The surveillance society

Printed from The Times of India
TOP ARTICLE
The surveillance society
N D Batra, Dec 13, 2010, 12.00am IST

Air travellers in the US have been protesting about the humiliating choices they have to make: full body electronic strip searches that leave nothing to imagination, or bodily pat-downs by security agents that some feel amount to sexual assaults.
Even people with orthopaedic shoes, appliances or medical devices - insulin pump, feeding tube, ostomy or urine bag, or exterior component of cochlear implant - have not been spared the screening or pat-downs.
Secretary of state Hillary Clinton has said that she would avoid it, if she could. But topmost US public officials are not subject to such enhanced screening procedures. The experience of Indian ambassador to the US Meera Shankar has been different: she faced a pat-down at an airport in Mississippi. Whether you live in New York, Amsterdam or Mumbai, the fear contagion is everywhere. Fear has become a constant travel companion, thanks to newer and more ingenious methods terrorists have been using lately.
Experts say that eventually we will become used to newer physical intrusions into our privacy as it has happened in other aspects of our lives. In fact, we have been slipping into a low-intensity surveillance society since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Our sense of insecurity, both physical and economic, has increased manifold and we have been quietly submitting to whatever brings us a feeling of certainty.
Protests against intrusiveness by employers and businesses into our personal lives have, in fact, become muted. Employers watch us all the time. Since most office workers use the internet and communicate via email, companies watch closely how their employees use office electronic resources, including whatever they save on their laptops, iPads or access through their smart phones. Several court decisions regarding workplace privacy confirm that, in the US, employees have very few privacy rights if information is stored in the company's system.
Employers do have legitimate concerns especially regarding the confidentiality of trade secrets; ongoing contractual negotiations; sexual harassment messages exchanged among employees that might lead to legal liabilities for the company; and whistleblowing activities that may affect the reputation of the company. These concerns are not new but the speed with which transactions are done on the internet has created a state of constant mistrust. There has always been some multitasking in the workplace.
But mobile web has created new avenues for multitasking, which is now becoming a common occurrence. With continuous restructuring and layoffs, many working people keep networking and looking for new opportunities. Companies, especially in the field of information and communications technology, fear brain drain and are watching who is applying for jobs. If anyone is trying to cross over to a competitor, he should not expect the boss to be sympathetic. Some contend that subjecting employees to digital surveillance generates a coercive environment and might eventually affect productivity negatively.
If monitoring is being done for preventing fraud, protecting intellectual property and trade secrets, or maintaining a harmonious workplace environment, the rational must be explained to employees and the policy clearly stated. Web bugs and other online surveillance devices are being increasingly used by businesses to track users when they surf their websites.
Advertisers surreptitiously place small software programmes called cookies on our hard drives to track where we surf so that they can customise the most appropriate advertising message for us. It's called target marketing, reaching the right person with the right message.
But web bugs are different. They can be programmed to collect data without the knowledge of the user. For example, a web bug can be programmed to look at a data file on a networked desktop without leaving a trace that the data has been touched at all. When you look at your bank balance online, the web bug too could be monitoring it. Some companies use web beacon, a single-pixel picture, to identify users.
A beacon can track whether a particular message, including junk mail, has been opened, acted upon or not. Any electronic image that is part of a webpage, including an ad, can be programmed to act as a beacon and spy on the user. Companies claim that the information enables them to personalise the surfing experience when a frequent user visits their portal, but they assure us that no personally identifiable information gathered from the beacon research is shared with the clients. Unfortunately, that is not always true.
Some companies use biometrics, face recognition, radio frequency identification (RFID) and global positioning system (GPS) technologies to keep a watch on their properties and track clients. Car rental companies in the US use GPS to keep track of their rental cars. If a car is stolen or is involved in an accident, the company would know the exact location of the car.
Do you see the future? Along with our luggage, we too might have to wear RFID tags so that we can be monitored via GPS as we move from one airport to another, from country to country. Perhaps it would enhance security but surely it is going to be a multibillion-dollar business. Homeland security and corporate global will determine how much privacy we will have whether at the airport or office, in mobile devices or our homes.

The writer teaches communication and diplomacy at Norwich University.

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Ode to Singapore

Printed from
The Times of India
Some Creative Messiness, Please
N D Batra, Mar 19, 2010, 12.00am IST

Singapore is an obsessively orderly and tidy society. You begin to feel the difference as soon as you disembark at the Changi airport and smoothly glide through Immigration for a taxi that zips through the city under unobtrusive and ubiquitous security cams. If there is an accident five miles ahead of you, i have been told, you would be alerted. The city knows who is doing what; nonetheless, it gives you a genuine feeling of openness, safety and comfort, if you follow the rules. Law enforcement is another obsession here.
A Malaysian-Indian family who recently moved to Singapore told me that this is the safest place for women. In many ways, the measure of a civilised society is how safe its women, whether in hijab, sari or miniskirt, feel when they use public transportation, taxis or walk its city streets at night.

Singapore is perhaps the only country in the world that has banned chewing gums, whose discarded messy blobs are a disgusting public nuisance. Since the unintended and terrible consequences of the 1920-33 prohibition experiment, it is unthinkable that Americans would ever accept this kind of draconian law. But Singapore is different. Unsocial behaviour (chewing gums, spiting paan, etc) and unruly people that disturb social harmony and tarnish the Singapore brand are unacceptable. If it could, the city-state would like to get rid of foreign workers from South and South East Asia, whose nasty social habits, drunkenness, littering, spitting, loud music and public urination are intolerable to Singaporeans.
Many Singaporeans shun the lowly work that foreign workers do and look down upon them from their highrise air-conditioned homes. So auxiliary police officers (APO) patrol areas where foreign workers live and congregate - areas such as Little India, the Golden Mile Complex and other places - in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that foreign workers commit more crimes than local Singaporeans. The arrest rate, according to police figures for 2007, for foreign work-permit holders, was 227 per 100,000 as against 435 for Singaporeans; nonetheless, the country's largest newspaper recommended that "labour contractors and employers make it a contractual duty to brief guest workers thoroughly on the dos and don'ts of life in a tidy society".
Foreign workers in construction, manufacturing and service industries are vital to the Singapore economy, and there are 856,000 of them out of a total foreign population of 1.25 million. But the new budget being discussed now in parliament would impose a progressive levy on companies hiring foreign workers, hoping that hiring restrictions would motivate companies to automate and innovate, thus, increasing productivity.
Higher productivity would require fewer unskilled foreign workers and more highly skilled Singaporean workers. It is doubtful Singapore will ever be able to do without foreign workers, whether high-skilled professionals or low-level construction and domestic workers.
For many Singaporeans, 1.25 million foreigners are too many but the trouble is that Singaporeans are not making enough babies. The fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world. Educated Singaporean women are career-oriented; and, besides, they are professionally extremely competitive with male workers. What makes child-rearing so difficult in Singapore is the paucity of infant care for which the going rate is, in Singapore dollars, $1,000 to $1,500 per month for two to 18 months toddlers. The government gives $600 to full-time working mothers. Some expectant mothers reserve a seat in an infant care facility as early as two months into the pregnancy. The most impressive achievement of Singapore is the mutual acceptance - not merely tolerance - of each other among its various ethnic and religious groups.
Commenting on inter-religious harmony, senior minister Goh Chok said, "Singaporeans are also blessed because many religious organisations reach out to (the) larger community, not just cater to their own flock." The self-congratulation was prompted by the decision of the Ramakrishna Mission to offer 60 parking spaces to Bartley Christian Church worshipper next door for their Sunday services for which the mission built a special gate on its compound. Inter-religious and inter-ethnic recriminations are almost absent.
Recently when a pastor criticised Buddhism and Taoism, whose practices are followed by most ethnic Chinese constituting Singapore's overwhelming majority, his remarks were regarded as socially unacceptable. Singapore politicians, city planners, architects, educators and think-tankers aspire to make the city a hi-tech global hub of trade and commerce that competes with Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai, a goal that is not difficult to achieve.
But to become a great centre for the arts and culture, like New York or London, Singapore needs unbridled freedom of speech and expression, and some tolerance for the creative messiness that accompanies it. It is freedom of speech in all its manifestations that enables a nation to generate an abiding grand narrative or a myth that binds its people. Today Singapore is a very neat, prosperous and liveable city. It is free from civic violence but its civic life is dull. The city-state has no great heroes. It has no grand story to tell the world.
(The writer is professor, communication and diplomacy, Norwich University, US.)

