After Brexit, Itexit Looms, Spanish Order Caves In: God Help Europe

After Brexit, Itexit Looms, Spanish Order Caves In: God Help Europe

                                                                               Saeed Naqvi

Pardon the postscript first. With the appointment of Giuseppe Conte, a lawyer, as a compromise Prime Minister of Italy, the wheel has come full circle. But before the Italian see-saw could stabilize Spain’s Mariano Rajoy has thrown in his towel in the face of corruption charges that actually never left him since 2015. Establishments in Italy as well as Spain have been mauled in recent days by People’s power. This People’s power has been given an insulting name by the rulers – “Populism”.

Meanwhile herewith the column I wrote from Rome yesterday (Thursday) before travelling to the troubled countryside:   

From the terrace bars, Rome’s current vogue, the monuments look mysterious in soft light even as St. Peters towers above all. But this panoramic grandeur disguises the tumult into which Italy has been tossed after President Sergio Mattarella, a judge by training, refused to swear in Paolo Savona, 83 years old Economy’s Professor who is staunchly against EU.

Savona’s name had been proposed by the victorious alliance which came to power following the elections in March. The Five Star Movement is anti-austerity and anti EU; the League is sharply xenophobic on the migrant issue.

While the Interim Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a lawyer was more of 5 Star nominee, the Finance Minister rejected by President Mattarella shared the League leader, Matteo Salvini’s anti-German bent. A growing anti-German sentiments is becoming part of Italy’s political rhetoric. Matteo Salvini, pulls no punches on that score.

“German newspapers call us beggars, ungrateful, lazy, freeloaders and they want us to choose a Finance Minister they like.”

Alessandro Gilioli, Deputy Editor in Chief of the influential L’Espresso, was candid. He thought that the Leader of the Five Star, Luigi Di Maio who never sought a Euro exit, would have been amenable to a compromise even in the first round negotiations with President Mattarella last week. But Di Maio could not have stuck his neck out with a softer line on Europe: that would have been a huge advantage to the League. An almighty competition in radicalism is on between unlikely competitors.

President Mattarella, a Europhile, acting under heaven knows what impulse or pressure, invited a 64 year old IMF official Carlo Cottarelli to become interim Prime Minister. This was like a red rag to the 5 Star-League bull. Mattarella came under further pressure to reverse the decision which would have given the coalition a formula to grow exponentially in the next elections.

An even more muscular, menacing combination of 5 Star and the League would be in the perception of Brussels, not the medicine that the doctor had ordered for Italy, the world and certainly for the EU which is still reeling from the Brexit blow and looking at disturbing developments in Spain. An Itexit would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions. So all the world’s establishments leaned on the President to open up consultations which have resulted in the reappointment of Conte. The compromise is: Conte minus Savona. What is being attempted in Italy is to delay the day of reckoning – when People disgusted with established parties will install their representatives whom the rulers continue to call Populist.

Consider what happened in Spain. In 2015, Pablo Iglesias with his communist portfolio, riding a crest of Podemos (Yes We Can, echoes of Obama’s first campaign) burst upon the Spanish scene on a platform to get rid of Rajoy, noted for corruption even then.

Look how Rajoy managed to stay on until the latest vote. The stop gap Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of the declining socialist party standing on rotten stilts will fall sooner rather than later.  Will that be the end of the Establishment in Spain? As an insurance, a Centre-Right youth party, Ciudadanos, Citizen’s party has been floated successfully, borrowing Podemos’s aesthetics. Its leader, Albert Rivera, has boosted his image on a nationalist platform opposing Catalan independence.

Remember also how the world’s progressive groups had built castles in the air when Alexis Tsipras of Greek communists, Syriza, promised the utopia where “austerity” will be forever banished? Today he is a contented poodle in the German lap.

But the new turn in European affairs seems to suggest that Tsipras too might be a nine days wonder. In fact, Yanis Varoufakis, the former Finance Minister, whom he sacked under German and EU pressure, has resurrected himself on the platform which Tsipras discarded. On Mattarella’s initial undemocratic action, Varoufakis was scathing. “By grounding their candidate for Finance, you have given a fantastic gift to populist forces”.

“You said nothing when the League leader Salvini named himself the Minister for Interior, when he was committed to throwing out 5,00,000 immigrants?”

