Red tide rising in Lalgarh

The All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries, of which the Darjeeling district committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which spearheaded the Naxalite movement, was an important constituent, became the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969. The latter, however, splintered soon thereafter and, at one stage, there were about 40 different groups and parties professing allegiance to the Maoist political stream. Yet, despite this and the harsh repressive measures, the movement spread from the Naxalbari area to Debra and Gopiballavpur in Midnapore district in West Bengal, Mushahari in Bihar, Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh and Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh within a short period.

The movement has continued to grow, and now covers substantial tracts in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, with contiguous areas of these States forming a ‘Red Corridor’ stretching from Andhra Pradesh to Nepal. It has also established a presence in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The insurrectionary violence now being witnessed at Lalgarh and elsewhere in India is led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), formed in September 2004 through the merger of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India.

A significant feature of the Maoist movement is that, stamped out in one place, it has raised its head in another. Thus, suppressed in West Bengal by the end of 1972, it re-emerged as a force in Andhra Pradesh, where it had been crushed earlier, by mid-1970s and in Bihar in the 1980s, and then in the other States.

One reason for the movement’s survival and spread has been the inadequacy of the state’s response. Counter-insurgency is a highly complex and multi-dimensional business spanning territories as far apart as psychological warfare, electronic surveillance to human intelligence-gathering and actual operations on the ground. Each of these areas requires expertise, state-of-the-art equipment and motivation of the highest order, which is lacking in most State police forces steeped in sloth and venality. In fact, it is the predatory nature of the State police forces that makes it difficult for them to enlist popular support against the Maoist, and easy for the latter to whip up popular anger against them and make them targets of attack.

The impact of this basic drawback has been aggravated by the fact that the police are poorly armed compared to the Maoists who often sport AK series rifles against their .303s. They lack adequate communications equipment, an absence which has been acutely felt in Lalgarh, and mobility, there being very few adequately armour-plated vehicles which can withstand landmine blasts. Even the special outfits that several State Governments have cobbled together have not helped because of inadequate weaponry and equipment and the fact that officers and personnel leading them are from the State police establishments and thus tend to be defined by their ethos and conventional mindsets.

Besides, police forces have to be led at the political level by leaders who command respect by virtue of their personal attributes and who either themselves have the vision and intellect to recognise the magnitude of the challenge posed by the Maoists and the nature of the response required, or are wise enough to leave matters to police officers who have it. There are few such leaders at the State level. Rather, the majority of them, including those in ministerial chairs, are known to be corrupt and not terribly bright, which makes it easy for the Maoists to run down not only them but the entire parliamentary system of Government as an instrument of exploitation and class domination.

Political leaders are frequently unable to identify officers who have the integrity, commitment, intellect, sensitivity, political acumen and courage to lead counter-insurgency operations — as opposed to those who have not. The factionalism that prevails in the Indian Police Service — as also that of the Indian Administrative Service — cadre of various States, makes the matter particularly difficult. Poorly-led police forces are at a serious disadvantage when facing most Maoist leaders who are educated, committed and have years of operational experience behind them.

Maoists also have the advantage of a ready reservoir of recruits from tribal and other disprivileged families that find themselves deprived of their traditional means of livelihood and uprooted from their meagre landholdings and homesteads by a ruthless, inhuman process of development that principally benefits the emergent upper and middle classes at the cost of the poor. Matters are compounded by a rapacious, extortionate and arrogant bureaucracy which strips citizens of both money and dignity whenever an opportunity presents itself, and which constitutes something very similar to the New Class which Milovan Djilas defines (The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System) as being “made up of those who have special privileges and economic preference because of the administrative monopoly they hold”.

The state being still the principal instrument of development, with functions extending from running banks, hospitals and insurance companies to providing electricity and water connections to homes and factories, the intense and widespread alienation that follows cannot be overstated. One then hardly needs to be surprised by what one is witnessing in Lalgarh. And there will be many more Lalgarhs without a fundamental change in the way India is governed.