Unbowed and unafraid

Unbowed and unafraid
ND Batra
18 January 2010
From The Statesman

The biggest challenge to China’s one-party authoritarian rule comes not from its peripheral regions, Tibet or Xingjian-Uygur, but from its heartland, writes ND BATRALIKE Chinese dissident and democracy advocate Liu Xiabao who, on Christmas Day, was jailed for 11 years for “incitement to subvert state power”, many Chinese intellectuals must wonder, perhaps like TS Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock, “Do I dare… Do I dare disturb the universe?” Most would rather make money than risk their lives for political freedom.

But those who dare must keep in mind that whoever disturbs social harmony and the peaceful rise of China’s becoming a dominant global super power with his seditious and insidious ideas must be silenced. China has little tolerance for the noise and chaos of democracy. Last year, human rights activist and environmentalist Hu Jia was sent to prison for three-and-a-half years for his subversive writing. In 2005, another writer, Shi Tao, was convicted and sentenced to a 10-year jail term for leaking a Communist Party internal memo to an outside non-Chinese website. And foreigners must behave if they want to do business with China, or borrow from its trillion-dollar kitty, or want to use its diplomatic leverage with North Korea and Iran, or plan to do something about global climate. China can do all this and much more.

In fact, whatever China does or does not do at home or abroad impacts the rest of the world. Many countries in Asia and Africa envy China and would like to emulate its freedom-neutral, export-based model of rapid economic growth.But in spite of this, China is terribly afraid of upsetting its delicate applecart, afraid of the power of ideas of men like Liu, who refuse to bend and bow before the might of the one-party authoritarian rule. It has been much easier for China to condemn the Dalai Lama, a “splitter” of the motherland and a “devil in a monk’s robe”; but is undecided on what to do with Liu who, at the time of 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, was a visiting scholar at Columbia University but returned post-haste to China to participate in the protest, for which he had to spend 20 months in prison.

While the rest of China has been going from economic peak to economic peak to dazzling Olympian heights, it must be puzzling for Beijing to understand why the 54-year-old Liu still talks of human rights and democracy. For his persistent writing about socio-political conditions in China and his contribution to Charter 08, Liu was held in custody for more than a year before a formal indictment.

Charter 08 asks for fundamental rights, the rights to which people in Europe, the USA, India and other liberal democracies have become so accustomed to that they seem so natural, including, for example, separation of legislative, judicial and executive power, legislative democracy, an independent judiciary, freedom to assemble and form groups, freedom of expression and religion, civic education, protection of private property and, most of all, a federated republic. Ten thousand Chinese who are reported to have signed the document since its inception on 18 December 2008 form only the tip of the iceberg.

In December 2009, Liu was subjected to a hasty trial from which not only his wife was excluded but also the news media. Liu, who has received international accolades for his fearless human rights advocacy, will not be allowed to write anything during his prison term because under current Chinese law he will lose all his political rights.International protests do not matter to Chinese authorities, who are determined to maintain their hold on power in the name of social harmony and economic growth. Since Liu’s arrest in early January last year, several organisations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Poets, Essayists and Novelists as well as many prominent writers (Salman Rushdie among them) and Nobel laureates have appealed to Chinese President Hu Jintao, but to no avail.

Even President Barak Obama raised the issue during his meeting with President Hu Jintao in Beijing last year. But having declined to meet with the Dalai Lama, Obama’s commitment to human rights in China seems rather dubious in comparison with his predecessor, George W Bush’s call for democracy and human rights.Secretary of state Hillary Clinton, thanks to her new found political pragmatism, seldom talks about Chinese human rights, though as First Lady, when she visited Beijing in 1995 to attend the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, she forthrightly told her Chinese audience, “Freedom means the right of people to assemble, organise and debate openly. It means respecting the views of those who may disagree with the views of their governments.” Liu Xiabao and the Charter 08 signatories are asking for the same thing; and they won’t go away.

The biggest challenge to China’s one-party authoritarian rule comes not from its peripheral regions, Tibet or Xingjian-Uygur, but from its heartland, from people like Liu Xiabao.

(The writer teaches communication, media law and diplomacy at Norwich University. He is also author of Digital Freedom and is working on a new book, This is the American Way)

US New Diplomacy

Times of India
Top Article:
Exercise Of Smart Power
N D Batra
27 July 2009, 12:00am IST

Recently, US defence secretary Robert Gates, a no-nonsense seasoned hand from the Bush administration, stated explicitly in Foreign Affairs that "to fail - or to be seen to fail - in either Iraq or Afghanistan would be a disastrous blow to US credibility, both among friends and allies and among potential adversaries".
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton - who recently visited India to reaffirm the strategic and economic bonds built by the previous administration - wholeheartedly endorses Gates's views when he said that because of its grinding poverty and unfriendly neighbourhood, "Afghanistan in many ways poses an even more complex and difficult long-term challenge than Iraq - one that, despite a large international effort, will require a significant US military and economic commitment for some time". Read "some time" as a long, long time, even though it has been often said that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Gates has asked for an additional 22,000 troops for the army, for the next three years. An extra 17,000 troops and 4,000 military trainers are being sent to Afghanistan. Do not expect the US to leave the Af-Pak region to its own devices; nor will US presence be against India's national interest.
Gates's national defence strategic vision goes far beyond what has ever been attempted anywhere. A most serious problem that the US military confronts is how speedily it can move forces from one danger zone to another. Gates's solution: build a swift and lethal force fitted with precision-guided weapons, on-the-spot intelligence-gathering by a network of satellites; troops that can be airdropped to a battle zone bypassing existing bases or beachheads. Networked with GPS, unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles and remotely controlled drones that can provide real-time battlefield view, a lighter and speedier force can end the war quickly with fewer civilian casualties.
In the early days of Iraqi operations, swiftness was achieved through maximum cooperation among Special Forces, army, navy, marines and air force, enabling them to act as one cohesive yet flexible force. This strategy that the Pentagon should incorporate into its war manual, according to Gates, will nevertheless not be enough. The army must be trained for the unconventional war carried out by a dispersed and networked enemy that draws its sustenance from many non-state actors sheltering in failing or unfriendly states. Besides, 'GI Joe' should be ready for doing social reconstruction and building civil society for which much more than a smart military doctrine is needed. Neither the Rumsfeld doctrine of 'shock and awe' nor the Powell doctrine of massive force application to serve a well-defined public-supported national interest is enough for the Af-Pak situation.
The al-Qaeda-Taliban asynchronous warfare strategy has made nonsense of every military doctrine. The US needs a new model for dealing with the enemy. "Terrorist networks", Gates has said, "can find sanctuary within the borders of a weak nation and strength within the chaos of social breakdown. A nuclear-armed state could collapse into chaos and criminality. The most likely catastrophic threats to the US homeland ^ for example, that of a US city being poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack ^ are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states." The new defence strategy must take into account "the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervour of irregular warfare" and "wars...in which Microsoft coexists with machetes and stealth technology is met by suicide bombers," added Gates quoting defence scholars. That has been India's dilemma.
While Pakistan's nuclear threat has held India back from taking defensive-offensive measures, ISI-backed and professionally-trained terrorist groups under the disguise of charities and civic societies have been causing mayhem from India's heart of democracy, the majestic Parliament, to its city of palaces Jaipur to its most cosmopolitan corporate and cultural nexus and plexus, Mumbai. The Taliban-al-Qaeda in Afghanistan-Pakistan cannot be eliminated by traditional military strategies. The enemy has to be tracked down "hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block", argues Gates, for which "the United States needs a military whose ability to kick down the door is matched by its ability to clean up the mess and even rebuild the house afterward".
Addressing the Council on Foreign Relations before her India trip, Clinton called it the exercise of "smart power...the use of all means at our disposal, including our ability to convene and connect. It means our economic and military strength, our capacity for entrepreneurship and innovation...The question is not whether our nation can or should lead, but how it will lead in the 21st century...America will always be a world leader..." As the Pentagon is "re-programmed" and recalibrated to become a new effective global force, the US cannot forget the much larger potential threat emerging: China's growing mastery of outer space and cyberspace, satellite warfare and cyber warfare. That is where the future US-India strategic dialogue should begin.
(The writer is professor, communications and diplomacy, at Norwich University, US.)

India goes to election

Reflections on India at election time
ND Batra
Fromg The Statesman

The public trust in leaders in India is limited by their parties’ narrow-minded regional-and-caste based ideologies, rampant corruption and unscrupulous opportunism despite their occasional Madison Avenue style public relations image-building. According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, of the 1,425 candidates 222 have criminal records, including “charges of murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping, extortion,” and other heinous crimes. The scars and burns of the Gujarat communal massacre in 2002 and the mass killings of poor helpless Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 are still seared into people’s visual memories.

Thanks to television and global media, we saw how ugly and inhuman people can become at times and felt ashamed of ourselves. This is what the media revolution does to a democratic society like India. It never lets you forget the past and it also fuels the desire for change at a rapid pace.