During the Cold war, Christian Democrats were kept in power by the entire western alliance. Italy at this period had a much loved Communist party which, paradoxically, was considered a taboo for power – atleast while the Soviets were around. Soviet collapse by that token, deprived the CD of its blackmail card to stay in power.

Italy’s conscientious Judges who had held their fire for fear of unsettling a system which had served as a bulwark against the global Left, now began to investigate the corruption in which the Italian power structure was sunk neck deep. 1992 onwards, hundreds of politicians, civil servants, businessmen went to jail for brazen corruption.

When Berlusconi became Italy’s Prime Minister in 1994, he owned every TV channel. Naturally the media backed him to the hilt during his subsequent spells in power. Over a decade ago, a comedian Beppe Grillo started a blog to engage young people on basic issues like technology, water, pollution, unemployment, economic distress. Italians, suffocated by Berlusconi’s self-serving media monopoly, built an internet revolution on the platform created by Grillo’s blog. This is the platform on which the current alternative Italian political structure is being erected.

There may be differences in detail, but Europe these days is convulsed by two currents fiercely opposed to each other: People’s power, from the Left and the Right (disparagingly named “Populism”) is out to dethrone the established order. Until the other day this order seemed invincible: the Establishment had many instruments in their toolkit. But developments in Spain suggest that the seemingly invulnerable are running out of steam. Change and status quo are in conflict on an unprecedented scale.

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Entire Opposition Join Hands Even As Doves In RAW And ISI Coo

Entire Opposition Join Hands Even As Doves In RAW And ISI Coo

                                                                              Saeed Naqvi

Dated: 25.05.2018

Two mutually reinforcing images from last week may well define the next phase in national affairs. It is too early to call them game changers but they have considerable potential.

The most comprehensive array of opposition leaders, almost a record, who assembled in Bangaluru for H.D. Kumaraswamy’s swearing in as Chief Minister of Karnataka is significant because it happened despite the contradictions inherent between the various groups in that galaxy.

The occasion produced the man and he better be noticed: Kunwar Danish Ali, the Jamia Millia educated, JDS spokesman, carried sufficient credibility on both sides to swiftly stitch together the Congress-JDS alliance in the state. This became the platform on which stood India’s non BJP diversity. In stitching this extensive hem too Danish Ali is being applauded by those who know.

Muslims in politics are either too weather beaten or “too Muslim” to navigate diversity. Danish Ali, in my view, is a political animal with a wide reach and one who keeps his faith intensely private. We should hear more about him should the Karnataka experiment remain intact.

The other iconic image was, quite curiously, of a book release. It must have been a few hours of grave national danger, because seldom has the well appointed auditorium of the Claridges hotel been more packed with spies, past and present. For its sheer audacity, Spy Chronicles, RAW, ISI and the illusion of Peace, is by itself a thrilling title, but when the authorship comes out in sharp silhouette, the revelation takes ones breath away. A.S. Dulat, former chief of RAW and Gen. Asad Durrani, former head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) have put their heads together and have, without compromising fidelity to their respective oaths of office, produced a 320 page document which must now onwards inform those in the sub continent shaping policy on Kashmir and Indo-Pak relations.

The high powered congregation in Bengaluru and the brave effort of the Dulat-Durrani duet, both respond to the same national quest – a softer more humane sub continent. Alas, a calmer India, on its own, divorced from the sub continent, is just not possible. It is, likewise, not possible for Pakistan. 1947 was both a blessing and a curse. We could define our separate nations according to our lights but we were also yoked together by geography from which proceed historical and sociological currents which flow forward but also regurgitate into the past.

The first concerted effort to wrench away from the sub continental centre of gravity came from Pakistan dictator, General Zia ul Haq. His push for Nizam-e-Mustafa invited nascent Islamophobia which has metastasized into the modern horror.

Just when fluctuations in Indo-Pak ties gives way to a seemingly interminable hostility, comes the Dulat-Durrani intervention, opening a ventilator in an otherwise suffocating hothouse.

What the book touches on is, in effect, the nub of the matter. Indo-Pak initiatives flounder on that ubiquitous document meant for the principal, say, the Prime Minister, marked “for eyes only”. If the Deep State on both sides is the obstacle, why not allow spymasters on both sides to sort out the cobwebs which the principals cannot?