Wrong strategy to fight poverty.

In the 1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi rued the bitter fact that only fifteen rupees out of every hundred, earmarked for any poverty alleviation programme in India, actually got through to the ‘real poor’, the intended recipients. The rest went without a trace, presumably into the pockets of various facilitators.

Even at the time, the more cynical set the effective percentage at nearer 5 than 15, with inflated bills and sub-standard deliveries added in. This is obviously unacceptable in a country where the bulk of the people are poor, earn less than $ 450 a year, even 62 years after independence, with nearly a quarter of our billion plus population Below the Poverty Line; defined by the World Bank at an income of $ 1 or less a day or $ 365 a year.

The Indian Government defines the Poverty Line much lower, at an income of just Rs 10 a day, stating that it is enough to buy food that can deliver 2,000 calories of nutrition. It is difficult to see how this is feasible in 2009 unless the presumption is that multiple family members will beg, borrow or steal at least Rs 10 daily. Over 300 million eligible-for-work Indians are both unemployed and languish below the Poverty Line.

Internationally, also in the 1980s, Irish rock-star-activist Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats organised the Band-Aid (Song: Do they know it’s Christmas), and Live Aid concerts in 1984 and 1985, respectively, watched live on TV by over 400 million people in 60 countries.

Live Aid, in particular, raised nearly $ 300 million, right in the first flush, for the starving in Ethiopia, while advancing the capabilities of global satellite television, the so-called ‘global jukebox’, with simultaneous live concerts on different continents, hooked up and broadcast in real time.

Geldof persisted with the serious work of getting the succour to the needy after the razzle dazzle of the concert was over. And unhappy with the chronic leakages in disbursement, he set up a parallel administration to reduce the waste, profligacy and corruption endemic in a great deal of charity work, as even more money poured in; but with predictably mixed results.

Much of the funding or the relief material was siphoned off by NGOs and Ethiopian Government agencies, even the carefully vetted ones, that were not above profiteering on the misery of the helpless. Black markets prospered on Live Aid largesse. This, even as the entire effort benefited from the sympathy of the world, provoked by the massive publicity generated — not the least of which were from the harrowing, prize-winning images of the starving and dying shot by highly acclaimed photo-journalists.

The subsequently knighted Sir Geldof’s moral successor in the Irish rocker cum economic activism stakes, Sir Bono of U2, is more philosophical about the actual good that concerned people are able to do, choosing to persist regardless.

Initiated into the charity arena by Bob Geldof, Bono helped organise Amnesty International’s Conspiracy Of Hope global tour in 1986 alongside rock star Sting. Bono subsequently organised Live 8 in 2005 and remains committed to his fund and awareness raising efforts for a host of global issues to this day.

Viewed in broader terms, celebrities and charities, ranging from causes such as AIDS to global warming, and the vanilla, if vital, universal needs of education and health, have been enjoying a mutually beneficial relationship for quite some time now. The protagonists feature the stars of Hollywood, the international sporting world, entertainers of various hues, senior Western politicians and ex-Presidents of the US, Nobel laureates and so forth, in its fold.

But here in India, or internationally, in all the global distress spots, the rate of disbursement of relief to the most needy continues to be badly afflicted.

The United Nations and its agencies, less headline-grabbing, perhaps less glamorous, definitely less self-serving, but with demonstratably long-term commitment and steadiness of purpose, also plough on with dogged determination. They are realistically attuned to doing as much as they can. They carry out authentic and formidable research on their subject areas before acting, despite the corruption and the thicket of political pressures applied to them under the guise of nationalism.

Meanwhile, over 20 years after, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi is famously focussed on the trials and tribulations of the poor in rural India, seeing in their betterance the panacea to most of India’s ills.

He is allegedly the prime mover in many of the UPA Government’s recent rural upliftment initiatives, which have been riddled with delays, sluggish implementation, and rampant corruption. Mr Gandhi, on the campaign trail recently, put the figure of actual benefit to the target audience at just one rupee out of ten.