Dr N Bhaskara Rao, writing for the Center for Media Studies, observed that “in the last fortnight of March 2009 there were more than a dozen instances from around the country that we saw news channels showing cash in large volumes being transported or distributed by political leaders in the context of the Lok Sabha poll.” Although this kind of anecdotal observation needs to be vetted by empirically verifiable evidence, perception is reality in the public mind.

While the Internet makes India global, it is television that mirrors the actual realities and can uncover hidden problems including corruption and criminality. Television gives everyone easy access to information and even the most complex topic has to be simplified into terse statements, sound bites and visual moments. Television turns the abstract into the concrete and the visual. It can make corruption and injustice visible.

An uneducated worker or a farmer can easily understand what is happening; and given the Indian habit of building quick grapevine communication, eventually every topic ends up in political discussion, and into the voting booth. So when television shows some parts of India clean and bright, naturally the voters, the urban and rural poor, may ask, what about us, the slumdogs?

With cell-phone cameras everywhere, every “note for vote,” to borrow Dr Rao’s phrase, can be captured for the 24/7 television.

It is legitimate for a farmer on the verge of suicide to ask the question: How can you leave us behind? Trickle down economy has not been good enough even for the United States; but for India the economic growth must reach every nook and cranny, the lowly and the humble, the rag pickers of Dharavi-Mumbai and the rat eaters, Musahars, of Bihar.

I regard it as an assertion of the people’s right for equal access and equal opportunity to share the good life that one sees on television, soap operas and commercials. In other words, the pace of economy cannot be slowed down; rather it has to quicken to meet the rising aspirations created by television news media in India.

Since globalisation, privatisation and free market have begun to create more jobs, there’s no reason why any government, communist or otherwise, could afford to oppose the trend and still stay in power. On the contrary, one sees a growing trend in various states in India for generating competitive advantages to attract direct foreign investments and collaboration.

I have always wondered why Bengal lost Tata’s Nano, the little beautiful car which has become part of the global chatter. Competition: This is the global paradigm shift that Indians must understand. So if Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai rise, can Ahmedabad with Nano in its workshop remain far behind?

In a competitive environment of the free marketplace, the states, communists or communalists, have to position themselves to attract private investments and encourage entrepreneurship. Information technology industry in India has reached a critical mass and in spite of the Satyam scandal it will continue growing.

But India needs balanced development, including massive emphasis on agriculture and rural development to spread wealth and reduce disparities.

This is not to minimise the importance of information technology as an engine of economic growth. The change of government will not adversely affect the information technology base and the trust that Indian knowledge workers have been building for more than a decade. The Satyam hiccup would not change the fundamentals that India is a reliable source of off-shoring for major companies like General Electric, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and others, who value India’s knowledge workforce.

One can say with confidence that the technology sector will continue to receive the excellent support that it has been receiving regarding infrastructure and developmental policies. ITs foreign collaborators and partners need not have any concern. In fact, whatever party or coalition comes to power in New Delhi, it will certainly make all-out efforts to ensure a growth-friendly environment to attract foreign investment. But at the same time we should keep in mind that since not everyone can go to IIT or IIM, jobs off-shored to India from the United States and Europe would play a marginal role in lifting people out of poverty and raising them into the growing middle-class. There has to be something else, something much more dynamic like the rise of millions of cell-technology mobile small entrepreneurs who can grow like giants.
The next leadership must forge millions of levers to lift India out of poverty.
This much I know that once again India’s millions of electorate will regretfully affirm that the age of giants, those larger-than-life men and women ~ Jawaharlal Nehru (Tryst with destiny), Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (Integration of states) and Indira Gandhi (Liberation of Bangladesh, accession of Sikkim, bank nationalisation that has protected India from the global financial crisis today) ~ is over forever.

Nonetheless, Dr Manmohan Singh has been good enough for the country. He has kept the hurly-burly political alliance together for five years, persuaded the country to accept the path-breaking nuclear deal with the United States, braved the Mumbai terrorist attack, and on the top of it, he has managed to keep up the average economic growth around 8 percent. Now it is the age of exploration of space, outer space, rural space and cyberspace, for which India needs bravehearts, men and women with courage, integrity and imagination.

China, US, India

Battle of ideas shall continue

CYBER AGE - ND BATRA
From The Statesman

Before the global financial meltdown began last September, the whole world watched with fascination the unstoppable rise of China as a model of economic progress. China as a global workshop ~ that exports, exports, and exports ~ became an exemplar of the energy born of nationalistic commercialism.

Except for those pesky Tibetans and their conniving agents abroad, it looked China had become a global brand with a single dominant story of harmony and peaceful rise. But now because these bankrupt Americans and Europeans are not buying much, many factory sites in China look like a vast wasteland. The euphoria of Asian values and uniqueness is no longer visible. China of course is not crumbling like a cookie but it is also not speeding like a shining silver bullet train.
China as an idea has to compete with others in the international marketplace of ideas. So you can never say that the battle of ideas has been finally won. For example, we did not realise that the end the Soviet Union was not the end of the battle of ideas but rather the beginning of new ones. Think of history as a dynamic landscape where the battle of ideas continues.

Some people, especially those trained in propaganda believe that all that a country needs is a new image and therefore it must re-brand itself. It is not that easy. Even a most authoritarian nation cannot control the message and its image even though it may be the sole source of information about itself. Of course you can never control the image of an open society because there are so many independent actors, institutions and corporations competing for attention.

For example, the Slumdog Millionaire image of India can never be done away. When some of my colleagues ask me as to how accurate is the portrayal of India in the movie, I say it’s a beautiful and accurate “misrepresentation” of India. But Mumbai slumgdogs are better than Mother Teresa’s hopeless downtrodden. Add to this tapestry, the millions of Indians who are using their mobile phones to become entrepreneurs; and the Tata Nano; and the rise of silicon whiz kids in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, Kolkata, et al, and you have a throbbing compelling image of India.

Similarly, Hollywood, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Wal-Mart and all others contribute to the US image abroad. But now you add to this mélange the financial meltdown, increasing joblessness, and the bloody news from Afghanistan! The US image abroad is the materialisation of what the USA is doing at home and abroad.

Foreigners who see only Hollywood violent movies and video games are likely to have a distorted image of the USA. But if you bring them to university campuses, cultural centres, and workplaces, you would see the image of the USA in their minds change radically. Keeping the dynamic nature of the emergent image, it should not be difficult to understand why the public perception of the USA differs from one country to another. The image depends upon the quality and the extent of its presence and its usefulness to the host country.

Even the smartest public diplomacy campaign won’t change perceptions overnight especially when America is deeply engaged in multiple missions abroad. Events might occur beyond its control, which could further blur the image in some countries. China’s presence in the USA is huge but poor quality China-made toys, tainted pet foods and defective tyres have shattered its image of a reliable manufacturer. No amount of public relations or threat of going to WTO as it recently tried to do with India over toys would help China unless it realises that good products are manufactured by countries where the Press is free, where there is political and corporate transparency.

The always-on 24-hour global communication, blogs, instant messaging, and news cycles, make it impossible for practitioners of public relations to devise a central strategy to impose a message control, as it can be done in advertising campaigns for a product or a political candidate. In an environment of unbridled communication, you might still control the message, but you cannot control the meaning when instant alternative interpretations are available.

Each nation is different, so what works in Indonesia may not work in Pakistan. The challenge is to find the right vehicle to carry the message for a specific local audience. Public diplomats must use local leaders to champion and advance their cause and they should do so in such a manner that it makes the local people feel good while at the same time generating goodwill towards the country that is using information culture to foster goodwill. Hollywood is still the best cultural export, but US popular culture, due to proliferation of senseless violence and explicit sex, creates negative impressions in foreign audiences, in spite of the fact the world has been spending billions of dollars importing American entertainment.

The paradox is that in spite of negative feelings about American popular culture that it depicts profanity, nudity, mayhem and crime, the popularity of mass culture, even in the Islamic world, remains strong. In countries like India and the USA, corporations, educational institutions, and non-profits organisations represent most precious values such as individual initiative, innovativeness, entrepreneurship, freedom of speech, and competition. Google and Apple, for example, embody as much of what America stands for as does Hollywood.

India’s massive general election starting 16 April in which an electorate of 714 million would participate makes the idea of India very persuasive and appealing. I would rather have free and fair elections in India than a glamorous summer Olympics.

(ND Batra blogs at http://globaldiplomat.blogspot.com and teaches communications at Norwich University.)

Internet Rumors

Working in a world of Internet rumours

From The Statesman
ND Batra
The Internet has enhanced the global supply chain of knowledge, research and education, fuelled global business, and speeded up the flow of capital to places where it is needed. It has also given us alternative sources of news, along with gossips and rumours.

