The Puzzling Israeli, Saudi, Indian Shia Diplomacy In Lucknow

The Puzzling Israeli, Saudi, Indian Shia Diplomacy In Lucknow

                                                                               Saeed Naqvi

In May 1993, Shimon Peres became the first Israeli Foreign Minister to visit India. Rajiv Gandhi had taken the initiative to upgrade relations. P.V. Narasimha Rao actually accelerated the process which led to the opening of embassies in Tel Aviv and New Delhi.

Rajiv had to overcome considerable inertia on relations with Israel. Yes, India’s support for the Palestinian cause was non negotiable but the argument that Indian Muslims would be agitated if relations with the Jewish state were upgraded were patently false. Indian foreign policy being sensitive to minority interests was totally different from policy being hostage to Muslim whims. This would lend credence to the whispering campaign, against Muslim appeasement the Indian Right was embarked on ever since Indira Gandhi split the Congress in 1969.

Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Shah Bano and Muslim Personal Law, the minority character of Aligarh Muslim University and such like issues had all been exaggerated as matters of vital concern to Indian Muslims. They needed security, education, jobs, entrepreneurial help and de ghettoisation.

Upgrading of relations with Israel had a global context. Collapse of the Soviet Union had created a compelling Sole Superpower moment. The set of reasons that caused P.V. Narasimha Rao to invent Manmohan Singh as his Finance Minister also operated in the switch towards Israel.

So internally prepared was the Indian establishment to clasp the hands of the West and its powerful engine, namely Israel, that the “switch” became a “lurch”. And this “lurch” began to look particularly unseemly after George W. Bush, embarked on a global war on terror.

Instead of quelling terror, this war ended up unwittingly promoting recruitment cells for terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Central Asia, Europe, US, Russia, China, everywhere.

In brief, promotion of relations with Israel in early 90s made sense because of the altered global situation and the promise of peace embedded in the Oslo process. An imbalance in India’s foreign policy was being corrected. Israel was being brought into groups India already was dealing with.

There was a measure in New Delhi’s steps then. In fact, when I asked Peres why there was not much substance in a relationship which had been inaugurated with such fanfare, he quipped:

“India-Israel relations were like French perfume: they had to be smelt not drunk.”

That was then; a relationship along with all the others in West Asia.

After the negative fallout of the War on terror, one would have expected New Delhi to proceed cautiously on a path that would prevent a 200 million strong Muslim community in India being alienated.

Earlier the Indian leadership has been wrong in holding up its equation with Israel because of the wrong assumption that such a step would anger Indian Muslims. It was perverse to see the Palestinian issue through a communal prism. But the manner in which New Delhi subsequently hurtled headlong towards Israel despite universal Muslim anger because of the provocative way in which the global war on terror was fought, distinctly hurt Indian Muslims. These circumstances are a total contrast to those attending the Peres visit in 1993. This is why eyebrows have been raised by the puzzling visit to Lucknow by Dore Gold, Director General of the Israeli Foreign office. This happened in May when it was more or less certain that the nuclear deal with Iran would be signed in June or July.

At the Lucknow meeting, Gold was flanked by high powered former Israeli military and Intelligence officers. What was even more spectacular about the Lucknow conclave was the presence of an equally high profile team from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi delegation was let by retired Major General Dr. Anwar Majed Eshki, Chairman of a Jeddah based think tank and once close to Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The delegations had the sanction of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

What was the purpose of the Lucknow meet? Who organized it?

The meeting could not have taken place without New Delhi’s unofficial support. Arrangements for the conclave were made by the Vivekanand International Foundation. National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, was Founder Director of the think tank. The bandobast for the meeting was handled by Gen. Syed Ata Hasnain of the Foundation who retired some years ago as Commander of the 15 Corps in Srinagar.

The Indian delegation was led by the former Raja of Mehmudabad, scion of a Shia family with wide connections in the Shia world, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Obviously, the Israeli-Saudi delegation were keen to gauge Iranian influence on Indian Shias, the potential for Shia-Sunni differences on future Indian attitude towards Iran,  after Iran becomes globally kosher post the nuclear deal.