Leftovers from Partition are Kashmir, Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim tensions. If tense communal relations are a requirement for the politics of Hindu consolidation, it follows, as night follows the day, that Kashmir and Indo-Pak relations must simmer in perpetuity. They have been placed on auto by our own hands.

To obviate communalism as an essential requirement for electoral politics, it is essential that the motley political crowd on the podium at in Bengaluru is regularized. Many societies called it a rainbow coalition.

Both, pre requisite and a consequence of the Bengaluru experiment is precisely this: tone down social disharmony which communalism aggravates. This end is unachievable without the Dulat-Durrani initiative taking off. Social disharmony, it needs to be stressed, is the overarching malaise under which communalism is played. That is why one photograph that came out of the Bengaluru assembly is epochal – Sonia Gandhi leaning her head against Mayawati’s.

It may be odd to remember Urdu poetry at this juncture but do indulge a line. The most graphic poet, Mir Anis, describes cosmic tumult in which two mutually hostile creatures come together in the face of common danger:

“Shaheen o kabk chhup gayey

Ekja mila ke sar”

(Facing danger, the falcon and the dove put their heads together in the thicket)

Considering that Congress lost its deposit in the March by-elections in UP’s Phulpur and Gorakhpur constituencies, Sonia Gandhi would be seen to be in requirement of the BSP supremo, Mayawati’s help. Mayawati may not have been the winner but it was with her help that Akhilesh Yadav’s SP won the two seats.

In this situation what would one make of Congress Election Chief in Madhya Pradesh, Digvijay Singh’s statement from Bhopal. He dismissed any tie up with the BSP. Neither was Sonia’s photograph with Mayawati an announcement of a tie up, nor does Digvijay Singh’s reported statement scuttle it. This non-story is only a precursor to what is in store: political busy bodies will load a triangular situation – Congress, BSP, SP – with such heavy voltage speculation that some strand somewhere will snap. The process of coalition building will only be partly in the hands of the principals. To a large extent the process will be conditioned by the din surrounding it which will create misgivings all around as in rapid fire magazines.

The Dulat-Durrani initiative will be subjected to an even more severe ordeal by fire, atleast upto 2019. The events of last week provide hope which will generate its opposite – the Pulley principle.

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Ramadan Ceasefire In Kashmir Meaningless If Media War Continues

Ramadan Ceasefire In Kashmir Meaningless If Media War Continues

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

I have never seen the electronic media so totally defiant of the BJP government. Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s avowed intention to calm Kashmir by announcing a Ramadan ceasefire appears to have been dismissed as “appeasement of Pakistan and terrorists”.

A guest peering out of one of the six windows on the TV screen was frothing in the mouth. “Murderers of our brave jawans are being shamelessly appeased.” The other went one better: “a brave nation does what the Sri Lankan army did to the LTTE – just finished them off.” The anchor on this Aaj Tak show Thursday evening looked angrier than both. This apparently is common fare.

The Communist Party of India is receiving signals from its Kashmir unit that it may have to rename itself. The ‘I’ in the CPI has been hurting the state unit for quite some time. But after the recent surge in shootings, stone pelting, “encounters”, sustained images of wailing women, trailing the spate of funerals, and relentless media jingoism, the “I” now invites physical danger. True, a defunct party by any name will remain defunct, but even so, Communist Party of Kashmir (CPK) will atleast not incur the wrath of the street.

The relative Ramadan peace is a good occasion to take stock. Even in days of drift in Kashmir during the time of P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, there was a semblance of political control by the National Conference and the PDP. Elements of the Hurriyat had fingers on the street pulse. The scene recently has been anarchic: there was no control.

Recent increase in violence was described by reliable sources as “indigenous” which is not what officials say.  A narrative which discounts outside “meddling” is not honeyed music to the establishment. Nor to that shrill panel – on Aaj Tak. Ironical, isn’t it, that absence of outside support to the insurgency disturbs us?