Sometime information, genuine and fake, gets mixed up and creates tremendous problems, especially when it is focused on a specific target, whether it is a politician, educational institution or business. Fighting rumours on the Internet is absolutely necessary because if they get out of control they can damage an individual or corporation’s reputation. Regardless of all the fact checking and corrigendum provided, what matters the most in people’s minds is perception.

Perception is reality. Reputation is based on perception. During the presidential election, for example, according to a nationwide survey, 90 percent Americans heard the rumour that Barack Obama was a Muslim and in spite of repeated denials, 22 percent people persisted in believing that he was a Muslim. But the Obama Internet-savvy gargantuan election machine squelched every rumour about him being a Muslim and his wife Michelle having uttered racial epithets like “whiteys” in a church. Mr Obama emerged as a great communicator, which contributed to his winning the White House.

Mr Obama’s presidential opponent Senator John McCain and his running mate Alaska Governor Sara Palins too were victims of malicious Internet rumors, which did not hurt them; they were able to manage them successfully. Because of their ability to reach people directly through television commercials and access to the news media, most politicians can set their records straight and silence or even kill rumors. Some of them learn to live with low-level rumors and continue working.

But corporations, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion all the time. Today the corporate global works in a 24-hour media environment that includes, apart from the traditional news media, citizen journalists who twitter and blog ceaselessly without any fact-checking and editorial gatekeeping. In fact professional journalists whose reputation depends upon accuracy listen to the daily buzz of citizen journalists. The situation is very complicated for businesses because they don’t know how to respond to millions of voices of the ever proliferating new media formats.

Instead of submitting to the headless monster, the challenge is how a corporation can turn new media into its advantage. What should be a corporation’s strategy in dealing with the rise of new decentralized unfiltered media protected by freedom of the press? Last month McDonald’s issued an unusual statement to nip a rumor floating on the Internet that the company was linked with the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza. It was meant to hurt the company in Arab and Muslim countries and therefore it became a matter of urgency to issue a firm denial: “McDonald’s donating profits to the war in Israel… These rumours are absolutely false. McDonald’s never has and never will support war efforts in any area of the world through sales and profits in our restaurants.” Ignoring the threat of this rumour would have been disastrous for the company.

About the same time last month there was an anti-Israel demonstration in London that attacked a Starbucks store simply because its CEO Howard Schultz is Jewish and has been an Israel supporter, for which of course he had received an award sometime ago. The demonstration was triggered by wild rumours on the Intent, including mass e-mails and texting that both Starbucks and McDonalds “are donating their next 2 weeks of earned revenue to Israel.” It urged people to “boycott them and forward this message immediately.” Because the company took prompt steps, the rumor did not harm the company at least in terms of marketing. In 2003 the Starbucks rumor was the other way around. An e-mail originated rumor said that Sawbucks Corporation was closing its operation in Israel. The e-mail gave no explanation though the message created the impression that the company was joining Arab countries’ sponsored boycott of American businesses in Israel. Starbucks did not ignore the rumor; it started its own tactful campaign to squelch the rumor and explained that closing its business outlets in Israel was purely a business decision, and that the company would return for business when conditions changed.

Like businesses, universities also live on their reparation. Last year Samuel G Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University, recounted in The New York Times how the University of Kentucky tried hard to kill a vicious e-mail rumour that the university had dropped a popular course on the Holocaust in order to avoid hurting Muslim sensibilities, which was a blatant lie. But in spite of official denials, press releases and corrective media reports to the contrary, the e-mail rumour kept spreading from individual to individual, Listserv to Listserv, wrote Prof. Freedman.

This was the time when Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad had called an international conference denouncing the Holocaust, the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis, as a figment of imagination, a myth. But of course when University of Kentucky continued teaching the Holocaust course, the rumour died.

Although we love our blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other interactive social networking sites, the grey side of new media is the quickened pace of myriad Internet rumours, whistle-blowing, and other negative publicity about local and transnational companies.

Rumours appeal to our worst collective fears about powerful people, institutions or corporations, especially those who wield tremendous influence on our daily lives. As rumours spread, they not only tend to hurt their targets or victims; they as well reveal our mental state as to who we are.

PS: Imagine if someone had started rumours about Satyam before its founder Ramalinga Raju had outed himself as a swindler.

(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University)

Kashmir and Arundhati Roy

Deconstructing Arundhati Roy and her tribe

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Ms Arundhati Roy, writing in The Guardian (UK) about the trouble in Kashmir, makes an interesting self-observation, with an aura of exceptionalism, saying, “For someone like me, who is not a Muslim”, the Islamic idea of freedom is hard to accept. Ah! But what if she were Muslim?

Islam would have been an unbearable burden upon someone born with a free spirit, 451-degree Fahrenheit imagination and a big incendiary mouth (“India’s many torture centres and Abu Ghraibs in Kashmir… The Indian military occupation of Kashmir makes monsters of us all”) for the simple reason that Islam (a non-pluralistic religion with an uncompromising claim for truth about one God the Greatest, the Prophet and the Holy Book), and secular freedom, as she has understood it, do not chime together. It is the same reason why Ms Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi writer, does not find any Muslim country comfortable and has returned to India claiming, “India is my home though Kolkata is where my heart is.” If you open the door, all Bangladeshis will come to India because India has much greater freedom than any Muslin country. India has a future. Only the blind don’t see it.But what is wrong with Kashmiri Muslim separatists who do not find India comfortable as the rest of 150 million Muslims do? Ms Roy is puzzled and wonders, “Those who wish to turn to the Qura’n for guidance will no doubt find guidance there.

But what of those who do not wish to do that, or for whom the Qur’an does not make place?” Uttering such words about the Holy Book (no place in Qur’an?) would have been blasphemous if she were in Saudi Arabia, where as a Muslim apostate she would have been stoned to death or would have been running from one hiding place to another as Mr Salman Rushdie did for years after he had supped with Satan. Unquestioned obedience (to the religious doctrine) is freedom in Islam as it is in the traditional Christianity of which the historical consequences have been authoritarianism, intolerance and the Inquisition; not freedom and democracy which developed only after the Western mind began to unshackle itself from medieval religious orthodoxy.

Visiting the Kashmir Valley on the wings of poetic eloquence and with fire in her belly during the recent protests, Ms Roy hyperventilated about Srinagar, “The city floated on a sea of smiles. There was ecstasy in the air.” Kashmiris were free from fear. All they wanted was freedom from democracy by exercising their right for self-determination so that they could live according to the Shariat as the Taliban are trying to do in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Ms Roy’s free spirit turned fearful and she began to wonder what would happen to the Hindus of Jammu, when Kashmiris are finally allowed to quit “nanga bhhookha Hindustan” and bravely march to “jan se pyara Pakistan” led by the self-proclaimed supreme leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Would they too have the right to self-determination? “Will the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits living in exile, many of them in terrible poverty, have the right to return?” she asks. And she knows the answer.

Kashmir has seen one of the worst ethnic cleansing in recent history but Ms Roy, like other Indian intellectuals, opinion-makers and politicos, is afraid to call a spade a spade. Amazingly she brackets the fringe people with great writers like herself. Listen to her falsetto agony and self-pity: “What will happen to homosexuals and adulterers and blasphemers? What of thieves and lafangas and writers who do not agree with the ‘complete social and moral code’? Will we be put to death as we are in Saudi Arabia?” (Italics added). That Kashmiri scenario of freedom will be an intolerable nightmare and Ms Roy wants India to wake up and get out of a hellhole: “India needs aazadi from Kashmir...” Half a million Hindus who visit Amarnath every year too will be free from the burden of treading the inhospitable mountains. And the poor Muslims of Jammu, who will be deprived of the blessings of Kashmiri azaadi, too will find their own freedom as rest of the millions of Indian Muslims have found.

Echoing Ms Roy’s revelation of how the militancy is miraculously changing to non-violence in Kashmir, Jug Suraiya of the Times of India wondered what India would do if Mr Geelani, and “his followers were to adopt the strategies of non-cooperation and satyagraha…” If Mr Geelani were to develop the true spirit of Gandhian sataygraah and non-violence, he would cease to be the Geelani we know, the man who has never stopped believing that Kashmir being a Muslim majority region belongs to Pakistan and there is no other way except the Islamic way, the doctrine Al Qaida and the Taliban want to impose on all Muslims. The only man who ever succeeded in following Mahatma Gandhi was Martin Luther King Jr, who said 45 years ago, “I have a dream...” And that dream has come true in the rise of Senator Barack Obama, the first Black to be nominated the presidential candidate of a major political party in the US. That is an example of a non-violent revolution.

Mr Suraiya asks rhetorically, “By letting Kashmir go peacefully would the idea of India be subverted? Or would it be enlarged and further endorsed? That is the real import of the so-called Kashmir question: it has become the question of the idea of India, and what that idea means to us.”