Clearly therefore, something needs to be done to overhaul the popular models of poverty alleviation. The United Nations, no fair-weather friend to the task, privately bemoans the lack of strategic thinking in this regard, the near non-involvement of academics and thinkers who might be able to fashion plugs for the loopholes.

But perhaps the answer lies in buying something to show for your money, creating rural and poverty alleviating infrastructure, instead of targeting the minimum guaranteed employment programmes with their on-paper progress and their dig-a-ditch-and-fill-it-back-up dynamics.

By this reasoning, the rural roads programme, initiated by the previous UPA Government, has/will probably yield better results than yet another ‘rozgar’ programme. Infrastructure development also possesses a bottom, budget overruns notwithstanding, unlike hand-out style poverty alleviation which gives new meaning to the term ‘bottomless abyss’.

The United Nations set itself some millennium goals for ‘all United Nations Member States’. In 2000 it wanted to “eradicate extreme poverty and hunger” by 2015, amongst a host of other objectives such as “universal primary education” and “environmental sustainability”. Peopled by highly skilled professionals, it is nevertheless used to revising its time-lines.

But, perhaps if it developed a consensus with the Indian Government, and those of other countries, that it will only fund poverty alleviation infrastructure, instead of intangibles, more than the disgraceful five to 10 per cent of the funding may yet turn out to the benefit of the poor.

It is not everyone’s case, but those less concerned with the exigencies of creating compliant vote-banks may see merit in encouraging the abject poor to help themselves via decent and plentiful facilities placed within their reach.

Tribute to a great Martyr whose birthday was forgotten by his nation on 11th june in the name of world cup.

सरफरोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है
देखना है जोर कितना बाजू-ऐ-कातिल में है

ऐ वतन करता नहीं क्यूँ दूसरा कुछ बातचीत
देखता हूँ मैं जिसे वो चुप तेरी महफ़िल में है
ऐ शहीद-ऐ-मुल्क-ओ-मिल्लत,मैं तेरे ऊपर निसार
अब तेरी हिम्मत का चर्चा गैर की महफ़िल में है
सरफरोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

वक्त आने पर बता देंगे तुझे ऐ आसमां
हम अभी से क्या बताएं क्या हमारे दिल में है
खेंच कर लायी है सब को कत्ल होने की उम्मीद
आशिकों का आज जमघट कूचा-ऐ-कातिल में है
सरफरोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

है लिए हथियार दुश्मन ताक में बैठा उधर
और हम तैयार हैं सीना लिए अपना इधर
खून से खेलेंगे होली गर वतन मुश्किल में है,
सरफरोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

हाथ जिन में हैं जूनून,कटते नहीं तलवार से
सर जो उठ जाते हैं वो झुकते नहीं ललकार से
और भड़केगा जो शोला सा हमारे दिल में है
सरफरोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

हम तो घर से ही थे निकले बांधकर सर पर कफ़न
जान हथेली पर लिए लो बढ़ चले हैं ये कदम
जिंदगी तो अपनी मेहमाँ मौत की महफ़िल में है,
सरफरोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

यूँ खडा मक्तल में कातिल कह रहा है बार-बार
क्या तमन्ना-ऐ-शहादत भी किसी के दिल में है?
दिल में तूफानों की टोली और नसों में इन्कलाब
होश दुश्मन के उड़ा देंगे हमें रोको न आज
दूर रह पाए जो हमसे दम कहाँ मंजिल में है,
सरफरोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है

जिस्म भी क्या जिस्म है जिसमे न हो खून-ऐ-जूनून
क्या लड़े तूफ़ान से जो कश्ती-ऐ-साहिल में है
सरफरोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है
देखना है जोर कितना बाजू-ऐ-कातिल में है.

