exports of services from Europe to India are worth €10 billion, while services imports are valued at a little more than €8 billion.

India has a several affinities with the EU, not least that it, too, is an economic and political union of linguistically, culturally, and ethnically different states. But, in practice, these affinities have not translated into close political or strategic relations.

In 1963, India was one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with the European Economic Community (the predecessor to today’s EU), and the India-EU Strategic Partnership and Joint Action Plan of 2005 and 2008 offer a framework for security cooperation. But it will take time for the EU to develop a common strategic culture. The EU member states must develop a collective approach to national-security problems before meaningful strategic cooperation between the EU and India can occur.

Another important impediment to India-EU relations is that Indians don’t like anyone lecturing to them. One of the great failings in the EU-India partnership has been Europe’s tendency to preach to India on matters, such as human rights, that Indians believe they can handle on their own.

A democracy for more than six decades (longer than some EU member states), India regards human rights as a vital domestic issue. Neither Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, nor any European institution has exposed a single human-rights problem in India that Indian citizens, journalists, and NGOs have not already revealed and handled within India’s democratic political space.

Given this, the EU’s effort to write human-rights provisions into a free-trade agreement with India, as if they were automobile-emissions standards, gets Indians’ backs up. Trade should not be held hostage to internal European politics about human-rights declarations. On the actual substance of human rights, India and the EU are on the same side and have the same aspirations. Once this irritant is overcome, negotiations over the free-trade agreement, which have long been in their “final” stages, can be concluded, and should transform trade.

There is also room for technological cooperation. India’s abundant and inexpensive scientific brainpower and its growing reputation for “frugal innovation” offer interesting potential synergies with Europe’s unmatched engineering capacity.

Of course, there are serious structural impediments. Ironically, despite its human-rights rhetoric, the EU has long favored China over India: for every euro that the EU invests in India, it invests €20 in China. Admittedly, this is partly India’s fault, because it has not created an equally congenial climate for foreign investment.

Another stumbling block is that India prefers bilateral arrangements with individual member states to dealing with the EU collectively. Arguably, this is necessary, given European institutions’ lack of cohesion on strategic questions. Since the Maastricht Treaty created the EU in 1992, Europe has claimed to have a “common foreign policy,” but it is not a “single” foreign policy. If it were, EU member states would not need two of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and be clamoring for a third.

Yet the case for India-EU cooperation could not be stronger, since the bulk of the world’s problem areas lie between India and Europe (or, as Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt once put it, between the Indus and the Nile).

The danger is that India could write off Europe as charming but irrelevant, a continent ideal for a summer holiday, not for serious business. The world will be poorer if the Old Continent and the rising new subcontinent fail to build on their shared democratic values and common interests to offer a genuine alternative to US-Chinese dominance.

Name of Source: Project Syndicate

To travel is to wilfully leap into the unknown – to give up the assured security of home for the exigencies of the world. This is true whether one journeys from home to a nearby town to see a mela, or to another continent in search of work. Over time, the world and its mores seep, imperceptibly, into our lives and into our minds. We inch closer, howsoever marginally, to becoming – as the Greek philosopher Diogenes first called himself – a “citizen of the world”.

Predictably, travel arouses a swathe of responses: the world can repel or inspire reflections. For some, like Mahatma Gandhi or Charles Darwin, travel provided intellectual and moral reasons to empathise with others; for some others, like Sayyid Qutb or Pol Pot, the world inspired justifications to murder in the name of religious purity and class consciousness. For most of us who fall somewhere between these polarities, travel forces our minds to adapt, to rethink, to reevaluate our prejudices and to recalibrate our passions in ways far removed from conventional education. Travel, in other words, is learning by other means.

Remarkably, in the education curricula of our country, travel rarely figures. An odd picnic during the school year is the most that one might experience. Beyond that, for large sections of India’s poor and middle class, the world is reduced to one’s city, one’s family and nowadays whatever the television channels proffer. The wide world and its wonders mean little.

