Commemorating 1857: Will People Succeed Where Government Failed?

Commemorating 1857: Will People Succeed Where Government Failed?
                                                                                                  Saeed Naqvi

As the anniversary of 1857 approaches on May 11, my mind goes back in time. In 2006, within two years of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) rule, a high level meeting was held at 7, Race Course Road, residence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to chalk out a plan of action to celebrate on a national scale, the 150th anniversary of 1857, India’s first war of Independence, which would fall the next year, 2007.

In my four decades of journalism I have not seen such a galaxy of national and state level leaders, representing every political shade, endorse an extensive agenda without demur. Among those present were Sonia Gandhi, L.K. Advani, Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Prakash Karat, A.B. Bardhan and a host of others – academics, poets, artists, senior journalists.

The Prime Minister in his concluding remarks said the occasion be used to celebrate “our diversity, our liberalism, our civilizational inheritance and the values of integrity and service to man that defined the national movement.”

The Prime Minister made special mention of the role played by the “Rani of Jhansi who fought against British attempts to implement gender biased laws of inheritance.”

The official briefing dwelt on the suggestion that Pakistan and Bangladesh should be included in celebrating 1857. Noted Gandhian, Nirmala Deshpande’s idea was particularly well received. She suggested that soil should be brought from Bahadur Shah Zafar’s “mazaar” in Yangon for a memorial in Delhi’s Mehrauli where the poet-King had marked the “two yards of land” for his grave near the shrine of Sufi Saint Khwaja Bakhtiar Kaki, disciple of Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer.

With so much bipartisan support, implementation of ideas appeared to be feasible. But as I embarked on a script for TV, taking up the Rani of Jhansi trail at the very outset, I received the first big shock.

Her flag or Insignia, with Hanuman embroidered on it, came into British hands after the valiant Rani fell in battle. The British Army High Command placed the priceless tapestry in the custody of Rajputana Rifles. As I pursued the story I found that this, most valuable of trophies kept at the Raj-Rif Centre had been “stolen” some years ago. The Insignia of Rani Lakshmi Bai stolen from the Indian Army?

The next stop in pursuit of this script was equally disturbing. My village, Mustafabad, happens to be in Rae Bareli, where I had, in my childhood, been shown a large tamarind tree within the premises of the magistrate’s office as the symbol of local participation in 1857. Rebellion in this famous district was led by Rana Beni Madho Baksh Singh, the zamindar of nearby Shankarpur. He escorted Begum Hazrat Mahal to Nepal where he was killed fighting the Gurkhas.

Clandestine crucial help in men and material to Beni Madho was provided by Mir Baqar who, along with his 22 supporters, were eventually captured and hanged from the tamarind tree. The bodies were left in this state for three days. My jaw dropped when I reached the location. There was no memorial. The tree had made way for a common electric transformer, next to a gutter.

There was no point pursuing other ideas that had been accepted at the Prime Minister’s meeting because nothing worthwhile was ever implemented. For example: the entire route from Meerut to Delhi’s Red Fort taken by the Indian soldiers, and civilians in their support, be named “Kranti Path” or “Revolution Path”.

Among those present at the meeting, Shashi Bhushan, wrote a stinging letter to the Prime Minister: “It is regrettable that there exist memorials for those who fought for the British, including India Gate at Delhi, but there is no monument for hundreds of thousands killed fighting for freedom.”

After the painful inability of the government and all political formations to be able to make anything of the spirit of 1857, I am heartened by an episode or two recently.

The other day, after a packed hall at the India International Center, had been regaled to an evening of poetry by Nida Fazli the popular Urdu/Hindi poet, I found that most of audience that lingered after the recitation for a conversation with him were mostly from the world of Hindi media. Whatever critics may say of Nida’s poetry, he has emerged as a firm bridge between Urdu and Hindi audiences. “A common language, Hindustani, divided by two scripts” Nida says. An idea tossed up that evening and endorsed by Nida, harmonized with the mood set by his verse.