Just when Kashmir was at fever pitch, the mayhem in Aligarh Muslim University erupted around the photograph of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Friends are in error if they consider the undiluted hooliganism on view in Aligarh an occasion to engage in a serious debate on Jinnah’s culpability in partitioning the country. The hoodlums of Aligarh were not busting their guts to have Jinnah’s portrait removed from the AMU union office. Quite the contrary. Hindu Yuva Vahini would love to provoke Aligarh hotheads to dig their heels in to preserve Jinnah in the university precincts. This will be the ammunition which can come in handy at all times. The campus will be the ordnance depot for frequent explosions in the service of the projected Hindu Rashtra.

This is not the first time in recent decades that AMU has been exploited for saffron politics. Ever since Prime Minister V.P. Singh aggravated identity politics by implementing the Mandal Committee report providing reservation in government jobs to lower castes, the BJP has rushed to prevent the caste structure from crumbling. Hindu consolidation, by building up the Muslim ogre, has been the obvious strategy.

Aligarh was frequently the target as part of this strategy. There was no Arnab Goswami in the 90s but Hindi newspapers played a lead role in widening the Hindu-Muslim divide.

A story appears in newspapers that, after horrendous riots in Aligarh city, some of the injured Hindus being taken to the University Medical College for treatment, are being killed by Muslim doctors and interns. Even though the university is only three hours drive from New Delhi, newspapers choose to rely on unverified agency copy which, in turn, quotes upper caste Hindi newspapers.

An incredible scene is being enacted on the outskirts of the university. Local scribes seated on chairs arranged in a circle under a mango tree, sip tea even as one Krishna Kumar Navman, BJP MLA from Aligarh, holds them in his thrall with graphic accounts of murders in the hospital.

“Has anyone visited the Medical College?”, I ask. They had not, they say, because it is “risky”.

At the medical college the picture is surreal: petrified doctors encircle me.

“No one has come to us for clarification”, they complain.

Why have they not reached out to the journalists with their story? After a long, pregnant silence, they speak up. They thought it would be dangerous stepping out of the campus “in the midst of communal violence”. This is what I call uninstitutionalized apartheid.

That was 30 years ago when there were no TV channels to inculcate saffron nationalism on the scale I saw the other day and which I have mentioned above.

Folks overtly agitated or elated at the turn of events in Aligarh, may find it sobering that Pakistan’s Jinnah is not the only leader around whom communal polarization can be contrived. Ram Navami processionist in Kankinara, 24 Parganas in West Bengal were so overpowered by the spirit of Rama that they pulled down the statue of Congress President and India’s first Education Minister, Maulana Azad – a person, who in his outlook was exactly the opposite of Jinnah. This was in preparation for the Panchayat elections currently in the news.

Protection to anti namaz lumpens in Gurugram, or those who pasted a Maharana Pratap Road placard on Akbar Road (the placard was removed the next morning), Modi clenching his fist at Tipu Sultan during the recent campaign, are minor episodes in an epic of hatred being manufactured for 2019 ofcourse, and beyond if need be. In this gameplan there is no real, long term respite for Kashmiris, Muslims, or Indo-Pak peaceniks. Alongside, the rage of the dalits and tribals is spiraling out of control. There is an element of simulation in anti Muslimism for political reasons but the retribution faced by dalits and tribals in the countryside is visceral.

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Record For US President: Tears Multilateral Deal Then Publicly Endorses Torture

Record For US President: Tears Multilateral Deal Then Publicly Endorses Torture

                                                                                               Saeed Naqvi

In the Trump multiplex, three shows are on simultaneously. First, the stages between the announcement of withdrawal from the deal and real withdrawal – how signatories respond at each step. That is one play. Without the US to lean on, will Britain ever countenance a grouping of which Germany is the most muscular member? Riveting stuff.

Second, consequences on West Asia. And finally, sauce for Iranian goose is not sauce for the North Korean gander. Nail biting suspense for the audience because no one will know what turn the three narratives will take.

Those smacking their lips at the prospect of Europe drifting away from the US, into another lap, would do well to delay celebrations. True, Donald Trump has just handed them money for jam by withdrawing from the Iran Nuclear Deal, but as I have said above, between announcement and actual withdrawal there is time for a slip.

Almost on cue, Israel has provocatively sought to escalate the Syrian conflict by attacking what it says are Iranian assets. Israel must have been very peeved at Iran protégé Hezbullah’s Hasan Nasrallah administer an electoral one-two on the chins of Tel Aviv and Riyadh. After this week’s elections in Lebanon, he is indomitable in the country’s politics. He fulfills one of the laws of nature: he whom Washington opposes must win.