Predictably, the idea of India – whether as a geographical or cultural space – is increasingly lopsided in the minds of many. The less privileged know little beyond their own areas, or what they see in Bollywood movies. The children of the elite of India’s major cities know more about Manhattan or London than they do about, say, Bhubaneswar or Thiruvananthapuram. Many parts of India are virtually foreign countries to their young minds, through no real fault of theirs. Who wants to think about Dantewada when there is a jet plane taking off to Dubai? Our collective consciousness slowly fragments along familiar lines of global capital flows and worldly aesthetics.

Should this matter?

In a heterogeneous democracy like ours, where resources and geographies are different, where peoples and cultures change with every district – it is paramount that we are able to see past our immediate environs. The overbearing tyranny of small disaffections dictates our public discourse. The acrimony in our Parliament and media is emblematic of our inability to listen to, far less agree with, each other. Technology has amplified marginal dissonances. We may know more facts about others, but our discourse suffers from Asperger’s syndrome: the remarkable inability to empathise. Unlike those individuals who suffer from Asperger’s, we have a choice.

Our collective challenge is then how we do offer, to the generations of Indian who follow, opportunities to recognise our collective destiny? Lester Pearson, the late Canadian Prime Minister, said in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture: “How can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can this be if they don’t know each other?” To him, and to others, knowledge of the other was critical to demystify, to get past clichés & to learn to treat each individual according to the “content of their character”. The best way to do this is to travel.

Why not explicitly encourage such personal explorations as a matter of public policy? World travel may be limited by the high level of resources required and the difficulty of obtaining visas. But why not promote travel within India?

We could create a pan-Indian quasi-governmental agency along the lines of AISEC (Association Internationale des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques et Commerciales) to act as a hub for students who seek to travel. This agency could provide logistical support to students – guidance about possible destinations, a database of student hostels, basic medical assistance & volunteer opportunities in each Indian city. It could also accredit and screen related enterprises like youth hostels, tour providers and social service organisations needing volunteers. In essence, by involving itself in such an enterprise, the State can protect the young travellers, and implicitly make India more accessible.

Another possibility is a centrally facilitated nationwide school children’s exchange program. Let children from Srinagar come and spend two weeks in a year in Thiruvananthapuram and vice versa. Let the Kashmiri children learn about the vast oceans, while Malayali children learn about the snow-clad mountains. Let them interact and play, fight and make friends. This could create friendships that might last a lifetime. But it would need organisational support and subsidies, which the State can provide.

Or take our young writers in Indian languages, who are rarely able to venture beyond the prisms, and the prisons, of their vernaculars. They have just as keen and sensitive perspectives on life as our English language writers, but their horizons are necessarily more limited, and a national perspective often eludes them. They are doubly discriminated against – for being young and being outside the scope of the English language press. Creating a national programme that funds young writers to travel the country and write about it in their local languages is a useful step towards our collective cosmopolitanism.

The resources for all this do not all have to come from the State. But the Government could establish a National Endowment for the Discovery of India that is open to private tax-deductible contributions and that can be used to finance the ideas outlined above. If we are to grow into a country that is open-minded, we must learn to not just leave the windows of our homes open to the world, as the Mahatma advised us, but also step out and engage with the world. The best place to start is in India itself – large, multiple, diverse, and in many ways unknown to its own citizens. To encourage young Indians to travel through their own land would reify the idea of India for the next generation. It would be a journey well worth undertaking by all of us.

Name of source: Hindustan Times

Monday’s decision by the Board of Control for Cricket in India effectively terminating the Kochi Tuskers franchise is the latest development in a saga attended from the start by controversy. A team that had acquitted itself rather well in its first season in the Indian Premier League [ Images ], and had ignited the imaginations of cricket-loving Keralites, appears to have become a casualty of mismanagement and financial default. Amid the disappointment now spreading across the state lies a much larger story that goes well beyond cricket to Kerala’s place in India’s development.

An IPL team for Kerala was a dream that few dared to dream. As a member of Parliament from the state, I was acutely aware that Keralites simply did not believe we could compete with the major cities of India to attract big-ticket investment and high-value enterprises to our state. That’s why the establishment of a Kerala IPL team was all the more significant and important for the people of this tourist-friendly state, long languishing in the backwaters off Indian cricket’s shores.