It focused on May 11 as a day to be commemorated this year. This would kickstart a process that should then be taken up each year. On this date in 1857 soldiers of the British Indian army, after having captured the Meerut cantonment a day earlier, reached Delhi and proclaimed Bahadur Shah Zafar as their leader and Emperor. This was the first pan India uprising of the people – the first war of Indian Independence. Groups of journalists here and there, some political formations, publishers of a new Urdu daily, activist figures like Kuldip Nayar and Justice Rajinder Sachar are on board to commemorate May 11. What has to be devised is an agenda which discards the cliché that secularism has become – a system of merely “tolerating” or “accommodating” each other. This has to be replaced by a secularism of shared aspirations which is what India’s First War of Independence was.

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Nothing Became Musharraf Less Than His Return To Inhospitable Pakistan

Nothing Became Musharraf Less Than His Return To Inhospitable Pakistan

                                                                                                                               Saeed Naqvi

How will the Pervez Musharraf tragi-comedy affect events in Pakistan? To gauge the future, the past should be something of a guide.

Richard Armitage, US Deputy Secretary of State, flew into Islamabad and left Musharraf with no option after the global War on Terror was launched after 9/11: Pakistan would have to join the war on America’s terms.

This imposed a paradox on Musharraf. He was required to exterminate exactly those Jihadists, who had been armed to the teeth by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, since the 1980s, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. These had been diligently shaped into an Islamist fighting machine. This machine, once a favourite of the Pak army, for a low level conflict in Kashmir for instance, was now required to be destroyed.

So, Musharraf began to play both sides of the street. Occasionally he was found out and had his ears tweaked by Washington.

Washington’s requirements were two fold which, sometimes, dictated distinct approaches. With egg on its face in Iraq, it was important to muffle, terminate stories of rising militancy in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Musharraf had to be spurred on in this war.

Washington’s other requirement grew out of the Republican desire for a magical outcome: namely – end to militancy plus a democratic Pakistan growing into a full blown oak. This could be advertised as an achievement on the eve of the November 2008 US elections.

Some sympathetic souls in the US realized Musharraf was taking too much of the blowback from the Afghan war on himself. That is how the idea grew out of a three way power structure – the President, Army and a Prime Minister who, in this case, was to be Benazir Bhutto.

Just compare the return of Benazir Bhutto with that of Musharraf: both equally botched up. There is a universal delusion that establishments, whether in Islamabad or in Washington, are absolutely on the ball as far as intelligence is concerned. Ofcourse they are not. Otherwise Bhutto would not have been assassinated nor would Musharraf have landed himself in boiling, witches’ cauldron.

But wait a minute. Bhutto’s return was part of a deal between the Army and the US. Which interests had struck the deal with Musharraf?

Remember, when Bhutto’s participation in the February 2008 elections had been cleared, Nawaz Sharif was sent back to Jeddah from the airport. His candidature was initially not kosher. Saudi Arabia pushed for him and thereafter, with his hands tied behind his back, he came up trumps in Punjab and, nationally, second only to the PPP which gained because of sympathy on account of Bhutto’s assassination.

In other words, Sharif won despite the Army and the US being in opposition to him. After all it was Gen. Pervez Musharraf who had ousted him in a coup.

His proximity to the Saudis had also given him access to elements who had mutated into Al Qaeda and Taleban. Since the US was pushing for an all out war against militant Islam, Sharif’s softer tone was not popular with the Americans.

The situation has changed. The US is preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan after stitching up some kind of an arrangement with the Taleban. This is a pipe dream, but on that later. In these circumstances, is Sharif’s chance of remaining a front runner for the May 11 elections a source of comfort to Washington?

There is, however, an awkward complexity. In an atmosphere of rampaging anti Americanism in Pakistan the only way to advance electorally is to be perceived by the electorate to have steered clear of the US. The paradox involved is exquisite: advance on an anti American platform to be able to help Washington find interlocutors influential with the Taleban.

Where does Musharraf fit into this scenario? If he had not become something of a political cipher, he may have helped the Muslim League (Q) to steal some of Sharif’s thunder in Punjab.

Unless the plot is so high and deep as to be beyond the capacity of available instruments to gauge, on the face of it, a homesick Musharraf has returned to everybody’s utter embarrassment.

