Iraq, UN and India

T V R Shenoy has a good defence of India’s strategic ambivalence on the Iraq issue. He is particularly scathing towards the UN:
One might argue that individual affiliates of the United Nations — UNICEF, WHO, or the World Food Programme have done a decent job on the whole. But they can, and should, be spun off to become independent bodies (like the International Red Cross). Because the United Nations on the whole is nothing but a collection of lazy, unimaginative bureaucrats, selected without any regard for merit. As for the General Assembly, it deserves nothing but our contempt.

Let me take you back to December 7, 1971, when the General Assembly voted on the infamous ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution. Pakistan had attacked India three days earlier, and India had recognised Bangladesh as an independent nation on December 6. But while Islamabad’s treatment of the Bengalis had long been a global scandal, it was India that was at the receiving end in the General Assembly. We lost that vote by 104 to 11, with only the Soviet bloc standing by us.

I have had little respect for the United Nations’ moral posturing ever since. That body celebrates its 58th birthday later this year, the age when Indian bureaucrats retire. Perhaps a similar fate is indicated for the United Nations…

Hizb commander shot dead

Good news
A couple of months back, I thought of composing a hopeful post. The hopeful post would note that Kashmir had been quiet for a while. It would hope that perhaps Kashmiri terrorism would follow its Punjabi predecessor into oblivion. The handful of terrorists who rape and murder Kashmiris had been hunted down. The ordinary people were tired of terrorism, and, while not completely happy with the Indian (or Jammu and Kashmir ) government, had found that they were better off working with an imperfect democracy than with a bunch of jihadists.

Then something told me to wait for summer, and that something was right. Now that summer has begun, the killing has resumed. If proof is required that terrorism in Kashmir is, at least now, entirely Pakistan’s handiwork, this is it.

Tavleen Singh (via Shanti) asks why we can’t strike Shock and Awe, the way the US is doing with Iraq. I think the answer is obvious – for the same reason the US couldn’t strike shock and awe against USSR. A limited war with Pakistan would be pointless; an all out war would be devastating for both.
Leaning on the US to put pressure on Pakistan should be tried, but I don’t think it will work. The US is trying to push Pakistan towards “moderation”. But in Pakistan, an
extremist is someone who wants to export jihad all over the world including to the US, whereas
moderate is someone who wants to keep the jihadis under leash for the limited purpose of harrassing India. Musharraf is a moderate only in the sense that he is dismayed by the extent to which Islamisation in the Pakistani army has taken a life of its own and now he wants to control the Frankenstein’s monster, not to kill it.

It is obvious why the US wants Pakistan to moderate itself, but it is not clear to me what difference it makes to India. A collapse of authority in Pakistan would make the US unhappy. It wouldn’t be
good for us either – after all, we don’t want Pakistan’s nuclear suitcase to fall into the hands of nutcases.

Frankly, our choices aren’t good, and I think that we have made the best of a bad situation. In Jammu and Kashmir, I think that we have won the war of legitimacy. If cross-border terrorism would just go away, Kashmir would be as peaceful in a year as Punjab is now. I think our best options are to use covert operations to kill as many terrorists as possible in Pakistan, ex?loit differences among the groups to weaken them and wait for the Pakistani army to get really unpopular and get it replaced by a democratic government. The US won’t do it for us. It will be afraid of “destabilisation”. India will have to do it. for itself

Bharatiya Blog Mela #6

Sorry for the delay people, but today was an unexpected holiday, and even more unexpectedly, I had work that did not involve sitting in front of a computer.
< ?r />(flourish of trumpets…)
So ladies and gentlemen, here is this week’s Blog Mela.

Shankar Narayan talks about how blogging will change the world of journalism
Kingsley takes a walk down Brigade Road, Bangalore and notices an interesting fact.
Sameer has a good roundup of the forces arrayed against the American coalition.
Swami (permalinks not working, March 24 post) claims that an article by Swaminathan Aiyar on the Iraq war isn’t making any sensible point.
Mahesh (permalinks not working, March 29 post) links to an article on how Mugabe is using sneaky tactics to steal a by-election, wants the international community to step in to rescue Zimbabwe.
Yazad links to another article by Swaminathan Aiyar, in his opinion the best one written on the war yet.
Shanti links to an article by Tavleen Singh and calls for India to take firmer action against Pakistan.
Jayakrishnan Nair takes up the question of when the Mahabharata war actually took place.
Aju on what kinds of blogs he likes.
Jyotsna Kamat (March 8 post but permalink doesn’t work) has a very informative article on B L Rice, who was the first Englishman to document Karnataka’s history.
V S Babu in a scathing post, describes the attempts by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to get Malayalis to do even less productive work than they are doing now. (Sorry couldn’t resist )
(Gratuitous plug: Dakshina Kannada – the saner alternative to Kerala. The climate is as good, the people are smarter and the politicians aren’t completely insane)
Dina Mehta talks of the sociology of software, specifically how discussion boards, blogging, etc. help in the formation of social networks.
The Inscrutable American has detected the beginnings of a communist revolution in a blog.
(I once had this bright idea of sending all our communists to the US by asking them to practice true Marxism. After all, Marx had predicted that communism would come to the most advanced capitalist country first, and India, still being a feudal country, would have to go through capitalism first, right?)

Phew! That’s it for this week. Expect this to be mirrored on Realwomenonline by today.
And who’s next?
Update: Here is the his place to find how you can nominate your posts for this week.

Last Warning

Public,
Today is the last day to submit nominations for this week’s Bharatiya Blog Mela. The response hasn’t been good so far, and if it continues to be poor, I threaten to fill the mela with items that catch my gaze.


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Hypocisy

Well Yazad beats me to this. Swaminomics has another article describing the hypocrisy exhibited by all the actors in the current Iraqi drama.

Needless to say, India isn’t let off the hook.

India says the UN should sanction any war on Iraq. Did India ask the UN permission for its 1971 war with Pakistan? Not at all, it acted unilaterally. Officially, India claims that Pakistan started that war through an air attack on December 3. In fact the Pakistan Air Force was simply responding to the intrusion of Indian troops into East Pakistan on November 21, an invasion reported by the international press but blanked out totally by the tame Indian press.

I was watching “Question Time India” on BBC yesterday where I learnt that India’s motion to liberate East Pakistan was opposed by 114 out of 160 members of the United Nations General Assembly (I am not able to find any reference online)

And guess which permanent member of the security council vetoed the entry of Bangladesh into the UN general assembly in 1972?

Modesty forbids me from mentioning that I have blogged on the same theme a while back

Too much time around computers

You know you’ve spent too much time around computers when:

You are poring over a printout of a project plan, and you point your finger on a task expecting a tooltip to hover telling you the start and end dates of the task.