Cricket is India’s de facto national sport and India is the global game’s biggest source of revenue. Kerala has been marginal to Indian cricket — habitual wooden-spooners in the Ranji Trophy Plate League. Where does it fit in to the grand narrative of Indian cricket? It was a footnote at best. But behind the establishment of Kochi Tuskers Kerala was an agenda broader than cricket.

As CLR James memorably wrote, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” Kerala’s 21st century development will require the confidence of private sector players from abroad and elsewhere in India that investment in Kerala will pay for them. This will, above all, need a change of mindset. Kochi Tuskers Kerala or KTK, as the cumbersomely-named team was called, provided the people of Kerala with a different way of looking at their potential.

When, as a Kerala MP, I pursued the opportunity of bringing an IPL team to Kerala, it was because I was convinced that the only antidote to the hidebound statist mentality that has produced such economic stagnation in Kerala in recent years would be the infusion of a venture that was as 21st century in its conception and execution as the IPL. I saw KTK as a venture that would not just boost the prospects of Kerala’s cricketers, but spark the imaginations of our young people and open new vistas for businesses, as well as promote a new surge of “cricket-related tourism” in our beautiful state (whose advertising tagline is ‘God’s Own Country’). That investors from Gujarat and Maharashtra [ Images ] were persuaded to team up to bring their venture to Kerala was, to my mind, proof that Kerala too could attract outsiders to invest in our future.

Sadly, of course, those outsiders (whom I had no role in choosing, merely in steering to Kerala) have let the state down by defaulting on their obligations to the BCCI. There seems little likelihood, the new board president says, of the breach proving to be repairable. Mahela Jayawardene’s [ Images ] capable squad, through which Ravindra Jadeja [ Images ], RP Singh [ Images ] and Parthiv Patel [ Images ] had resurrected their cricketing careers (and returned to Indian colours) had repeatedly demonstrated match-winning potential. Though the team’s overall record in their first season was middling, Geoff Lawson’s boys had done enough to make a decent impact, with victories over Mumbai [ Images ], Kolkata [ Images ] and Delhi [ Images ] in the bag, and their prospects in the next season had looked promising indeed.

Kerala, too, had begun making the team its own. Till April 9 this year, it was the owners’ team. But from the moment the first ball was bowled at Kochi’s Jawaharlal Nehru [ Images ] Stadium, the aspirations of the team became one with that of the thousands who cheered for them. A team lives on the energy poured into their hearts by their loyal fans. That’s why the onus of the Kerala team’s termination falls heavily on the thwarted passion of each cricket fan from the state, whether living within it or outside (as do the many who tuned into the team’s games on TV in the Gulf states).

Kerala’s short-lived team had glittered with four stellar players hot from the World Cup finals, a claim no other IPL team could make, and with four members of the expanded Indian touring party to England [ Images ] in the summer (ditto). They had given Kochi fans a glimpse of world-class cricket, unprecedented in Kerala, in the IPL matches they had played there. Poorly supported by the lethargic and self-interested administrators of the Kerala Cricket Association, Kochi Tuskers Kerala had promised to rewrite the cricketing history of the state. Their demise is a blow whose major victim is Kerala cricket itself.

What lies ahead is not entirely clear. There is talk of a court case. Perhaps new owners can revive a franchise whose potential had barely begun to be tapped. For the moment, though, a larger dream has been nipped in the bud as it had barely begun to flower. Cricket, and the narrative of India’s 21st century development, will be poorer for Kochi Tuskers Kerala’s exit from the IPL.

Name of Source: Rediff.com

India is no stranger to protest movements, fasts-unto-death and the mass mobilisation of citizens for a popular cause. But Mr Hazare’s agitation has raised important new questions about the role of civil society in the functioning of our parliamentary democracy.

The elected Parliament and the Government of India are being accused of acting in a manner which is incompatible with or even diametrically opposed to the desires of “civil society”, a term which only serves to further add to the confusion.

What is “civil society”? Civil society is broadly understood to be composed of the totality of civic and social organisations, voluntary social relationships and institutions, whether formal or informal, that form the basis of a functioning society — as distinct from the organised structures of the state.