अमर शहीद पंडित राम प्रसाद बिस्मिल जी

Politicians face credibility crisis

With the second Manmohan Singh Government looking more like a Congress Government, it is possible that the illusion of single-party dominance is going to become the framework of political discourse for the next few years, or at least until there is a crisis which proves unmanageable. This effortless return to the mental parameters of the Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi era may not be a good reflection of ground realities. But the resounding post-facto endorsement of the chattering classes for the Ruling Party of India has, unfortunately, never been marked by profundity.

The natural corollary of this winner-takes-all mindset is that after being at the receiving end of some initial derision, the vanquished will be left to lick their wounds in private. Both the deflated Ministerial aspirants in the BJP and the frustrated puppeteers in the CPI(M) know that they have a lot of listening and explaining to do. But they also know that some perfunctory show of contrition will suffice to defray the immediate frustrations of the foot soldiers. Apparatchiks, particularly those who exist in a cloistered environment of the party offices, know that they can put off exercising hard options by falling back on the need to take a considered decision.

Time and events being great healers, a rigorous post-mortem can be shelved indefinitely if the immediate pressure to take remedial action can be averted.

It is paradoxical that despite functioning in a democratic environment, the internal regime of India’s political parties is grounded in committee room secrecy. This wasn’t always so. Till the late-1960s, the Congress, for example, had a reasonable degree of inner-party democracy. Elections to the All-India Congress Committee and its State counterparts were held regularly and were often fiercely contested. The annual AICC sessions were marked by speeches that were robustly critical of the Government’s policies and the party leadership.

Open, rumbustious discussion was also a hallmark of the Socialists. Ram Manohar Lohia fought bitter inner-party battles with the likes of Asoka Mehta, Chandra Shekhar, NG Goray and Nath Pai. His flamboyant followers such as George Fernandes, Raj Narain and Madhu Limaye were great votaries of the “change or split” path.

Communism in India was nominally wedded to the Leninist tradition of party organisation that ensured a paramount role of the Central Committee and Politburo-the proverbial vanguard of the vanguard. Yet, and particularly after PC Joshi injected intellectual vibrancy into the party in the mid-1940s, the undivided CPI boasted a culture of political discussion.

The subjects of concern-the class composition of the Indian state and the relevance of “bourgeois democracy” were two all-time favourites-may have been abstruse. There was also an exaggerated reliance on what Lenin “himself” or Mao Zedong may or may not have prescribed, and cravenness before discreet instructions from Moscow. However, despite these constraints, the political “line” was thoroughly dissected. The Communists moved seamlessly from “correctness to correctness”.

The tradition of political openness received a grave setback after the Congress split of 1969 and the Emergency. The emergence of an all-powerful leader and the dynastic principle meant that decision-making was arrogated to the one and only leader. In the 1990s, the Congress suffered three major electoral defeats. Yet, apart from one brain-storming session in Panchmarhi, the party did nothing to address the grave problem of political erosion. The Congress’ recovery in 2004 and the awesome advance in 2009 owed little to any well considered plan of rejuvenation. It was an outcome of happy circumstances.

Rahul Gandhi has proclaimed his intention of democratising the Congress. The intention is noble and suggests that the heir apparent may have cottoned on to the root cause of the decline of political culture-a problem he has tried to circumvent by making politics into a caste. However, the extent to which the Congress reverts to its original moorings will depend on the calibre of its top leadership. It is one thing to promote inner-party democracy in the good times. Bad times often prompt a regression.

Curiously, it is the BJP which faces a problem not dissimilar to that of the Congress. If the Nehru-Gandhi family acts as an adhesive in the Congress, it is the RSS which plays Pope in the BJP. The BJP’s problems have multiplied on two counts. First, the RSS has eroded its moral authority and social influence thanks to its unwillingness to face contemporary realities. Second, success in electoral politics has triggered a breakdown of ideological certitudes and added to the charms of aggregative politics. The RSS has tried to hold things together by command. Diktat has replaced informed choice and this enforced regimentation has in turn stymied the party’s renewal.

After Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani, the party’s presidents have lacked the depth to pursue creative politics. Since the defeat in 2004, the BJP has curtailed inner-party debate, not least because the minders and their nominees have lacked the competence to handle intellectual scrutiny.

Restoring the credibility of politics and the political class is a national challenge. As democracy strikes deep roots, more and more people want a say in how parties behave and who they project. The Primary was once an American quirk but it has now become crucial to the British system as well. In India, people are offered choices on election day but have no say in determining the shortlist. To strengthen the quality of democracy, a system of constant interaction involving the top and the bottom is imperative.

The country pays lip service to the argumentative India; it is time to show similar respect to the arguments.

Pak: A failed State with a crashing future

As is often said, Pakistan is a failed State. This is an understatement if one bothers to check with reality. The powers that be in Pakistan are living under a make-believe utopia. True, they have delivered a shock by attacking Mumbai, killing around 200 people, many of them being very important persons. But there is no doubt that India is a bigger and better military power with credible nuclear and missile armaments. It has been tested on ground on as many as four times, and on all the four occasions the war was initiated by Pakistan. But everytime, Pakistan was defeated by India decisively. In Kargil, though Pakistan was in an advantageous position, the brave jawans of India still defeated Pakistan capturing peak after peak. However, the US managed a honourable retreat for Pakistan.

The military masters of Pakistan still weave the dream of capturing India by 2020. A map has been circulated in Pakistan’s Army to boost the morale of their jawans, which shows areas of UP, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal, and J&K as part of the target area to be annexed by 2012. It also shows Mumbai as Muslimabad and, perhaps, the Capital with half of Karnataka, Andhra and half of coastal Maharashtra to be annexed by 2020. The secret paper demarcates most of south India as disputed territory. This map has somehow reached to one RC Ganju, an expert on Kashmir and Pakistan.

Someone must be dreaming and weaving utopia. After all, the e-mail that was circulated by the terrorists before Delhi blasts were clear in their aims and objectives of disintegration of India and its Islamisation. This is clearly a lunatic thinking.

Let us come to the country where such people can manage to attain high ranks in the army and the Government. In fact, today Pakistan is standing at a more dangerous point of its history than it was in 1971 and it is not because of India. The perception created in Pakistan is that India is its biggest enemy. But, as a matter of fact, India has acted as a biggest unifier of Pakistan. The Pak army is not only Punjabiased, but is also Islamised. Islamisation of the army has created more problems than solving it. It has destroyed the civil society to a great extent, barring two States.

The Baluch are struggling for their basic rights. Whosoever of them happens to meet an Indian, requests him to liberate them from Pakistan. They scream that they do not want to live under the clutches of brute Pakistanis. The FATA area of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), from where Taliban launched several attacks on Soviets in Afghanistan, is practically under Taliban’s control. More and more areas of NWFP has gone under Taliban’s control. U.S. wants Pak army to create a pressure in that area, but Pakistan is moving its army from there under the cover of engaging India on the eastern borders. Pak army today is factionalised and, to some extent, demoralised.

So far as the economy of Pakistan is concerned, all the indices have particularly bottomed out. Foreign currency reserves are hardly sufficient for a few weeks. Industrialisation has a bleak outlook. The military elite have sucked all the vitals of whatever economic wealth it possessed. It is living on artificial respiration from IMF, courtesy the US. It cannot fight India without Arab money and without China’s or US help. All these helps operating together are almost impossible. Terror machines at the hands of private individuals and seminaries are enormous. Moreover, people, especially the younger generation, are angered against US and, therefore, against its own Government. Society and the Government are the victims of their own terror factories. Today, in most areas, these terror factories are not under the control of Pakistan Government.