The other big reversal for the US led alliance is Syria itself. Iran was beginning to loom menacingly over Riyadh and Tel Aviv. Does Washington’s withdrawal from the deal bring Iran down a few notches? Or quite the opposite happens? Iran looks dignified. Trump it is who has bartered away American trust. He is replacing measured policy with caprice and impulse.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry sought to address the West Asian scene differently. Their world view was at a variance from Trump’s “non world view”.

The Obama-Kerry approach to the Iran deal was conditioned by serious nuclear concerns, ofcourse. But it was also a function of re prioritizing US role in world affairs in the context of China’s rise. The “pivot to Asia”, in their conception, required a more “hands on”, focused attention to the Asia-Pacific region. They placed the Korean Peninsula in that framework. Diplomacy would advance US interests but without risking strategic alliances.

Having inadvertently enhanced Iranian stature by dismantling Taliban in Afghanistan (with Iranian help, let’s remember) and Saddam Hussain in Iraq, the nuclear deal was one of the ways to manage Iranian power.

The deal had conferred legitimacy on the power structure in Tehran. A new balance of power in West Asia had become feasible. Tehran, Tel Aviv, Ankara, Riyadh, Cairo, would be part of this pentagonal balance of power.

The Palestinian Peace process, Syria’s civil war, Yemen, money spinner for arms merchants but a diplomatic disaster – all demanded American attention on a daily basis. This stalled the crucial “pivot”.

Obama and Kerry sought to place Tel Aviv, Riyadh and others in the same tent as Iran. This was anathema to Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammad bin Salman. There was a frenetic stamping of feet at this prospect.

They were encouraged from the “New Cons” lobby parked in Washington think tanks, campuses, media and sundry Zionist groups, that Israeli-Palestinian was no longer the West Asia’s core conflict. It had been superseded by the Shia Sunni schism. This was now the basic faultline conditioning West Asian affairs. “No one talks of the Palestinian issue these days” remarked a very old but alert Henry Kissinger during a talk at the Nobel Academy in Oslo two years ago.

The issue which underpinned Arab unity until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-91 was Palestine. Thereafter, Iran remained a thorn in the sides of regimes where the street was sensitive to the Palestinian tragedy – Egypt, Jordan, for instance. How did Iran aggravate the situation? Sustained focus on the Palestinian issue during Friday prayer sermons by the supreme leader in Tehran were routine. The agitation in the Arab street, and the basement, in response to these sermons gathered further strength in direct proportion to disturbing news from Gaza or the West Bank. It was continuous crisis management.

Swollen ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood would cause Hosni Mubarak to go running to the Saudi King who opened his coffers for mosques and radio stations in Egypt which propagated exactly the political Islam which Saudi investments were supposed to quell.

Cairo’s discomfiture was a source of anxiety to Tel Aviv too: the Egyptian regime, under the American yoke, was well disposed towards Israel. But the Muslim Brotherhood’s growing links with Gaza were disturbing.

For the international community to remain consistently focused on the Shia-Sunni divide, the Palestinian issue must be placed under a haze. With their combined clout, Tel Aviv and Riyadh succeeded in shifting focus to Shia perfidy against Israel and Saudi Arabia. Remember, how livid Netanyahu was with Obama? Totally ignoring the US President, he sailed above his head to address the US Congress.

There was an ironical twist to the tale. Excessive focus on the Shia Sunni divide, quite unintentionally brought anachronistic Wahabism under global searchlights. This is one of the reasons for the Saudi Crown Prince’s impatient and risky gallop towards modernization.

If the Israeli-Saudi duet considers Trump a Godsend, the partners better investigate such qualities as Trump’s attention span, his intellectual stamina. Can he stand by impulsive decisions until they acquire the outlines of policy? He announced he was leaving Afghanistan, then ordered a military surge in that country. High appointees have been in and out of Trump’s rotating door with such rapidity that it is something of a world record. What becomes of the CIA Director-to-be Gina Haspal, celebrated torture expert, will be watched with interest. His chilling endorsement of Haspel is in words that no American President, no “leader of the free world” would have uttered in his wildest nightmare. He made one’s hair stand: “Torture works” he repeated with cold deliberation “Torture does work”.

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