Browsing the literature, one finds references to any and all of these as examples of civil society: universities and schools, families and clans, companies and markets, trade unions and political parties, hospitals and clinics, temples and mosques, community and religious associations, cricket clubs and debating clubs, newspapers and media organisations, recognised non-governmental organisations and unrecognised “neighbourhood watch” groups.

Together, an entire society is made up of all these elements, and the relations between these components are often considered to be determinant in shaping the structure and character of a society.

So if that is civil society, what does it have to do with law-making? There is a fair amount of literature on relations between civil society and democracy, and the influence of one upon the other. The great 17th century political philosopher John Locke described civil society as comprising people who have “a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them”.

Locke and Hobbes, however, were more concerned with the construction of the state out of social disorder than with civil society per se. Indeed, as political philosophers grappled with theories of the state, they saw it increasingly as distinct from society: in the 18th century, German philosopher Hegel even saw the “state” as diametrically opposed to “civil society”.

Things have changed in more recent times. One of the earliest modern observers of civil society was the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed it in action in the new US republic in the early 19th century and wrote about the vigour and strength of American civil society institutions in his classic Democracy in America.

In the 20th century, American political theorists like Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, using the tools of functionalism and largely motivated to study the evolution of political models toward an American democratic ideal, laid emphasis on the role of political culture in democracies. The concept of “political development”, largely credited to Almond, relied in part on his analysis of the contribution of voluntary community activities and non-governmental organisations to the development of democratic politics.

Almond, building on Tocqueville, saw such organs of civil society as serving to increase social awareness of political issues, and by involving their members in the processes of discussion, cooperation and collective decision-making, enhancing the practice (and therefore the evolution) of democracy.

The logic is clear. A thriving civil society creates a more informed citizenry, who make wiser voting choices, participate more effectively in democratic political life, and thus do a better job of promoting the accountability of democratic governments.

Half a century after Almond, the American sociologist, Robert D. Putnam, in his seminal study of contemporary US society and politics, Bowling Alone, has argued that social activities — like community sporting events — serve to strengthen political discourse and build democracy. This is because, through shared social activities, relationships of trust and shared values are built amongst members of a community, resulting in the creation of what is called “social capital”.

In turn, such relationships are transferred into the political arena, underscore the interconnectedness of society and help to bind a nation by holding society’s various elements together. Equally, the decline or disintegration of such civil society institutions creates a more fractured politics and greater intolerance, with the adoption of extreme positions by people who are insufficiently connected to each other through civil society.

If this is how civil society works in a democracy, should it have a role in law-making? It can certainly be argued that laws are made by a society to regulate itself, and that, therefore, civil society is obviously a source of law. The associations of people for various civic purposes inevitably lead to opinion-making on various subjects, including those that are determined by legislation.

The Australian lawyer and UN official Geoffrey Robertson QC, while writing of international law, claimed that “one of its primary modern sources is found in the responses of ordinary men and women, and of the non-governmental organisations which many of them support, to the human rights abuses they see on the television screen in their living rooms”.

Many would argue that in today’s world the same impetus does and should play a role in making domestic laws in a democracy. Those of us who have watched the incessant television coverage on our multiple all-news channels of the Anna Hazare movement can have no illusions whatsoever that the responses of much of the Indian public to the Lokpal issue have been driven and even shaped by what they are seeing and hearing on TV.

Whatever law eventually emerges from Parliament on a Lokpal will undoubtedly have amongst its key sources “the responses of ordinary men and women” to the mass media on this issue.

So much for the global perspective. In my next column, I will try to address how that perspective applies to India.

Name of Source: Deccan Chronicle

“River of Smoke” does not disappoint. “Sea of Poppies” ended amid a raging storm, rocking the triple-masted schooner, the Ibis, and its colorful array of seamen, convicts and demi-slaves. Its sequel catches another storm-tossed vessel, the Anahita, a sumptuously built cargo ship laden with opium owned by Bombay merchant Bahram Modi, as it heads to China. In the same waters is the Redruth, on which sails a Cornish botanist looking for rare plants, especially the mythical golden camellia, and assisted by the Bengal-raised French orphan Paulette from the Ibis. But “River of Smoke” requires little familiarity with its predecessor; the Ganges makes way here for Canton, and the protagonists — traders, orphans, imperialists, smugglers, painters and mandarins — live in a different world from the one Ghosh described in his previous volume.