The attack on Mumbai has isolated Pakistan. Almost all countries, including many Muslim countries, have condemned Pakistan for the Mumbai terrorist attack. Pakistan lost all credibility. All its responses carry no weight in International affairs. In Pakistan today, there are said to be one crore eight lakh unlicensed weapons, that too sophisticated ones. There are over ten lacs young people being trained in extremist universities. What is more dangerous is that more than half of them are unemployed and angry. They can do anything and kill anybody, just for money. Therefore, there is abundance of human supply in the Fidayeen market.

Many scholars of international repute like Stephen P Cohen say that today there is no country other than Pakistan, that is more dangerous. It has everything that Osama-bin-Laden could have asked for: “political instability, crusted radical Islamists, abundance of angry young western recruits, secluded training areas, access to state-of-the-art electronic technology, regular air service to west and security services, which do not always work as they are supposed to (Newsweek January, 2008).”

It needs no expert to conclude that Pakistan has a bloody past and the future of a crashing plane, whenever it happens

Cause for concern

Australia has enjoyed the image of a peaceful, laid-back multicultural democracy, one that has welcomed foreign students to pursue their studies in a developed and congenial academic environment. Sadly, that image has soured somewhat, with the recent attacks on Indian students and others. There have been allegations of racism and accusations that the Australian police were not doing enough to prevent such incidents. The boorish attacks, most of them occurring in the State of Victoria, have caused understandable concern in India. Unfortunately, they have also sparked over-the-top nationalist outrage, with effigies of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd burnt in New Delhi, Bollywood declaring that no films would be shot Down Under, and Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray demanding punitive measures against Australian cricketers participating in the Indian Premier League. What emerges when the facts are analysed dispassionately is that not every assault involving an Indian has been of a racial nature. According to the Victoria police, of the 36,765 victims of robbery and assault in 2007-08, 24,000 were Caucasian. It is also reasonable to assume that Indian students constitute a soft target for assailants; a sizeable number of them work late-night shifts to finance their studies and can afford to live only in less-secure neighbourhoods.

But what is equally clear is that those in Australia who deny the existence of curry-bashing and make out that virtually every attack on Indian students is opportunistic rather than racist are engaging in a cover-up. The Victoria Police Commission has admitted that there were 1,447 cases in which Indians were victims of robbery and assault in 2007-08 (compared with 1,083 instances in 2006-07). Pointing out that its students have also been attacked in recent years, a concerned Chinese government has called for better protection for international students in Australia. Together, the Chinese (130,000) and Indians (97,000) comprise about 40 per cent of the country’s foreign student population. Mr. Rudd’s conversation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his setting up of a task force to deal with the issue of violence against foreign students suggest that Canberra is earnest about containing the malaise. International education is one of Australia’s top foreign exchange earners ($11.4 billion in 2007-08). What the federal and relevant State governments must do to preserve the image of Australia as an attractive value-for-money educational destination and a tolerant and enlightened multicultural society is to get less defensive about the attacks and more effective in providing a secure environment for foreign students.

A bogus war on Taliban

Pakistan’s offensive, involving severe fighting and heavy casualties, which has reportedly cleared the Swat Valley, Buner and Lower Dir and other tribal areas of Taliban fighters, has been regarded as an indication of Islamabad’s determination to wipe out fundamentalist Islamist terrorism from its soil. Is that so? What does it mean for India?

The trouble is that the Pakistani Army’s claims of success lack adequate independent corroboration. A report by Dexter Filkin in the New York Times of May 8, stated that there was no way of verifying the claims by the Pakistani military’s chief spokesman, Maj Gen Athar Abbas, as newspersons and most outsiders had been blocked from the areas. It further quoted a woman in a refugee camp in Mardan as stating, “The Army and the Taliban are not killing each other — they are friends. They are only killing civilians. When civilians are killed, the Government claims they have killed a bunch of terrorists.”

A report by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, published in the New York Times of May 19, about urban guerrilla warfare confronting Pakistani Army as it closed in on Mingora, quotes a statement by the military as claiming that it had started clearing houses in Kanju, a village in the outskirts of Mingora, and residents who had left Kanju described a mounting civilian death toll. It then added, “The Pakistani Army has closed Swat to outsiders and essentially ordered residents to leave. The authorities have also mostly barred journalists from entering the area, making it difficult to verify what is happening.”