Armed with faith, Abraham jumped into the fire of Nimrod and found himself wreathed in flowers. Musharraf has leapt into a fire, but it looks increasingly probable that he will emerge wreathed in street dirt.

He deserved better. He had gone farther with both, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh than any Pakistani leader in reaching an agreement with New Delhi. He could not upturn laws but he liberalized conditions of living in Pakistan. There was only a government TV when he took charge. By the time he left, Pakistan had a thriving, lively media which too has turned upon him. He has placed himself in a situation where he cannot be helped even by the Army, of which he was once master.

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“Muslims Attack” Another Revered Shrine In Damascus

“Muslims Attack” Another Revered Shrine In Damascus

                                                                                               Saeed Naqvi

Millions of Muslims will, in the next few days, observe the birth and death anniversaries of Fatima Zehra, Prophet Mohammad’s daughter. But during this period, the world famous shrine of her daughter, Saiyada Zainab, outside Damascus, holy to millions around the world, will be in grave danger. That remarkable chronicler of London’s “Independent”, Robert Fisk, ascribes the danger to “Salafist mortar fire”.

The news some days ago was alarming but the shrine had not been “destroyed”, as extremist propaganda claimed. Let Fisk speak: “Mortars crack and rumble around us but save for a few marble squares, the place (shrine) stands untouched. There’s a T-72 tank down the road and a clutch of government soldiers outside”. But that is the picture today. What’s to come is still unsure.

The mischief that is afoot in Damascus is part of the sequence which caused the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas and the shrines of Timbuktu. But there is a major difference: Bamyan and Timbuktu were swift acts of vandalism. Damascus, the world’s oldest continuous urban habitation, has been in the eye of the storm for quite some time.

And all of this, even as the Security Council peers over the rampage for nearly two years? Would the world’s leaders have been as insensitive if, say, Santiago de Compostela in Spain were under siege?

Indeed, when an Australian fanatic set fire to the Al Aqsa mosque in the 60s, the Jerusalem municipality organized visits by foreign journalists to demonstrate how Israel had protected the mosque. And they had.

When Michaelangelo’s masterpiece at St. Peter’s, the Pieta, was desecrated, the outrage was global, cutting across religions.

How deafening by comparison this silence on the desecration of Prophet Mohammad’s granddaughter! Should the silence in a large section of the Muslim world surprise us? A frightful reality should not be allowed to be obscured: the perpetrators of the desecration in Damascus claim to be Muslims manufactured specially for the “houris” of paradise.

Remember the folk who threatened Lahore with thunder and brimstone just in case the city celebrated Basant with colour and kite flying? The tradition was declared as un-Islamic by exactly the variety active in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Mali.

A poet friend of mine derives comfort from the fact that this lot will never inspire literature, only ghastly terror films. While Zainab’s defining role, along with her elder brother Imam Hussain, in the battle of Karbala, in 680 AD, on the banks of the Euphrates in Iraq, has inspired some of the greatest poetry in Urdu literature.

Since Karbala happened barely 48 years after the Prophet’s death, it lent itself not as a mythical, but a live, historic battle between good and evil. It opened up for scrutiny the inherent conflict between ideals and Empire.

Josh Malihabadi, an iconoclast and agnostic, succinctly summed up the meaning of Karbala:
“Koi keh de ye hukumat ke nigehbanon se
Karbala ek abadi jung hai sultanon se.”
(Warn the self appointed keepers of People’s interests
Karbala symbolizes an eternal war against feudalism and injustice)

Much the finest poetry on Karbala is in the form of epics called Marsias which dwell on Hussain, Zainab and their entourage. Men were martyred but the women, like Zainab were, shackled and paraded through the long journey to the Omayyad court in Damascus.

The journey provided Zainab with an opportunity to bring into play her charisma and eloquence. Karbala, which might have remained a story buried on an obscure Iraqi river bank, became a turning point in Islamic history because of Zainab’s exceptional oratory. This gave her the additional title of being the world’s first woman war chronicler.