What unites the novels, though, is opium. At the end of “Sea of Poppies,” British opium interests in India were pressing for the use of force in China in the name of free trade. “River of Smoke” fleshes out that story. Bahram Modi (“Barry Moddie” to his British colleagues) hopes his huge consignment of Indian opium will make his fortune in the city where he — the poor son-in-law of a rich family — has reinvented himself as his own master, the secretive boss who inspires the devotion of his staff, the most prominent Indian businessman in Canton’s Fanqui-town, and the lover of a Chinese boatwoman. Through his eyes, the reader sees the Chinese noose tightening on the opium trade as an incorruptible commissioner, the real-life figure Lin Zexu, cracks down on Fanqui-town’s criminal ways.

The narrative is suffused with the rich intercourse of commerce and miscegenation, embracing within its capacious rubric a variety of set-pieces, from a Chinese boat serving authentic Indian fare to an Armenian trader interviewing Napoleon in exile on St. Helena. Though the period detail is meticulously researched and lovingly described, the characters through whom the story is told are largely marginal in the world Ghosh depicts — a half-caste gay painter, an orphaned female would-be botanist, an Indian merchant in a white man’s world. Those who dominate that world — the British citizens of a global imperium — espouse the doctrine of free trade in high-minded, hypocritical rhetoric that masks the amoral venality of smuggling opium (though the novel also gives voice to the handful of Western dissenters).

At times “River of Smoke” reads like a cross between a Capt. Hornblower tale and a Victorian epistolary novel, yet Ghosh’s sharply anti-imperial vision subverts both types. Above all, the novel reclaims a story appropriated for too long by its winners: those who, centuries ago, conquered (or imposed their will on) foreign lands, subjugated and displaced their peoples, replaced their agriculture with deadly cash-crops, thrust addictive poisons on them for profit and enforced all this with the power of the gun masked by a rhetoric of civilization and divine purpose.
And yet Ghosh does so without excessive earnestness, leavening his narrative with nuggets of fact and insight, from the Uighur origins of the Indian samosa to the role of Canton in forging a common sense of an Indian national identity among disparate peoples. The novel celebrates the joys of cultural and culinary mingling, the mongrelization of language in the forms of pidgin and Creole, and the mixing of peoples across old barriers of acceptable sexual and racial intercourse.

These traditions are breached, however, in prose that is largely conventional, even old-fashioned. “River of Smoke” could almost have been written two centuries ago, except that it captures the distinctive voices of these characters in ways that would not have been open to writers of that era. Language becomes a vehicle for representing the mating of cultures, and it’s brilliantly done. What sometimes seemed forced in the earlier book is natural and convincing in this one. (But watch out for a variety of strange terms, such as — on just one page— “swadders,” “buttoners,” “mumpers” and “mucksnipes.” The words “cumshaw,” “gubbrowed,” “mudlarking” and “linkisters” are used so often that you tend to assume you should have known them all along.)

Ghosh’s historical judgments are largely rendered subtly, without any of the sledgehammer effect of retrospective moralism that a lesser writer might have employed. But he is not above the occasional anachronistic cynicism. “Democracy is a wonderful thing,” Bahram observes to a British merchant. “It is a marvellous tamasha that keeps the common people busy so that men like ourselves can take care of all matters of importance. I hope one day India will also be able to enjoy these advantages – and China too, of course.” That’s too tendentious to be worthy of a fine writer.

But the novel’s strengths are considerable, its flaws barely apparent. With “River of Smoke,” Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is emerging as a monumental tribute to the pain and glory of an earlier era of globalization, an era when people came into contact and collision, intermixing costumes, customs, convictions, consonants, couplings and cash, shaping history all the while through their pettiness, their privations and their passions.

“Do you think they will remember what we went through?” Bahram muses as he watches young Indian Parsis playing cricket in Canton. “Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learned and the things we saw that made it all possible? Will they remember that their future was bought at the price of millions of Chinese lives?”

That is a haunting question. And there will be more, undoubtedly, when the final instalment of the Ibis trilogy arrives. I can hardly bear to wait.

Name of Source: Washington Post