Possible construct on the Lucknow meet, one of the five such meetings in various parts of the world, is an Israeli-Saudi desire to enter a consultative phase of diplomacy. So far they have operated in the Washington, Riyadh, Jerusalem triangle.

Above all, by holding hands in public, Jerusalem and Riyadh are institutionalizing a burgeoning romance. This will have ramifications.

 New Delhi can now play the Iranian string to its bow without looking over its shoulder for Israeli and Saudi sensitivities, the latter being a longstanding patron of Pakistan.

It is not nice to feel isolated in the region. At a recent meeting with the Taleban in Rawalpindi, both Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, were overseen in the same room by US and Chinese officials.

Is it over ambitious to spot seeds of a reliable back channel with Iran and Israel, should the need ever arise in the uncharted post nuclear deal roadmap?

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Iran Deal Sets Into Motion New Regional Balance Of Power

Iran Deal Sets Into Motion New Regional Balance Of Power

                                                                               Saeed Naqvi

Excessive projection of the “eye for an eye” passage from Deuteronomy as the defining feature of Israel is exemplified by Benjamin Netanyahu’s verbal pugilism. But it obscures a large Israeli constituency for peace. Having signed the nuclear deal, Iran will expect this constituency to expand. This expectation does not contradict its principled stand on Palestine. Somewhere in this space will germinate the seed for the next phase of politics within Israel. There is a school of thought in Iran which sees the destroyed economies of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen as an opportunity for reconstruction in cooperative ventures with Israel’s vast intellectual resource.

Political fermentation will take place on the Palestinian side too. Factions will outline and disguise their roadmaps towards Israeli moderates.

From President Hassan Rouhani to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, there are a range of factions in Iran which will grapple with each other and also orchestrate. The deal unshackles Iran in so many spheres that it now has a range of external players to incorporate into its strategies with recalcitrant adversaries.

Israel’s occupation of that other Hill in Washington is well known. But the forces which enabled President Obama with the nuclear deal will manage the US Congress too. To use Marxist terminology, the US Congress is only as autonomous as the US imperial interests permit. How useful are Israel and Saudi Arabia to these interests will determine their saliency in the region.

The area where there is likely to be no ferment on account of the deal are the GCC countries because the people are not involved. Elsewhere, as I have indicated the deal will catalyze ferment which will, on occasion, boil over.

The regional picture has been radically altered. The US backing all Israeli and Saudi misadventures in West Asia may well be a thing of the past. With the emergence of Iran, a different balance of power has been created which partially frees the US from the day-to-day housekeeping in West Asia. It can now attend to the bigger league in the Pacific.

The powers required to maintain the new West Asian equilibrium are Iran, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The last mentioned in the list is internally a little move unstable than even the Saudis. Ironically, the Saudis are directly responsible for this instability.

When the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia returned from convalescence in Europe and saw his friends Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak in Tunis and Cairo respectively, crushed by the Arab Spring, he swore to halt the Arab Spring and indeed, reverse it.

First, he quelled incipient rebellion at home by raining $135 billion hush money on his own people. Then he helped fuel the Syrian civil war in response to an Israeli desire to remove Damascus from the Iran, Hezbullah, Hamas “axis”. Behold, that “axis” now stands even more strengthened, even as the Saudis are exhausting their ordnance on the Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen towards an unquantifiable end. A purpose clearly is to appear to be checkmating a “Shia” threat but the real purpose is to control forces within the country.

Yes, during King Abdullah’s hyper active phase, the balance in Cairo was also disturbed. A pro Muslim Brotherhood conduct and official appointments by Mohamed Morsi had, by way of a reaction, brought out secular demonstrators onto the street, supported by the army Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

The Saudis and the Israelis leaned heavily on the West to tilt the scales in favour of the Army. Muslim brotherhood or political Islam is anathema to Riyadh and Jerusalem for separate reasons. Political Islam is inherently anti monarchy and therefore a threat to the House of Saud; it is also coherent with Hamas which adds to Israeli nightmares.