Letting Kashmir go peacefully into the belly of the beast, the Taliban, is not my idea of India.

Will “India minus the K-word” (Kashmir) or A-word (Arunachal Pradesh) or N-word (Nagaland) still be India? No. India will not be India. India is much more than a mere geographical, sociological or philosophical idea in the minds of the English-speaking intelligentsia living in their gated communities. India is unlike any other nation, a nation so sharply divided and so diverse, culturally, racially and linguistically, that the only way the sufferings of millions of people can be mitigated, the only way natural and manmade disasters can be confronted and overcome is to keep India together ~ whatever it takes. No nation can survive without statesmanship; or without force.

(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)

Homophobia is global

Gay unions: Time to take a stand

From The Statesman
ND Batra

This is an election year and no politician who seeks public office can escape the question of gay marriage. President George W Bush has said unequivocally that marriage is between a man and a woman, but he is not running for office.

The Democrat presidential candidates, Ms Hillary Clinton and Mr Barack Obama, as well as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mr John McCain, are opposed to recognising gay marriage, though they favour civil unions. Nonetheless, they cannot ignore what the California Supreme Court ruled on 15 May.

Writing for a 4-3 majority, Chief Justice Ronald M George said: “In view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.”

The decision overturned California’s 1997 law (which was reaffirmed by the Californians’ 2000 statewide ballot initiative) banning same-sex marriage.California, of course, has bestowed the same rights and obligation on civil unions of same-sex couples as on traditional heterosexual married couples. The court majority, nonetheless, said that although couples bonded in a civil union or a traditional marriage have the same legal rights and obligations, the use of separate terminology for gay people and heterosexuals to establish a family was discriminatory and violated the constitutional right of equal protection.

Semantics can create psychological segregation.

The California Supreme Court drew inspiration from a 1948 inter-racial marriage case in which the court had ruled that the law banning inter-racial marriage was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “The right to marry represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one’s choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual,” Mr George wrote for the majority.

If the will of the people overwhelmingly expressed in popular ballot initiatives or legislative actions imposed a ban on same-sex marriage as it did on inter-racial marriages, it violated people’s fundamental right to form a family of choice.

Neither the will of the people nor tradition could supersede the Constitution. Democracy was much more than a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The will of the people can be become tyranny.

Homophobia is a global phenomenon.

In the face of scientific evidence, most Americans consider homosexuality to be a cultivated lifestyle and fondly hope that one can be weaned away or de-programmed out of it. Every year schools witness fierce battles between parents and teachers as to what kind of books children should read, which sometime instigates the banning of books related to homosexuality.

Homophobia has led to violence and the killing of innocents.

In 2006, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed its earlier decision that gay people had the legal right to marry, some people were jubilant, while others went crazy. It sounded like the beginning of a cultural war.

Nothing has divided the American people so painfully since the question of slavery as the issue of what to do with gay people and lesbians, who have been outing themselves in hordes and getting their faces in everywhere ~ in television sitcoms, school textbooks, magazines covers, dance floors and legislatures.

Soon after the court decision, stand-up comedian and talk-show hostess Ellen DeGeneres announced on her show that she was planning to get married to her long-time girlfriend, actress Portia de Rossi. The audience cheered her lustily.

Although Americans by and large oppose gay marriages, they are inclined to accept civil unions for same-sex couples that would grant them the same rights as heterosexuals have.

Vermont was the first state to recognise civil unions for same-sex couples but only after the state’s highest court ruled that gay people were being deprived of constitutionally guaranteed equal rights and enjoined the state legislature to eliminate this discrimination. The Vermont court did not rule on marriage, rather it ruled on equal rights for all citizens, which included healthcare benefits, inheritance and other rights that go with marriage.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went to the extreme and challenged the very definition of marriage. If marriage is essentially a union of hearts, a commitment between two people ~ Evelyn and Madeleine, Ivan and Isaac ~ the concomitant rights and obligation of such a commitment must be respected.

But that’s not what the Bible or Koran says. That’s what the interpreters of the Constitution say.

It is only in Hollywood movies and mass media that you see the US as a homogeneous country. In reality, it has always been a house divided, which is its primary source of its dynamism and creativity.

Adding to the confusion, several states have passed laws that recognise only heterosexual marriages. So what would happen to a Californian gay married couple, let’s say with adopted children, when the family moves to a non-gay marriage state like Alabama?

The Californian Supreme Court seems to be saying that the state should choose a common nomenclature that captures the essence of both traditional marriage and civil union, so that gay people do not feel segregated or discriminated against. Maybe it is time to get rid of the ideologically and emotionally loaded words husband, wife and marriage and replace with them with spouse and domestic partnership.The final word on the meaning of marriage of course lies with the US Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter.

(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)

The pope, Islam and Tibet

Speaking in two voices: The pope, Islam and Tibet

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the US came at a very critical time. Just before his visit, the American people had witnessed massive global protests about the Olympic torch, which has increasingly become a symbol of Chinese repression against Tibetans and their religious beliefs rather than a celebration of freedom.

The 81-year-old pontiff summed up the crisis of faith in the modern world of unbridled free market capitalism when he asked, “Who can deny that the present moment is a crossroads?” He was admonishing his followers that while the church’s path is known, there is a danger of people taking the road less frequented. In spite of the promises of rising economic prosperity and globalisation, “we see clear signs of a disturbing breakdown in the very foundation” of the social order. American society accepts unmarried couples, unwed mothers, bachelor fathers, same-sex civil unions, multiple sex partners and all kinds conjugal or parental arrangements. Some Americans claim it their religious right to be polygamous. All lifestyles cannot be equally acceptable, according to the church orthodoxy.

The pope asked a meeting of bishops: "Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday and then during the week promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practising Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalised, to promote sexual behaviour contrary to Catholic moral teaching or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?” His views on abortion and homosexuality appeal to a much wider audience than 67.5 million American Catholics, the largest single religious denomination in the US. Although the pope opposed the Iraq war in 2003, on abortion and homosexuality he has a kindred soul in the White House, where he was treated as a most honoured guest.In spite of the settlement of thousands of cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, which cost the church $2 billion, the pope’s visit was overshadowed by a haunting sense of shame and embarrassment. But I wondered if he was trying to spread the blame across all of American society when he asked, “What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?” Although he met some people who were sexually abused as children by clerics, there was no profound sense of atonement in his speeches to the American public. It seemed he was trying to do damage control ~ the way a multinational corporation does when it is hit with a scandal ~ and bring the faithful back to the fold.

Throughout his visit, the pontiff talked about protecting individual rights without any reference to the recent bloody events in Tibet. Perhaps the pontiff does not think much of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama or other religions. He has pooh-poohed the idea of ‘relativism’, which means that other religious paths are not as good Catholicism. Last December the scheduled meeting between Pope Benedict and the Dalai Lama was cancelled because China protested that the meeting would “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”. The Vatican has been trying to restore diplomatic ties with China and assert its supremacy over the Catholic Church there, which of course China won’t accept.

While calling “for a dialogue of the Christian faith with the modern world, and for a dialogue between all cultures and religions”, Pope Benedict uttered unpardonably inflammatory words against Islam, at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria, Germany, in 2005. He quoted Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, who in an exchange with a Persian scholar said, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”The pope failed to imagine the reaction such an insulting statement would have caused and later tried to apologise. “I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought,” he said.

Papal apologists on both sides of the Atlantic did not succeed in assuaging the outraged Muslims.
But what was the pope thinking when he chose a text that did not represent his own or the Catholic Church’s views? When on 19 April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger became the pope, he became the defining voice of the Catholic Church. He could not have been unaware of what he was saying.No doubt the pope was trying to warn the global Catholic community about the gulf that separates it from Islam. His views are not very far from those of President George W Bush, who told the National Endowment for Democracy a few years ago that “Islamic terrorist attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism.” The Vatican like most of the West does not look at Islam as a humane, gentle and kind religion.

In spite of his ambivalence about other religions and his diplomatic attempts to avoid offending China, the pope in his address to the UN called for outside intervention if a state failed to protect human rights: “If states are unable to guarantee such protection the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations charter and in other international instruments.”

Perhaps the pontiff should put his words into action, meet with the Dalai Lama and condemn Chinese atrocities in Tibet. Would the pontiff dare?

(ND Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University)

As security increases, would freedom decline?

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Last Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a plan for a nationwide text messaging system that would alert Americans on their cell phones about terrorist attacks, natural disasters, campus shootings (like the one that occurred in Virginia Tech in 2007), child abductions or a killer on the loose.