The manner, in which the battle of Karbala is observed as Moharram every year, bears some resemblance to the way in which Serbs preserve the memory of the battle of Kosovo, 1389. In both instances, “apparent” defeat is celebrated as transcendental or a higher victory. Hussain’s martyrdom at the hands of the Omayyad armies, “cleansed” the faith of the deviations which had crept in within four decades of the “message”. Serbs celebrate the battle of Kosovo because, even though they “apparently” lost, they nevertheless waged such fierce battle that they blocked Turkish armies from advancing into Europe. This was their victory.

Today, even though Kosovo is an independent Muslim country, the Serbian monument of Kosovo and some of the most exquisite monasteries like Decan, are totally secure, protected by the Kosovars along with European military help. Should Decan even be scratched, the reverberations, not only in Serbia but the entire Eastern Orthodox Church will be techtonic.

Why then this helplessness in the ranks of those whose adoration for the valiant Saiyada Zainab is so real? Another point: she brought her brother’s martyrdom to light. But the attack on her shrine is blocked even on websites in most Arab countries. Such tragic irony.

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What If Rahul Has Ten Year Plan To Build Party?

What If Rahul Has Ten Year Plan To Build Party?

                                                                                   Saeed Naqvi

Not more than 200 people select the 5000 or so candidates who are elected as members of Parliament and State Assemblies. Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, in his 75 minute talk, walking up and down the stage, at the Confederation of Indian Industries, on Thursday, was trying to make a simple point: an abysmal gap exists between the elected representatives and the country’s one billion people.

As opposed to the Parliament and State Legislatures there were 2.4 hundred thousand village Panchayats. It were these that had to be “empowered” as the nodal points most in contact with the people. Legislators and policy makers, have to develop institutional mechanisms to liaise with the Pradhans who implement policy at the village level.

Sensible thought, you would say. But this was not why the Captains of Industry had packed the hall. They had come for hints of economic reforms, his prime ministerial intentions. On both these counts they drew a blank. But none of this distracted the evening show hosts from their fixation: a Rahul Gandhi versus Narendra Modi showdown in the May 2014 General Elections!

The Indian middle class has been encouraged by the media to dream up a falsehood, that the country has miraculously acquired a two party system. This makes for lazy TV shows. Panels on these shows exhaust their lung power on Modi vs Rahul, when neither is a declared Prime Ministerial candidate.

There is, after all, the Karnataka state election next month. These will be followed by elections to Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh. If either Rahul or Modi (or both) are launched as star campaigners in these contests, pundits will have some data to legitimately gauge what is going on in the two main political parties. That still leaves out all the regional parties without whose support no government at the centre can be given shape.

It would not be too reckless to assume that the 2014 elections will yield a UPA III or an NDA II. An inversion of these formations is also possible, that is, coalitions supported from the outside by either of the two main parties. The tremendous sense of purpose with which Mamata Bannerjee has set about destroying her own image, opens up the possibility of the Left Front resuming a balancing role. Winning of 49 seats by the CPM out of 60 in Tripura Assembly last month should not be ignored.

Congress General Secretary Janardan Dwivedi’s touching endorsement of a dual power center flies straight into Digvijay Singh’s belief in Rahul Gandhi being projected as the next Prime Minister. This has been his position since 2009.

How does one explain this open tiff? Expectations were low in the Congress prior to the 2009 elections. Manmohan Singh had asked his handpicked economic experts to look for pastures outside the government. He was himself surprised to find himself in harness post 2009.

At this time a three way tussle began between three coteries. Since the Congress’s quantum leap from 145 seats in 2004 to 206 in 2009 was attributed to the Rahul factor, the PM’s men by way of tactic reached out to absorb him in the cabinet. If Rahul were thus contained in the cabinet system, a third power centre would be obviated. This would also be less bothersome to the coterie around Sonia Gandhi. Despite machinations on all sides, the triangle could not be rubbed out.

And now that the post 2014 power structure is being contemplated, the Congress is once again examining various options. Manmohan Singh, not given to rash statements, has himself encouraged a line of speculation in which the “dual power structure” is not ruled out for the third time. This is where Janardan Dwivedi derives his confidence to endorse the Sonia-Manmohan duet.

