FREEDOM NEEDS WATCHFULNESS

Better security means more freedom

By ND Batra
From The Statesman

On a recent flight to Chicago, the airport security inspector said to me with a wry smile on his face, “You have been randomly selected to undergo special search.” Why me? Of course, I look different. And with my dark-brown tanned un-American face, I could be anybody. But there were other people too, many all-American faces, waiting for more probing electronic searches, which lessened my resentment at the special treatment.

I would rather fly safe than being blown up in mid-air, even if it sometime amounts to profiling, which of course is not a pleasant thing to think about. But don’t we all profile strangers when we meet them? Terrorism is with us, let’s face it, which we can preferably without compromising our freedoms.

For international flights, the searches are much more rigorous. Eventually India with its burgeoning airline industry, too, might feel persuaded to use the security measures that the USA has been enforcing: digital finger printing and photographing of approximately 24 million foreigners entering and leaving the country from its 115 international airports.

The surveillance programme called Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology (VISIT) is based on the premise that either a potential international terrorist is known and has been included on the terrorist watch list and national criminal database that the homeland security department maintains or he could be digitally traced as he moves around the country.

Without such a comprehensive database, it hardly makes any sense for the home security secretary to assert that the system would “make sure our borders are open to visitors but closed to terrorists”. The inconvenience to visitors going through the VISIT screening process is not that terrible; nor is the emotional trauma so severe, not like what it might be in the case of someone being subjected to electronic strip search with a “naked camera” using low-level X-ray beams to reveal a person’s anatomy, including warts and hair along with metal, plastic or ceramic objects hidden underneath the clothes the person wears.

Nor is the procedure that time consuming for a visitor who has already spent several hours in the plane. As technology improves, electronic identification would become almost unobtrusive. Digital fingerprints and photographs will go into law enforcement databases to ensure that the visitor is the person he claims to be when he boards the plane from the place of origin and whether he overstays his visa.

With time, land borders between the USA and Canada and the USA and Mexico too would be turned into smart borders, digitally alive, as they should be between India and Bangladesh. The global village was not supposed to be like that but look what terrorists have done to Britain, the ultimate home away from home for asylum seekers.

The question is whether the system would do what it is supposed to do, that is, to apprehend potential terrorists without giving the authorities a false sense of security. For example, if the surveillance system ends up apprehending only small time crooks, drug offenders and visa violators, some other method less offensive to individual privacy could be used instead of subjecting millions of people to psychological discomfort of being suspects.

On the other hand, the fear of being caught in the digital net might keep terrorists altogether away from using airplanes as weapons of mass terror. When the surveillance programme was put in place, most international passengers visiting the USA took it as a minor nuisance but some advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberty Union took umbrage at the privacy invasive programme.

Since it exempts some citizens of 27 countries mostly Europeans, including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore, on a tourist visa for less than 90 days, the regulations seem racist; but considering that the recent London bombings were perpetrated by British-born terrorists of Pakistan descent, the exemptions must be done away with.

France too has a law that requires foreigners applying for visa to be fingerprinted and photographed at the French consulates. That should be the universal rule. It is some hassle but many of us would gladly pay the price and fly with peace of mind to reach our destination safe.

Airport security measures are not limited to electronic surveillance. Israel, Switzerland, France, Britain and Germany use armed air marshals on some or all flights, as does the USA now. I believe armed marshals should be on all flights, domestic or international, in every country. We need a tough approach to fight terrorism. Passports must be encoded with digital fingerprints so that the identity of a person could be quickly established.

The USA has in place a comprehensive computer-screening programme that will check a passenger’s identity and colour code him based on the threat he poses to the aircraft. This electronic trawling approach is necessary to make air flights safe, along with improving other sources of Intelligence. The number of terrorists may be small, but their reach is wide and consequences horrifying. The same electronic scrutiny should be applied to trains, buses and subway travel. Most travellers brush aside the minor inconvenience of being digitally fingerprinted and photographed. Of course, it won’t stop there.

Eventually US consulates, customs and border protection offices, immigration services, and state and local law enforcement agencies will have access to networked information. Warning: It is at the local and state level that one does not know how the information would be used, and hence the possibility of abuse. Checks and balances are necessary to maintain the dynamic tension between security and freedom.

India and China

India on the Rise?
Really?
But that is what says James Haughey in Electronic News.
“India is not the new China. It’s an entirely different type of investment and marketing opportunity…”
Read more...

But not so fast, says the London Telegraph: "The launch in India of a personal computer for only £130 is a mark of how the economy of that country has been transformed over the past generation. As Peter Foster, our South Asia Correspondent, writes in today's paper, its advent could herald an explosion in "cyber connectivity" similar to that which has already hit the mobile-phone market. India is living up to its reputation as a developing nation with a sensational information-technology sector. Is it thereby on the way to becoming a global economic giant?" Read more...