Countries like UK postponed taking decision on whether or not to recognize Muslim Brotherhood by setting up committees on the issue. There is no reason why foreign offices will endorse long term support for army rule or dictatorship in preference to Muslim Brotherhood which in essence is not very different from Europe’s Christian Democrats during the cold war. The results of these committee reports will be a matter of suspense.

The deal with Iran places John Kerry in the history books. His record will provide a contrast to Hillary Clinton’s dismal record as Secretary of State at a time when she is aiming at the White House. The killing of the US Ambassador, Christopher Stevens, in Benghazi; her inept statement, synchronized with the macabre murder of Muammar Qaddafi – “I came, I saw and he died”; her imperious wave of the hand – “get out of the way, Assad”, will not look pretty in the US election season, particularly if Bashar al Assad keeps smiling as if nothing happened. But should a consensus in favour of Muslim Brotherhood emerge in the West as a coherent, Sunni force to checkmate Iranian Shiasm, Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan will be emboldened at Assad’s expense. This, Iran will exert every muscle to prevent. The new West Asian balance of power will have been set in motion.

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Greece’s Tsipras And Tripura’s Manik Sarkar: Two Communists In Perspective

Greece’s Tsipras And Tripura’s Manik Sarkar: Two Communists In Perspective

                                                                                                     Saeed Naqvi

Upon my return from a driving trip around Europe, the front page anchor of the Indian Express caught my eye. It showed Union Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad in a warm handshake with the Communist Chief Minister of Tripura, Manik Sarkar, at the inauguration of an Internet Gateway in Agartala.

Even more striking was the treatment the newspaper gave to the headline which encapsuled raw, facts: the state has an astounding record in the incidence of crime, civilians killed, security personnel killed, kidnappings, encounters, rebels killed. The figure on every count is ZERO.

When a former Director General of Police in Tripura, B.L. Vohra a year ago gave me similar figures for the previous year, I rubbed my eyes with disbelief. I had never imagined a senior police officer, conservative to the core, in such ecstatic praise of a communist Chief Minister.

So, last April, I turned up in Agartala. Lo and behold, I found myself seated in the presence of the present DG Police, K. Nagaraj, endorsing all the figures I see on page one of the newspaper today.

Ofcourse, at the top of the page, across six columns, are stories related to the Vyapam scam, but I found the Tripura story heartwarming. This, for a variety of reasons including the unstated petrifaction at Europe grappling with communism in Greece, then possibly Pablo Iglesias’s Leftism in Spain and similar streaks in all of Latin Europe.

India had its first communist government in Kerala in 1957 snuffed out by Indira Gandhi.

For 35 years, Jyoti Basu, a communist to boot, ruled West Bengal until his successors fatally mishandled the land issue.

All of that later. Let me, for my immediate purposes, try and explain the Tripura phenomenon, from my notebook.

The State has been ploughing its furrow diligently with some quite extraordinary results on the Human Development scale and which no one discusses. Has the State with a population of 40 lakhs, not been in focus because it is small? Only Sikkim and Goa are smaller. Or has the media thus far been squeamish about applauding a State which for 32 of the past 37 years has been under Left Front rule? It was for this reason the page one display was striking. I had seen nothing positive about the new Greek political preference in European newspapers. The contrast was refreshing.

Some of its records are amazing. Its 96 percent literacy makes it the country’s most literate State. Literacy rate in Gujarat is 83 per cent. Kerala was once the leader but its Human Development record in recent years has been slipping.

Life expectancy of 71 years for men and 73 for women in Tripura too is a record. In Gujarat, it is 64 and 66. Tripura’s Bengali population ruins the absence of gender bias among tribals. Even so, it is 961 as against 918 in Gujarat.

The great genius the leadership has demonstrated is in grasping an essential truth: like politics, good governance too is essentially the art of the possible. Instead of beating its breast and flailing its arm around, the regime picked up all the Central and State schemes, put its head down, called in the officials, party cadres, involved the three tier Panchayati Raj system and gave a sense of real participation to the elected Autonomous District Councils which cover two thirds of the State and all the Tribal areas of Tripura.

This is the key. The basic conflict in the State, one which exploded as the fiercest insurgency in the North East, was on the tribal-non tribal faultline.