What does Digvijay Singh do in these circumstances? Rahul Gandhi, just 43, has time enough to design the “Beehive” (as he told the CII) where a billion Indians will busy themselves. He will undertake countless train journeys like the one from Gorakhpur to Mumbai where Girish the carpenter opened his eyes to Indian optimism. This will be the material for his Discovery of India. Remember the Duke in As You Like It? In his idyllic life “exempt from public haunt”, the Duke found “tongues in trees” books in the running brooks and sermons in stones.

Rahul will likewise, not waste his time chatting up the media but build structures of governance reaching the last of the billion Indians in the remotest hamlet.

He will be 48 during the 2019 elections and only 53 for the 2024 election. By that time all other parties will have exposed themselves as rotten. Only the structures Rahul will have built will deliver unto him the absolute majority without which Prime Ministership is a crown of thorns.

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“Life Is Becoming Like The World Of Islam”

“Life Is Becoming Like The World Of Islam”

                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

Good poetry sums up powerful emotions which people experience but cannot articulate. A friend in Pakistan has sent me a couplet which does open doors bringing in the light or, atleast, providing relief from seemingly interminable suffocation.

“Ek lamha to miley Amn-o-sukoon ka yaa Rab.
Zindagi Aalam e Islam hui jaati hai.”
(Not a moment of peace, Oh God, no serenity, no calm.
Life is beginning to resemble the world of Islam)

In other words the world of Islam, in its present condition, is to the poet Manzar Bhopali, an experience outside himself even though the poet is obviously a Muslim by birth.

The couplet under review does not for a moment suggest that the poet is giving hints of a possible defection from his faith. He has simply separated himself from “Alam-e-Islam” and placed himself at a vantage point to take a comprehensive look at it. It is then that he executes a remarkable simile.

“The weariness, the fever and the fret” was Keats’ description of “our condition” which was in dismal contrast to the full throated music of the nightingale.

Raghupati Sahai Firaq Gorakhpuri has a different simile for human suffering:
“Is daur mein zindagi bashar ki
Beemar ki raat ho gaee hai.”
(Human life these days has become the endless night of a patient tossing and turning in high fever.) The fever is not the passing flu, but terminal tuberculosis common in Firaq’s youth. The image is not dissimilar to the “wariness, the fever and the fret”.

But no poet in history has over held up Aalam-e-Islam” as the mirror to man’s existential hopelessness.

My sense is that something new has been said in very simple words and to which the silent majority in the Muslim world would respond with thunderous applause. The verse contrives an exit route from a disagreeable reality, an entrapment in forced homogenization. This has been imposed on Muslims by a lethal mixture of televised war, particularly the war on terror, possibly in unwitting implementation of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.

I have grown in the knowledge that any talk of Muslim homogeneity in India is false: the Mapillas from Malabar are different from Labbais in Tamil Nadu or Bengali Muslims. Language and local culture trump religious links.

Inder Gujral as Prime Minister invited me to Bangladesh because he felt a Muslim in his entourage would go down well in a Muslim country. Never in my life have I felt more lonesome with my Islam. The Bengalis, on both sides, led by the late Nikhil Da broke out in Tagore and Nazrul Islam, licking their fingers on Illich Maach, leaving a marginalized Muslim from Lucknow in the shadows.

Gujral and I had momentarily forgotten an elementary truth: the very emergence of Bangladesh was the triumph of linguistic regionalism over Islam.

Globally the Islamic world is even more disparate – stretching from the Maghreb to Pakistan’s borders with India, then around the Indian Ocean to South East Asia. Also, North Africa to the nations along the Sahel.

War and conflicts have been set up in most of these countries. I know all about colonialism, imperialism, capitalism’s greed, the do-or-die quest for mineral resources and strategic advantage. These interests cannot be defeated in the battlefield because Muslim Monarchs and sundry leaders have sought shelter from their own people under the Western umbrella. Since these umbrellas are in tatters – witness Cyprus, Greece, Italy and others yet in denial, the wave of violence will get more intense.

Aalam-e-Islam is ironically Darul Harb today or Area of Conflict thanks to the Muslim leaders sitting on Western laps with pacifiers in their mouths.