The initiative originates from a 2006 federal law, the Warning Alert and Response Network Act (WARN Act) that requires upgrading the national emergency system. Cell phone subscribers won’t be charged for the alert messages they receive from Uncle Sam; nonetheless, they could opt out. Although the wireless industry has endorsed the plan, according to news reports, service providers’ participation is voluntary. Target date for fully implementing the FCC plan is 2010.

Any organisation, private or public, that mass-distributes information instantly can also collect it from its users instantly. Search companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and others collect and archive huge amounts of personal data from which can be profiled the behaviour of the user. They also cooperate with authoritarian governments as a price for working in their countries, especially when the lure of profits is irresistible.

There are cases of Internet search companies that have inadvertently released from their archives millions of search queries. Even if the names were not released, it would not have been difficult to put together the profile of searcher XYZ, for example, and what was motivating his search. The questions XYZ asks and the searches he makes online or in real life would reveal his mind. Web users everywhere are quietly submitting to whatever brings them a feeling of comfort and certainty. Protests against intrusiveness by the government and businesses into our personal lives have become muted. We are lapsing into a non-obtrusive surveillance society.

Every time there is a terrorist attack text message, we would feel that the government might be right. Online surveillance devices are being increasingly used by businesses to track users when they surf their Websites. Tracking is done inconspicuously and the user can never suspect that he is being watched.

Most of us are familiar with cookies, Web bugs, small software programs the advertisers put on our hard drives to track where we surf so that they can customise the most fitting advertising message for us to achieve target marketing, reaching the right person with right message. But a Web bug can be programmed to collect whatever data is required without the knowledge of the user. When you look at your online financial statement, or a health Website, the digital bug too could be monitoring it. Some companies do inform their visitors about the tracking devices they use and for what purposes. A Web beacon can track whether a particular message, including junk mail, has been opened and acted upon. Any electronic image that is part of a Web page, including a banner ad, can be programmed to act as a beacon and spy on the user.

Companies claim that the information enables them to personalise the surfing experience when a frequent user visits their portal. Users can opt-out, but most of them don’t know whether the option is available; nor do many of them pay attention to the privacy statement. Clandestine observation technologies are not limited to the Net. Several companies are using biometrics, face recognition, radio frequency and global positioning system (GPS) technologies to keep a watch on their properties and track suspects. Many car rental companies in the United States use GPS to keep track of their rental cars. If a car is stolen or is involved in an accident, the company would know the exact location of the car. But can a company withhold information from the police?

Many airports have started using digital fingerprint identification technology to conduct background checks without any protest from employees. Face recognition technology is being extensively used not only in airports but also in ballparks, banks and other business establishments. If a suspect turns up, his face is digitally matched in seconds with the image database. It is not a foolproof system. So far we don’t know how many terrorists have been apprehended by face recognition technology, but the security business is booming in the United States.

The US Customs and some airports are using low-dose X-ray machines, such as Body Search, to electronically scan a person for drugs, bombs and contrabands. Body Search electronically strips a person naked and projects the image on the screen for scrutiny without the person being asked to take her clothes off ~ all in the name of security. Hundreds of air travellers, including women, are randomly subjected to electronic Body Search.

An interesting security tracking technology is the radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), which is attached to a suspect’s baggage as he checks in. The tagged baggage is automatically routed to a security area where it is screened with special cameras and sensors for explosives and other hazardous materials. Depending upon the level danger alert, along with our baggage we too might have to wear radio-frequency ID tags so that we can be monitored as we move from one airport to another, from country to country via GPS. From centralised text messaging on cell phones to radio frequency ID tagging, government and global corporate interests are converging.

Imagine the possibilities ~ good and evil!
What might a democratic country with a base of 300 million cell phones do?
Or think of an authoritarian rising super power texting a message to its captive billions: Beware of the devil in monk’s clothing preaching compassion.

(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communication and diplomacy at Norwich University)

CAN CHINA CRUSH TIBET?

Globalisation of Tibet

From The Statesman

ND Batra

China will once again succeed in crushing the Tibetan uprising which has spread from the politically reorganised region known as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) to the outlying provinces, Gansu, Sichuan, and Qinghai, where Tibetans have a significant presence.

Once again silence would descend upon Tibet and its people would retreat into their hearts and prayers. But that would hardly be a remarkable achievement for a rising global power, especially when it is trying to show off to the world how the country’s stupendous economic growth has transformed the lives of the people, including, as China claims, those who for centuries suffered the “tyranny of Tibetan feudalism”.

During more than half a century of total domination over Tibet and its cultural and religious institutions, including the massive settlement of ethnic Chinese and their businesses into the heartland of Tibet, China was supposed to have reformed and re-educated Tibetans into total submission to China’s “superior culture”, not to mention hegemony. Why, then, has one of the most authoritarian states the world has ever known failed to brainwash and control the minds of a tiny minority of six million mostly illiterate and leaderless people? Why would these “wretched Tibetans” listen to the voice of the “splittest” from Dharamsala?

After all, the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was able to crush innumerable uprisings including the bloodiest students’ and workers’-led brief revolution on 23 October 1956 in Hungary. The USSR, as China is doing now, sent in tanks and troops and, in spite of the fact that there were worldwide protests against the Hungarian suppression including in India, the Soviets succeeded in re-establishing their yoke on Hungary. That was an era of Cold War, a balance of terror and mutual annihilation, and the USA and the Soviet Union had other battles to fight. Hungary was forgotten in the vast oblivion until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Tibet’s storyline is different. First, in 1959, after the failure of the Tibetan uprising, the Dalai Lama along with 80,000 Tibetans escaped to India; and thanks to the Gandhian spirit still alive in India at that time, the Nehru administration let the young Tibetan leader gradually establish an international political and spiritual presence instead of turning him and his people into perpetually ghettoised refugees. Since the Great Escape, Tibetans ~ young and old alike ~ have been braving the hazards of Chinese occupation forces and have kept coming to Dharamsala. This year, another 2,500-3,000 Tibetans will escape to India. Many of them eventually go to Europe and the USA, where they imbibe the spirit of freedom and keep the spirit of Tibet alive.

The rise of the Dalai Lama as a global spiritual leader is an amazing phenomenon. Nothing has diminished him. How could this man who has been termed by a top Chinese official as a “wolf wrapped in a habit, a monster with a human face and an animal’s heart”, whose people are suffering a cultural genocide, still be so forgiving and so loving?

Visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the Speaker of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful, courageous and compassionate women living today in the USA, told her audience that Chinese atrocities against Tibetans were “a challenge to the conscience of the world”. Was she chiding India for being chicken-hearted? “If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world,” she admonished.

Last September, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Dalai Lama in her office, Chinese authorities were enraged because it amounted to giving the monk recognition as the political leader of Tibet. But Sino-German relations had begun to mend until the peaceful protests by Buddhist monks in Lhasa turned into a spontaneous eruption in the entire greater Tibet region and suddenly lifted the massive public relations smokescreen that the Chinese had succeeded in casting over the world about the “improvement” in its human rights record.

Through the miracle of cell-phone video, the Internet and YouTube, the whole world watched what the Chinese authorities were doing to Tibetans. Of all the Europeans, Germans are the most sensitive about human rights issues. The Genocide and Holocaust are eternally etched into their collective consciousness and historical memory. German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul was quoted as saying, “Violence can never be a solution. The two sides can only arrive at a solution through dialogue.” But there can be no dialogue between two sides unless they accept each other. Tibet’s Communist Party secretary, Zhang Qingli, told regional officials, “We are engaged in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique, a life-and-death struggle between the foe and us.” Whatever happened to China’s pretensions to a “peaceful rise” and the “journey of harmony”?

While Germany has been more outspoken about China’s oppression in Tibet, even suspending environmental technology aid talks, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been no less bold in his decision to meet the Dalai Lama when he visits London. He told parliament about his phone conversation with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wherein he urged him to ensure that there “had to be an end to the violence in Tibet”. He also said that he “called for constraint” and “an end to the violence by dialogue between the different parties”. But China considers the Dalai Lama a runaway rogue and trouble-maker rather than a party to the dispute.

China has two alternatives.
It may attempt to “resolutely crush” the Tibetan people’s uprising as the Communist Party’s official daily newspaper has urged the government to do and turn Tibet into an Orwellian Panopticon, much like the Soviet Union had done in Hungary and its other satellite countries. But in the age of wireless mobility, texting, networking and decentralised global organisations fighting for human rights everywhere, the Communist leadership may not succeed in using the great Chinese propaganda machine and the digital firewall to control the Tibetan mind without doing the same to the rest of the population.

Alternatively, China may consider establishing a genuine dialogue with the Dalai Lama and restore to Tibet internal sovereignty and autonomy and in the process transform itself into one country, multiple systems ~ as is the USA, India or the evolving European Union.