Under the Maharajas, who figure in mythology, Tripura was overwhelmingly tribal. But after the creation of East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), Hindu Bengalis from contiguous territories that were once managed by the Maharaja, migrated to Tripura. The tribals, (a total of 19 tribes) became a minority in the State. The 70:30 ratio in favour of the tribals was exactly inverted. Today 70 percent of the population is Bengali.

The Congress, its eye always on the main chance, fell back on the simple divide and rule strategy, pocketing the Bengali vote bank. If ever there was a shortfall, there was always a tribe to be played against the other.

A great tribal, communist leader, Dashrath Deb saw the future. He launched Jana Shiksha Abhiyan or campaign for education among tribals in 1945 forcing the Maharaja to recognize 500 primary schools, which mushroomed and today saturate the State – a school every kilometer.

It was from this wide base that the tribals gravitated towards communism while the Bengalis were turning towards the Congress. While the Congress was content with sectarian divine, a leader like Nripen Chakraborty accurately gauged the difficult social reality: without tribal support all Bengali agenda would be circumscribed. Likewise, tribals would not advance without Bengali help. The call went out: tribal-non tribal unity was the absolute imperative.

The idea flared up, across the State for two reasons. Tribals, who had taken to communism in the 40s and 50s, grasped the idea instantly. In driblets, Bengalis too came into the fold. So, while the Left slowly expanded its platform of unity, the Congress persisted with its Bengali focus, not without electoral gains. True, the Left Front has 50 seats in a House of 60, but the 36 percent of the opposition vote share must be largely credited to the Congress.

What keeps the electorate, indeed the population persistently in the Left’s thrall is the universally accepted incorruptibility of the leadership. Congress MLA Gopal Roy shook his head in agreement “personal incorruptibility cannot be denied”.

The first Left Front Chief Minister Nripen Chakraborty (1978 to 88) entered and left the official residence with same two tin trunks – full of clothes, books, and a shaving kit. Grocery purchases for the CM’s household were made on a ration card. Modern capitalism would probably consider him an outcast because he never had a bank account.

His disciple, Manik Sarkar, Chief Minister for 17 years without a break, is equally austere. His wife, a school teacher, goes to work on a rickshaw.

In efficient implementation of central schemes, the State has no parallels. Clinics, schools, anganwadi, infant and mother care, electricity distribution and, above all, building roads, connecting the remotest areas.

Heaven knows what feedback Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has on his Swatch Bharat or clean India mission, but if he were to send his officers to some of the more remote parts of Tripura, they would rub their eyes with wonder at what has been achieved in such a short period.

The road from Agartala winds around Longtarai hill range to Ambassa, about 80 kms away. A measure of the administration’s reach is Kumardhan Para, at a forbidding height.

A few years ago, folks at the village walked 18 kms to reach grocery stores in Ambassa. Today the Kumardhan peak has been conquered; a motorable road has been laid right upto the village centre. Little wonder Milind Ramteke, IAS, Collector of Ambassa (Dhallai) and his Block Development Officer, Amitabh Chakma, are local heroes, village after village.

The problems of Tripura, in a sense, begin now. The King of Bhutan floated the idea of Gross National Happiness. That, roughly, has been Tripura’s trajectory. It is now on an efficient welfare plateau. What next? It has an inimitable school network. But very little by way of college and technical education. There are no openings for the educated youth. The State, surrounded on three sides by Bangladesh looks admiringly at Shaikh Haseena. Indo-Bangla friendship will give it access to Chittagong port, 70 kms away.

The regime is not paranoid, but it is “aware” that the Church networks affect both college and post college job scene. A middle class so created is inherently anti “Left”, says a CPM leader. Moreover, further penetration by the Church would provide an opening to Hindutva forces to enter the scene with a countervailing sectarian agenda.

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Blind Rage Directed At Britons On Tunisian Beach

Blind Rage Directed At Britons On Tunisian Beach

                                                                Saeed Naqvi 

The big burly peasants from Ganganagar in Rajasthan, guns slung over their shoulders, embarked on vendettas which lasted generations should their due share of water from Gang canal which had made the desert bloom, be overdrawn by owners of contiguous fields.