A fight is being imposed on you. They know that you will be provoked one day and join the fight because of the injustices heaped on the Umma. But which Umma? Who from the great Umma is there to wipe the tears from the eyes of the little Rohingya children whose shacks were burnt in a fierce land grab which has been given an ethnic colour?

As for Indian Muslim, the situation has changed radically. Before 9/11 it was our domestic quarrel, a family affair. Now the fingers on the levers of the machinery fighting what is sometimes a phantom war on terror, are not always exclusively ours. This is one more way to keep India in the global loop. Damn the internally divisive consequences!

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Media’s Role As Foreign Affairs Impinge On National Politics

Media’s Role As Foreign Affairs Impinge On National Politics

                                                                                                       Saeed Naqvi

If proof were required, the DMK-Congress spat on the Sri Lanka related vote at the UN Human Rights Council has once again provided it. Foreign Affairs will increasingly impinge on national politics.

It follows, therefore, that conditions be created for electorate to be educated, made conversant with nuances of foreign affairs.

The burden for this responsibility should have fallen on the ample shoulders of the electronic media which opened up along with the economy in 1993. But it shrugged off this responsibility for a variety of reasons.

In this context, an inexplicable amnesia appears to have gripped Doordarshan which should have stood centre stage at a time when the world was observing the tenth anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003.

CNN had established itself as the pioneer in bringing a war into the world’s drawing rooms during the Operation Desert Storm in February 1991. BBC, having been beaten in this operation by the transatlantic cousin, pulled itself out of this reversal and, within two months, launched the BBC-World Service TV.

CNN and BBC became part of the war effort during the 2003 invasion, giving currency to the expression “embedded journalists”. Al Jazeera, I recall, had made a debut. So unpopular was it with the US Generals in charge of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the Qatar owned channel’s offices in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed.

The effect of Al Jazeera coverage tended to mobilize Afghan and Arab nationalism against US occupation. It had thrown the monkey-wrench in the propaganda war the twin alliance had planned for the two theatres. It was only in the wake of the so called Arab Spring that the Amir of Qatar, fearing for his own throne because of the winds of change in the region, placed the credibility of Al Jazeera at the disposal of the Western action in Libya and Syria, to boost the dwindling credibility of CNN and BBC. In so doing, Al Jazeera has compromised whatever credibility it had built up.

What DD had done under its Director General, Yaqoob Quraishi, was to set aside a prime time slot for an hour every day and given a group of journalists, camera units, technical hands total independence. The project had all round support from the establishment for a simple reason: Indian journalists must be witness to a major war in a vital region. Senior Indian correspondents were scattered across Iraq, the Kurdish areas, Basra, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Paris, London, Washington.

Never in the history of Indian journalism had a war in foreign lands been covered so comprehensively.

As soon as you mention “foreign coverage” the knee jerk response from major channels is: “foreign affairs” does not fetch us TRP ratings”. Here is an occasion, the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war, when DD can nail a lie. Amitabh Bachchan’s Kaun Banega Crorepati had the highest ratings those days. Iraq war coverage matched those figures.

Some of the stories brought out truths which would have remained hidden had Satish Jacob, Sankarshan Thakur, Syed Kazmi, Harinder Baweja, Vaiju Naravane in Paris, Sanjay Suri in London, not searched for the unexplored angle.

Triumphalist choreography attended the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue at Baghdad’s Firdous Square, outside Palestine hotel. Ragae Omar of the BBC, an outstanding TV reporter otherwise was unfortunately commandeered by headquarters to produce high decibel commentary to coincide with the pulling down of the statue. “Oh, they are coming from all directions……. The Iraqi people rejoicing in the moment of triumph.” Let the truth be told: Iraqi people did not some out dancing on the streets. In any case the statue itself was not pulled down by the crowds. A US marine placed a thick noose around Saddam’s head and the rope was pulled by a crane to cause the statue to tilt over. The crowds were mostly waiters from Palestine hotel and other bystanders.

In between, Vice President Dick Cheney was to appear on TV, exhorting the people of Iraq who, alas, would just not materialize.