(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University. He can be reached at narainbatra@gmail.com)

Global Civic Engagement

Global civic engagement through technology

From The Statesman
ND Batra

As the ravaging fires in California burnt hundreds of homes and killed several people, a small public radio satiation KBPS-FM San Diego, which was knocked off the air, used its ingenuity and decided to serve the public by publishing on its website maps of places where fires raged, evacuations were ordered, roads were closed, and the places to go for shelter and the best way to reach there.

Using Google’s My Map, its online managing editor Leng Caloh created a virtual map of Southern California, which was continuously updated and has been visited by more than 1.25 million people, giving up-to-date information about the developing situation. KBPS also used the social networking web service Twitter for text updates for cell phones. Twitter is a micro-blogger that allows short text messages to be sent to its site and it is mostly used by people who just want to exchange brief tit-bits, say, what the heck are you doing now? But KBPS used it to update the information on the status of the howling firestorm. Google Maps Website allows users to overlay information about weather, photos and places to go; but the company couldn’t have imagined that its service My Map will be ingeniously used for planning for public safety.

The use of technology for a purpose different from its original intent is called bricolage. It is the practice of tinkering and using the available material to create something new or solve a problem in a unique way. Americans are not the only bricoleurs, though they are most fertile and creative.

The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting story about a Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai who stealthily sent his reporters to Myanmar to report about the brutality of the military regime against the anti-government protesters, including thousands of Buddhist monks.

The use of cell phone cameras by Lai’s newspaper Apple Daily reporters made it possible for the world to see the bloody carnage in the otherwise closed country and prompted First Lady Laura Bush to write an op-ed piece about Myanmar in the Wall Street Journal. President George W Bush took a stand and imposed sanctions, which seem to be working. You see: the generals are talking.

A few weeks later in October, President Bush and the Dalai Lama met in advance of the ceremony to award the monk the Congressional Gold Medal, a unique honour for a homeless man. Although China huffed and puffed loudly like a helpless dragon warning that these events would be bad for US-Chinese relations, the television images of a man of compassion sent a powerful message of American support for Tibet’s autonomy that China has never honoured.

In many ways we see ourselves and know the physical world through our narratives and descriptions. Our nervous system and our personal and historical memories limit our abilities, our sense and sensibility, to describe and capture reality. But communications technology enhances our natural abilities and enables us to see other dimensions of reality.

Millions of words, for instance, have been written about Mahatma Gandhi whose birthday was celebrated on 2 October and yet it’s doubtful if the truth about this complex man has been completely captured.

If somehow we could know a way of tuning up and enhancing the nervous system to a higher level, the reality would change. Think of the time when zero was discovered and the subsequent development of decimal system; and how that might have changed the perception of reality by subjecting physical phenomena to measurement.

Measurement is actuality, which can be enhanced by technology. When Galileo’s telescope was embedded into the human nervous system, the view of the universe changed and the earth ceased to be a stationary planet.

Or consider some modern political events. Had satellite pictures not revealed the existence of the Soviet’s missiles in Cuba in the 1960s, Americans wouldn’t have perceived the threat to the country.

If the remote-sensing technology could pick up sights and sounds of human sufferings, it would become possible to know how the Chinese have been brutalising the Tibetans and their culture. The Tibetan cultural pogrom will find full description. Description either leads to action or generates guilt. Guilt demands action and atonement. That’s how human consciousness has been evolving, perhaps. Through communications technology, the human nervous system extends itself and gives a better or a fuller account of reality, and a feeling of liberation from the constraints of earlier description of reality.

New reality demands new laws, ethics, and social relations; and it creates new lifestyles, as one can see happening in the burgeoning economy of Kolkata, where the communist party is a dead man walking albeit still ruling. Communications technology — satellites, radio, television, cell phones and the Internet — which made free flow of information possible, has castrated communism.

History teaches a lesson that it is through the control of narratives that the powerful, the ruling classes, exercise their hegemony. I have always wondered how Britain ruled so successfully over India for about two hundred years. The British succeeded to a great extent by supplanting the native stories and narratives with their own literature and legends, so that knowing the legend of King Arthur was deemed more civilised than knowing the legend of King Asoka.

China has begun to transplant its own stories and historical descriptions upon the young Tibetans, and by the time they grow up into adulthood, their reality will clash with the truth held by their parents — unless modern communications technology, including wireless Internet, shortwave radio and miniature antenna dishes, keeps them alive as Tibetans. By denying the Tibetans access to their language and culture and access to communications technology, China is doing unto Tibetans what Americas have done unto Native Americans.

Don’t you agree that there is something remarkable about the Jewish people, in the sense that from the Old Testament through Steven Spielberg, they have been natural born story-tellers? Because of the anecdotal and photographic accounts of the concentration camps and documentaries like Shoah and docudramas like Schindler’s List, it is impossible to deny the truth of the Holocaust, in spite what Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad and other nay-sayers might say.
Most of us feel guilty for not having stopped it.
The Tibetans have no great film-makers, no story-tellers, and no access to communications technology. They might perish in the unheard silences of the Himalayas unless world leaders keep raising their voices, as President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did recently. It is time for global civic engagement through all available means of diplomacy and technology.

(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is working on a new book, This is the American Way. He blogs at http://corporatepower.blogspot.com )

PAKISTAN HAS A FUTURE, YES

What can India do for Pakistan?

From The Statesman

ND Batra

Benazir Bhutto represents a future that must happen: a progressive, liberal and secular Pakistan that should become a model for rest of the Islamic world. That is in India’s national interest. Weak and unstable neighbours cannot make India strong. Pakistan’s problems are India’s problems too because the patterns of behaviour of the two people are not dissimilar.

“The attack was not on me. The attack was on what I represent. It was an attack on democracy and it was an attack on the very unity and integrity of Pakistan,” Bhutto told the global news media after the dastardly bombings that turned her triumphant return into an unmitigated tragedy. “We believe democracy alone can save Pakistan from disintegration and a militant takeover,” she said with firm conviction even when others were wondering, “whodunit”?

Pakistan is undergoing political and cultural turmoil that has of course not gone unnoticed by rest of the world. People opposing the authoritarianism of President Pervez Musharraf have been lawyers, journalists and other open-minded moderate groups trying to bring Pakistan under the rule of secular law. But the situation is much more complex; religious extremists’ attempt at keeping the country under siege, for example, is certainly not without the support of some strata of the all pervasive military.

The “pattern of ad-hoc deal-making between the Pakistan government and pro-Taliban militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,” according to Dawn’s publisher Haroon Hameed, the CEO of the Dawn Group of newspapers, has been destroying the internal security of Pakistan. The solution to the problems does not lie in the imposition of emergency or martial law, but rather reviving the moribund democratic processes.

Unlike most other Muslim countries, Pakistan is no stranger to democracy. It has a vibrant Press, free and bold judiciary, and an intellectual class that is envy of the Muslim world. It is unfortunate that Pakistan is caught up between democratic aspirations at the top and religious obtuseness at the bottom. Instead of depending upon the questionable political strength and commitment of Musharraf alone for war against terrorism, the United States has been reaching out to a wide variety of constituencies in Pakistan including the media, universities, businesses, non-profit organisations, tribal leaders and intelligence communities.

Bringing Bhutto and Musharraf together to share power in a democratic framework has been so far the Bush Administration’s great diplomatic achievement. The democratic initiative will succeed if Bhutto and Musharraf accept each other as co-equals and co-dependents and realise that the enemy of Pakistan is embedded within the country and must be eliminated whatever it takes.

On a visit to Pakistan sometime ago, Vice-President Dick Cheney urged Musharraf to do a lot more to curb the growing influence of Al-Qaida and Taliban and prevent them from rebuilding and strengthening the infrastructure of terrorism in the safety of tribal areas from where they have been operating to carry out terrorist attacks against Afghan and NATO troops. As the recent Karachi bombings show, Al-Qaida-Taliban groups have spread their tentacles more pervasively in the country.

It is tragic that Pakistan has turned itself into a country warring against the very elements, Islamic extremism and militancy, that its super intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), nurtured as tools of foreign policy. Musharraf has not been able to make a total break from the forces that have supported him in his hold on power and hence the reluctant approach for fighting terrorism.

Since Musharraf cut the deal with tribal leaders relinquishing sovereign authority over the tribal territory, Pakistan has become a safe haven for Al-Qaida and the Taliban. John D Negroponte, Deputy US Secretary of State, observed before a Congress committee in February that Al-Qaida was “cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’ secure hide-out in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.”

Since Musharraf is not in full control of the forces operating in the divided country, what can be done? First of all, the United States forces should cross into the tribal territories in pursuit of the Taliban and Al-Qaida. Bhutto, once she assumes political power, may be open to this idea since these forces threaten the integrity of Pakistan.