Unverified claims by the military are difficult to accept at face value given the latter’s — and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate’s — close ties with the Taliban. As it has been known for a long time, and as Pakistan’s President, Mr Asif Ali Zardari admitted recently, the ISI and the CIA jointly created the Taliban in 1994. According to a report by Elisabeth Bumiller in the New York Times of April 1, Ms Michelle A Flournoy, Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, acknowledged before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, the US Administration’s concern about a wing of the ISI, which American intelligence officers said was providing money and military assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Under sharp questioning by Sen John McCain, she said that she thought the ISI or at least parts of the latter — were “certainly a problem to be dealt with”.

One has doubtless seen television news clips of the Pakistani Army directing artillery fire and rockets. But at whom? A report by Carlotta Gall and Elisabeth Bumiller in the New York Times of April 28, stated, “After strong criticism here and abroad over its inaction, the Pakistani military deployed fighter jets and helicopter gunships to flush out hundreds of Taliban militants who overran the strategic district of Buner last week.” The Taliban, however, had started retreating from Buner on April 24 under orders from its leader in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah.

According to television channels, the order followed a meeting between Taliban leaders Qari Muhammad Khan and Muslim Khan and the Commissioner of the Malakand division, Syed Muhammad Javed, in the presence of Maulvi Sufi Mohammad, the founder of Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Sharia-e Mohammadi (Movement for the Establishment of Islamic Law) who acted as an intermediary. Further, television channels showed dozens of militants, masked and heavily-armed, driving away in pick-up trucks and minibuses. Muslim Khan, the Taliban spokesman, said on April 25 that all militants who had come from Swat had withdrawn and that only local Taliban fighters from Buner remained in the area. He, however, did not mention how many had left and how many remained. Yet heavy fighting was reported from Buner district on May 6. Surely, “local Taliban” alone could not have held out for so long!

Clearly, there is more in the whole thing than meets the eye. Pakistani leaders, of course, have been talking stridently. Asked to clarify Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s statement that the objective of the north-western operations was “to eliminate the militants and terrorists”, Mr Zardari told a television channel during his state visit to the US in early May, “This means clearing out the area of the miscreants and bringing life to normalcy.” Asked if “eliminate” meant “killing them all”, he replied, “That’s what it means.” But then not all of Mr Zardari’s and Mr Gilani’s statements can be taken at face value. Besides, the Army can overrule both. After the terrorist attack on Mumbai on November 26 last year, they promised to send the ISI’s Director-General, Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to Delhi to help in the investigations. Mr Zardari finally admitted in an interview with NBC news on May 10 what had been known from very beginning — that the Army did not let him send Lt Gen Pasha!

Clearly, it is too early to say how successful the Pakistani Army’s offensive has been and how far the Army will go in dealing with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda. It is one thing to clear Swat, Buner, Lower Dir and Shangli districts of militants, and quite another to wipe out the Taliban headed by Mullah Omar and the Al Qaeda headed by Osama bin Laden. With both untouched, Taliban militants retreating in the face of the Pakistani Army’s offensive will be sheltered in their strongholds in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas just as the Taliban and Al Qaeda elements fleeing from Afghanistan in the face of the US and the Northern Alliance’s offensive in November 2001 had been sheltered by organisations like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, courtesy the ISI.

They will return when the going is good again. For it is one thing to drive the Taliban out and another to hold the territory thus cleared. Has Pakistan the political will to do that? Finally, the offensive does not mean that Pakistan would also act against the LeT and the JeM which it has created to stage terrorist strikes against India. Indeed, the release of Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, head of the LeT and mastermind of the attack on Mumbai on the ground of there being “insufficient” evidence against him, clearly indicates that Pakistan’s sptonsorship of cross-border terrorism against this country will continue.