To save the situation Ayatullah Baqar ul Hakim’s help was sought to mobilize the Shias of Sadr city, a Shia ghetto on the outskirts of Baghdad. That is when the Shias came out in large numbers, desecrating Saddam’s posters.

In his speech, Cheney thanked the “Religious leaders” for saving a triumphal choreography from becoming a total flop.

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Egypt’s President Morsy Comes Calling

Egypt’s President Morsy Comes Calling

                                                                   Saeed Naqvi

These are not cheerful times for South Block in its dealings with neighbours or nations as distant as Italy. But there is a whole range of countries, in the Arab world which have traditionally been warm to New Delhi and who have been sending senior envoys to plead their respective cases and seek Indian support bilaterally and in multilateral forums.

In this sequence, a visit of considerable importance is by Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsy early this week.

It would be churlish even to register negatively the fact that he will also visit Pakistan. He is a duly elected leader of his country after the so called Arab Spring ushered in some dramatic changes. These have since been successfully resisted by the Kingdoms and the Sheikhdoms in the region.

There are two broad problems Morsy has to contend with as he navigates his nation through a turbulent transition. First Egyptian culture and civilization are in conflict with Egyptian politics. The circumscribed “Muslim Brotherhood” format does not sit easy on its secular character.

The other problem is that the country’s electoral democracy is not yet on constitutional tracks which have been validated by the courts. This is why Parliamentary elections which were to be held in April 22 have been postponed.

In the course of talks with Morsy, the tricky one for New Delhi to handle may well be Cairo’s quest for greater co ordination on Syria. There will be a distinct Arab nuance to Cairo’s stand on that issue.

Recently the Arab League meeting at its headquarters in Cairo decided to give the Syrian chair at the League to the Syrian opposition. That Lebanon always abstains on any vote taken on Syria, reflects the Lebanese reality: the nation is divided on the issue.

Cairo’s position on Syria is that President Bashar al Assad appoint someone who can lead the negotiations with the opposition.

The question, ofcourse is, which opposition? According to UN Envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi there are 148 small and large groups fighting the central authority inside Syria. Is there even a ghost of a chance of a coherent opposition emerging from this motley crowd?

New Delhi wants Syria’s territorial integrity preserved and a negotiated end to the unspeakable violence visited upon the country.

One consideration comes into play in both, New Delhi and Cairo’s relations with Teheran. Neither would like to impair their relations with the GCC countries which, needless to say, stand to lose greatly should hostilities break out in the region – by accident or design.

Just as Syria will figure in Morsy’s talks, so was it at the top of the agenda with the speaker of the Iranian Majlis, and the Foreign Secretary of Turkey.

There is little doubt that a great deal of Syria’s current tragedy has been heaped upon it by massive external support to internal discontent.

Turkey’s problems are potentially severe too. These will become clear as time passes by.

The country was cruising along smoothly with an economy so much stouter than its European neighbours that the urge to enter Europe had given way to a national self confidence, sans Europe. Ironically, it had gained enormously by following on all the conditions preparatory to its entry into Europe. Towards that end, its democracy, ecology, economy, human rights, relations with neighbours had all improved.

At the time that Europe was in painful economic decline, Turkey looked by comparison, an extremely attractive place. Even the de facto autonomy of the Kurdish north of Iraq was open turf for Turkish business involved in mega projects.

A “simulated” distancing from Israel had given it some leeway in the Arab street. Relations with Iran were so good as to be potentially useful as a line of communication with the US.

True, a destabilized Syria would be a matter of grave concern to Turkey. The countries share a long border. What makes little political sense is the mounting evidence that Turkey allowed itself to be the earliest conduit for arms and men to the Aleppo and areas around it.

Apparently, Tayyip Erdogan could not resist the temptation of revealing himself as a ranking Muslim Brotherhood leader who had only toned down his Islamic credentials to fool Turkey’s urban elite and the Army, reared in a culture of uncompromising secularism, not dissimilar to what obtained in Damascus before the current crisis was loosened upon it.

This was stressed in the letter from President Assad carried by his senior adviser Bouthaina Shaaban for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. President Assad has also requested the Prime Minister to lead an initiative by BRICS for peace in Syria.

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