Systems of revenge and vendetta are part of cultures among the tribes of Afghanistan, clans of Somalia, Sicily, Arab lands, Latin America and part of the world not in our regular focus.

Nations have embarked on vendetta to teach opponents a lesson, exactly the term used by Deng Xiaoping to teach Vietnam a lesson in 1978. It turned out that he got something of a black eye at the battle of Langson. For having been cheeky at Pearl Harbour, the Japanese faced President Trueman’s wrath at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Such thoughts have crossed my mind over the past few days here, in London, watching news shows about the outrage in Tunisia.

On page one of the Independent is the smiling, almost benign face of Seifeddine Rezgui, the alleged perpetrator of the horrific outrage. Prime Minister, David Cameron has promised a “full spectrum” response.

Rezgui is already dead so we do not know the ones who are encompassed by Cameron’s “full spectrum”. Recent history of western “response” is replete with collateral damage on an unspeakable scale.

Accidental killings alone would account for hundreds of thousands of Afghan, Pakistani and Arab lives. Even the official figures of those killed in military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria is in millions.

The horrors of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, house to house searches, soldiers urinating on dead bodies, torture, rape and worse – and all heaped upon a hapless people for no fault of their’s. Three totally functional, efficient dictatorships, Iraq, Syria, Libya were willfully dismantled.

My first memory of West Asia was Beirut in 1970 where even the first secretary at the Indian embassy, Barakat Ahmad, was a man of the highest culture and erudition. Paris moved to Beirut in the winter – everything, from Rudolph Nureyev, Marcel Marceau, to the crazy Horse Casino. In any case, all that glittered in Las Vegas, acquired an elegance at the Casino de Liban.

Edward Said, Iqbal Ahmad and Faiz Ahmad Faiz were only one of the many intellectual groups dotted along the coastline and the lovely mountains. Beirut was good for skiing and swimming within the space of an hour. And, was there a rendezvous for the finest minds, better located than the St. Georges hotel? The coming of the Ayatullahs in Tehran in 1979, the transformation of Nabi Berri’s Amal into Hasan Nasrallah’s Hezbullah, the horrors of Sabira and Shatila, refugee camps, the 1982 invasion by Ariel Sharon, dismantled the world’s most elegant metropolis.

Cairo’s intellectual life revolved around Nasser being interpreted by Hasnain Haikal every week in the Al Ahram. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were softer places, conditioned by the cooperative socialism of the Kibbutz. Fa Giladi, the Kibbutz in the shadow of Mr. Hermon, was one of the world’s most exquisite locations for meetings and reflection. But it can be functional only in conditions of regional peace.

Baghdad, Damascus and Tripoli were intellectually suffocating because they were closed societies. But they were efficient in every sense, including intelligence. Every detail of the meal I had had quietly in Nablus was trotted out by Saddam Hussain’s Director of public relations, almost as a demonstration of his virtuosity.

Hospitals, schools, colleges, Institutes of technology, were all manned equally by men and women in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The 1,000 mile highway from Amman to Baghdad was like an endless billiard table.

Religion was at a discount in Baghdad and Damascus. In Tripoli, Mullahs were taboo. The most educated man in the neighbourhood could lead the Friday prayers. World’s first military academy for women was built by Muammar Qaddafi. His two body guards were women. The cradle to grave welfare system was incomparable.

And you went and recklessly destroyed these societies on trumped up charges of weapons of mass destruction and a seering desire in western hearts to build democracies everywhere except Riyadh, Amman and Rabat. David Cameron should be brought before TV cameras along with former Army Chief David Richards with whom he had bruising encounters on the invasion of Libya, which is at the heart of the problem plagueing Cameron.

What Rezgui did was horrible and can never be condoned. But do recall the discussion in the House of Commons when British intelligence was found meddling in Libya. Should not Prime Minister David Cameron be suitably exposed once again for having pushed the country over the precipice in a North African theatre which has bred anger and rage in the likes of heaven knows how many Rezguis yet to be brought into focus as bleak and shoddy villains of history.

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