Bhutto-Musharraf must break the nexus between the ISI and Taliban and other sectarian extremist groups. The ISI works like a powerful state within a weak state and it is necessary for the United States intelligence to penetrate its hierarchy with the ultimate goal of subduing this monster that terrorises the country.

India should join hands with the United States and do a well-planned public and business diplomacy in Pakistan to reach out to the intelligentsia and middle classes, who have the same global aspirations as other countries with growing economies. The prospects of rapid economic growth and rising prosperity would present Pakistanis with an alternative future that is founded on science and technology and globalisation, the future that Benazir Bhutto has come to symbolise.

(ND Batra who teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University is the author of Digital Freedom and is working on a new book, This is the America Way)

Hey Bangalore! Are You Listening?

When our daily lives become hyper-personal

From The Statesmsn

ND Batra
Google knows whether a person is a dirty trickster, an older man trying to seduce a younger woman; a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a cave in Second Life; or a teenager posing as a medical expert.

Google is becoming the keeper of surfers’ personal history, well, at least for 18 months after which it makes it anonymous, or so it promises. The idea behind surf & search record-keeping is to create patterns that anticipate the searcher’s behaviour and provide the information quickly next time he looks for an item. More than that, based on searching patterns, Google, according to CEO Eric Schmidt, could answer hypothetical questions, for example: Where should I invest my bonus, in mutual funds or a savings certificate? Freedom in cyberspace is becoming “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice in Wonderland would have cried. The more you have it, the more you lose it.
The Internet has created a new media environment that not only enables people to communicate, discuss and exchange information, give and receive feedback, but it also provides an interactive collaborative experience, doing things together, when words become deeds and speech becomes action. Networked computers, the building blocks of the Internet, are much more than mere productivity tools and informatics systems. Unlike the traditional media, they are capable of creating cyber-environment that can be designed to be persuasive, and can motivate people to disclose personal information and change their social behaviours. Social engineers, especially those who serve authoritarian governments, know the potential of the Internet for creating an illusion of boundless freedom only to entice people in digital chains.

The next challenge for software programmers whether they work for Google, Yahoo or some authoritarian regime is to build a network architecture that enables the designing of virtual environment to motivate people, for example, to buy, sell, invest; obey the supreme leader; or even induce good social and personal habits such as not to drink and drive, not to have unhealthy sexual behaviours. Computer codes have the potential force of law, according to Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessing, and programmers could bypass the government and, in a manner of speaking, take law into their own hands. Or the government could also use programmers to stifle dissent. Give the monks of Myanmar computers and free access to the Internet. They may not come out of cyberspace to protest in the streets. But the rhetoric of software design, the persuasive code that entices, builds relationships, arouses and fulfills desires and keeps the users coming back, has not been fully explored in areas other than cybersex and virtual reality Internet games. There is a great fortune in developing codes that persuade the user to change his attitude, behaviour and actions.

Hey Bangalore! Are you listening?

The strength of the Internet is its interactive immersion, its ability to respond and give instant feedback and gratification. Feedback not only regulates the flow of communication but also gives some of the control back to the receiver of the message, in fact an illusion of freedom. Two persons in conversation establish a dynamic relationship to create shared meanings, of which a Web portal might keep a record. Human communication is essentially a transaction that takes place effectively if people have or can create a common field of experience. Internet communication can transcend face-to-face communication, can be very enticing, and in certain circumstances is even more desirable as many patients and therapists are finding. Lack of face-to-face cues, physical appearance and vocal inflections, which might arouse skepticism are absent in Internet communication, especially when it is time delayed (asynchronous) such as in e-mail or question-answer Websites.

Selective self-presentation makes it possible for people to open themselves up to others, which they would hesitate to do in face-to-face conversation for fear of contradiction and lack of control. But Google, Yahoo and the ilk keep digital footprints of what is going on in your hearts and mind. Even in chat rooms and instant messaging, communication can become what JB Walther, a professor at Michigan State University, calls as “hyper-personal,” that’s, socially more desirable than we are likely to experience face-to-face. It allows the play of fantasy partly to compensate for the absence of aural and visual information that gestures and voice create in interpersonal encounters. Fantasy lowers our guards and makes cyberspace so seductively persuasive ~ and dangerous. So many teenagers go astray in cyberspace because it lets them assume fake identities and gives them freedom to pretend what they fancy themselves to be. Some of them become victims of con-men and predators, who too assume identities desirable for their teenage victims.
An Avatar can be very deceptive.
The playfulness of virtual environment, an environment of “Be what you want to be,” creates a pleasurable experience, a sensuous flow, in which we feel in control of our environment that real life might deny us. Those who spend too much time in Second Life might forget what real life is. In search of a fake identity, we are in danger of losing our real identity.

(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom is professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University. He is working on a new book, This is the American Way: An Intellectual Travelogue)

A total surveillance society

China surveillance copies USA

From the Statesman
ND Batra

George Orwell’s 1984 failed to materialise, but Keith Bradsher of the New York Times recently wrote how Wall Street has been colluding with the Chinese authorities to turn China into a total surveillance society.

Bradsher wrote: “China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, among other customers... has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange... the latest signs of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus.” Another company that trades its shares on Wall Street is China Security and Surveillance.

Just as China is supporting genocide in Darfur through its oil trade with Sudan, the United States is supporting the suppression of human rights by allowing Wall Street to funnel funds to “install surveillance systems providing Chinese police stations with 24-hour video feeds from nearby Internet cafes... Hedge fund money from the United States has paid for the development of not just better video cameras, but face-recognition software and even newer behaviour-recognition software designed to spot the beginnings of a street protest and notify police.”

China says something similar is happening in the United States too. Search companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and others collect and archive huge amounts of personal data from which can be profiled the behaviour of the user.

Last year, America On Line (AOL), an Internet search company, inadvertently released from its archives millions of search queries done by more than 600,000 users during a three-month period. Thought their names were not released but it would not have been difficult to put together the profile of searcher #167845, for example, and what possessed him or her. The American people are quietly submitting to whatever brings them a feeling of assuredness. Protests against intrusiveness by the government and businesses into our personal lives have become muted.

We are slipping into a low-intensity surveillance society. Every time there is a terrorist attack, we feel that the government might be right. Chinese are no different. Online surveillance devices are being increasingly used by businesses to track users when they surf their websites. Tracking is done unobtrusively and the user can never suspect that he is being watched; nonetheless, the practice is questionable, especially when the website does not declare in its privacy policy.

But who cares in China or Tibet?

Most of us are familiar with cookies, small software programmes the advertisers put on our hard drives to track where we surf so that they can customise the most appropriate advertising message for us to achieve target marketing, reaching the right person with the right message. But a web bug can be programmed to collect whatever data is required without the knowledge of the user. When you look at your online mutual fund statement, or a pornographic site, the web bug too could be monitoring it. So when a Chinese searches for Falun Gong, Catholic Church or the Dalai Lama, do you know what might happen to him? Some American companies claim to inform their visitors about the tracking devices they use and for what purposes. Users can opt-out, but most of them don’t know whether the option is available, nor do many of them pay attention to the privacy statement.
In China, you cannot opt-out.
Surveillance technologies are not limited to the Net. Several companies are using biometrics, face recognition, radio frequency and global positioning system (GPS) technologies, to keep a watch on their properties and track suspects. Many car rental companies in the United States use GPS to keep track of their rental cars. If a car is stolen or is involved in an accident, the company would know the exact location of the car. GPS also enables them to check the speed of a rental car.
Many airports have started using digital fingerprint identification technology to conduct background checks without any protest from employees. Face recognition technology is being extensively used not only in airports but also in ballparks, banks and other business establishments. If a suspect turns up, his face is digitally matched in seconds with the image database.

The US Customs and some airports are using low-dose X-ray machines, such as Body Search, to electronically scan a person for drugs, bombs and contrabands. Body Search electronically strips a person naked and projects the image on the screen for scrutiny without the person being asked to take his/her clothes off - all in the name of security. Hundreds of air travelers, including women, are randomly subjected to electronic Body Search.

An interesting security tracking technology is the radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), which is attached to a suspect’s baggage as he checks in. The tagged baggage is automatically routed to a security area where it is screened with special cameras and sensors for explosives and other hazardous materials. Along with our baggage, we too might have to wear radio-frequency ID tags so that we can be monitored as we move from one airport to another, from country to country via GPS.

Only if we could put an RFID tag on every terrorist!

Nonetheless, the United States is an open society. One can always go to court to seek a remedy against the state as well as corporate America. What can the Chinese do? Go to the Olympics, of course. Or McDonalds.

(ND Batra teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is the author of Digital Freedom. He is working on a new book, This is the American Way.)