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Journalism of Courage
THE NEW YORK TIMES wondered about Zahira Sheikh. The main complainant and prime witness in the Best Bakery case, who first turned hostile and then untraceable. The 20-year-old girl ‘‘with pigtails and a primary education’’ who had emerged as the public face of the victims of last year’s rioting in Gujarat. She had described to the media how her family and family-owned business was set on fire. She had vowed not to marry until the guilty were punished. This week, after all 21 accused were acquitted by the court, the NYT roamed the scorched remains of the spacious three-story family bakery near Vadodara — ‘‘it appeared to have been one of the finest homes in a lower middle class neighbourhood’’ — and wondered why Zahira changed her story and where she is now.
The paper cited a report issued this week in New York by Human Rights Watch which pointed out that 16 months after the riots, there have been no convictions. Muslims are being prosecuted under draconian antiterrorism laws but not the Hindus. And the police are downgrading charges against Hindu defendants, deleting names of the accused and failing to pursue rape cases.
Pakistan’s visiting general didn’t exactly blaze a glorious trail in the US media. This week, THE WASHINGTON POST angrily rounded on the Bush administration for ‘‘Betting on the General’’. Its editorial faulted President Bush for continuing to lean ‘‘heavily and exclusively’’ on a handful of heads of state to advance ‘‘crucial US interests’’. Like Hamid Karzai who, it pointed out, rules little more than the palace he lives in. And Pervez Musharraf, in whose watch Pakistan has become the ‘‘world’s single largest haven of Islamic terrorists — including most likely the fugitive bin Laden’’.
In the same paper, columnist Jim Hoagland was more scathing. A ‘‘skilful political alchemist’’ is turning a record of ‘‘failure, extremism and betrayal into gold’’ from the US treasury, he wrote. For Hoagland, Bush’s Pak policy risks confusing the urgent with the important. It forces Washington to look the other way as the general continues to renege on his promises, including that to ‘‘permanently’’ end cross border terrorism in India. It ‘‘…also imperils what promised to be Bush’s most innovative and important foreign policy initiative: the building of a new strategic relationship with democratic India’’.
Meanwhile, the NYT quoted analysts as saying that the Trade and Investment Framework the US has now signed with Pakistan draws attention to a pattern: the Bush administration puts ‘‘political-backscratching’’ ahead of economic considerations in the trade arena.
In for a colonial office?
This was a week when attacks continued on US-led forces in Iraq and the US media reported the fading of popular support for the war. The US president taunted the Iraqi fighters — ‘‘Bring ‘em on’’ — and America contemplated intervention in Liberia. In the WEEKLY STANDARD, military historian Frederick Kagan advised an increase in the size of the US armed forces — ‘‘at least 25 per cent’’. And in the FINANCIAL TIMES, Max Boot recommended that Washington set up a colonial office to better run the world. Like the old British Colonial Office and India Office. It could be called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, he said.
Liberal US weekly THE NATION invited twelve leading thinkers from around the world to debate the doctrine of ‘‘humanitarian intervention’’ after the war in Iraq. From the responses, the notion remains a deeply contested one, at least in the intellectual community, especially post Iraq.
Richard Falk plotted a change in the dynamic after September 11: the American approach to humanitarian intervention has morphed into post hoc rationalisations for uses of force. In Iraq, this has reached its extreme: The US is virtually ignoring the pre-war rationale of an Iraqi threat while playing up the post-war justification of the liberation of the Iraqi people. Mary Kaldor emphasised the need for an agreed set of criteria to determine when a humanitarian intervention is appropriate. She warned against confusing pre-emptive war with humanitarian intervention. Mahmood Mamdani and David Rieff objected to the sanitised term for what must be seen as a political decision to go to war. The virtue of the political, wrote Rieff, is that the case for making the decision becomes a matter for public debate, ‘‘rather than some kind of a categorical moral imperative whose need to be undertaken is self-evident.’’
For Ronald Steel, the problems lay in extending the doctrine beyond the prevention of genocide. And for Stephen Zunes, it triggered the question: Could lifting economic sanctions against the people of Iraq have encouraged a successful, nonviolent pro-democracy movement in the urban middle class and working class?
Vive Laissez Faire
This week, THE ECONOMIST put two very large ideas on the table. In its 160th anniversary issue, editor Bill Emmot wrote about capitalism and democracy. Contrary to the fashionable pessimism, liberalism, he said, has brought sharp reductions in both poverty and international inequality. Alongwith this growth in economic liberty, there has also been an impressive expansion of political and civil freedoms.
But Emmot said that a retreat from liberalism may be sighted, not in the world’s poorer countries, but in the developed world. Here, the 1990s boom, along with its extremes of misbehaviour went the furthest. Here, an over reaction to the excesses may bring on an excessive bout of regulation on business. Emmot suggested measures to ‘‘kick liberal capitalism back into acceptability’’. Such as ‘‘moves to punish corporate wrongdoers… moves to separate business and government to preserve government’s role as an arbitrator and counterweight…’’.
P.S: AT LEAST one US paper wrote about the ‘‘Ten Commandments judge’’. Roy Moore, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, had installed a two-and-a-half ton Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama State Judicial Building. This week, a federal appeals court ordered him to remove the monument. Incidentally, a statue of Manu has withstood similar controversy around its installation in the Rajasthan High Court.
• And NYT revisited Kashmir. And found a sense of calm. From Pahalgam, the paper reported an ‘‘unexpected explosion’’ in tourism in Kashmir: By June 24, 64,000 Indian tourists and 800 foreign tourists had visited the Valley this year, six times the number who arrived in the same period last year.