Brits wake upto terror

CYBER AGE
ND Batra
From The Statesman

Learning to live in ‘Londonistan’

In the wake of last month’s London bombing, President Pervez Musharraf asked Britain to take strong steps to curb terrorism instead of blaming of Pakistan. As if on a hint from the Pakistani ruler, Prime Minister Tony Blair just did exactly that, announcing a 12-point list of stricter measures that included closing down mosques that have become pulpits of hate and deportation of foreign Muslim clerics who “foster hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs or justify or validating such violence”.

I don’t know whether Musharraf would have the political courage to take such determined action in Pakistan, especially against madrasas and Al-Qaida training camps, regarded by international experts as breeding grounds for global terrorism. Nonetheless, he cannot be blamed for every act of terrorism that takes place in Britain or the rest of Europe even if the perpetrators were of Pakistani descent.

Blair went to the extent of saying that Britain would modify human rights laws, if needed, to enable authorities to deport foreigners glorifying violence back to their native lands, even if those countries have questionable human rights records.

Under the new rules, law enforcement agencies would be authorised to take measures even against extremist Islamic websites and bookstores; and those foreigners in Britain who are actively engaged with them would be deported. Other measures would include stripping citizenship from individuals apprehended indulging in extremist activities who have dual citizenship or are naturalised citizens.That’s what should have happened after 9/11 but most Brits saw no danger to their way of life thinking that what happened “over there” would not happen to them.

“We are British,” they thought, most liberal of all Europeans, a multicultural society. And they thought they could co-opt militant Islam through their openness, their unique British way of life. That seemed to be the pervasive smug feeling, but the subway bombing that killed 56 and the subsequent failed attempts by militants was a rude awakening for the British that Islamic jihadists would spare none. For the fist time since World War II Brits are scared that their Britishness is under threat and have begun to re-examine how far their culture could accommodate multicultural separateness.

At the Friday news conference, Blair said that swearing of formal allegiance and a rudimentary knowledge of English would not be enough to acquire British citizenship. “Let no one be in any doubt that the rules of the game are changing. Coming to Britain is not a right and even when people have come here, staying here carries with it a duty. That duty is to share and support the values that sustain the British way of life.” At the question-answer period that followed the announcement, Blair was hard-pressed to explain how far integration would go without destroying the salad-bowl kind of multiculturalism that has prevailed in Britain for long.

How much Britishness for citizenship is good enough would depend upon the state of terrorism. Frightened Brits would ask for more surveillance and stricter immigration and citizenship rules, as it is happening in the United States. Blair’s immediate goal is to see that tough measures to drive out extremists actually work without alienating the Muslim community at large. A similar struggle to integrate Muslims into their mainstream societies has been taking place throughout Europe since the Paris Metro bombing, the Madrid train attacks, and the killing of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam. Some say Britain has been too tolerant of Islamic militants, who have mistaken its magnanimity as cultural decadence.

Of course the new measures must be vetted through the British judicial system, but Blair is right in emphasising that freedom does not mean that foreigners should come here and say that “suicide bombing is a good thing, these people are heroes…. they shouldn’t come into Britain, and if they are here, they should leave.” These are the words of a deeply grieved and disillusioned man.

Nonetheless, the challenge is how to engage Muslims to accept that, as Blair put it, “you can have your own religion and your own culture but still feel integrated into the main stream of a community” much as British Hindus, Sikhs, Jewish, and Chinese have done without losing their distinctive cultures, their distinctive identities. While Britain may throw out some jihadists, work out some way so that multiculturalism does not dissipate into segregated cultural ghettoes, and every one living in Britain acquires some “British common sense,” whatever that means, the Internet presents a unique challenge for the international community.

Cyberspace has become a watering hole for extremists, where they replenish themselves with fundamentalist ideology that begets hatred against non-Muslims. Cyberspace, where a Muslim is a Muslim, not a Pakistan or a Saudi or a Moroccan, provides a secure, anonymous and fertile ground for Al-Qaida jihadists to spread their hate ideology, raise funds and recruit suicide bombers.

Blair compared Al-Qaida ideology with communism, but communism in its heyday was geopolitical; it had boundaries. But cyberspace has none, so Al-Qaida terrorism presents a different kind of threat, where global cooperation is absolutely essential and extremely difficult. In the meantime, Britain should examine closely, as France has been doing, what cultural permissiveness and appeasement of Islamic extremism has done to their beautiful country. India should do the same.

CHOOSING LIFE OVER POTENTIAL LIFE

Enhancing life
From The Statesman

ND BATRA

President Bush said he would veto any Bill for using federal money “to promote science that destroys life to save life.” In this respect, much of the country is not with him. According to a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, 53 per cent Americans favour embryonic stem cell research.

Last May, the House passed a Bill to provide funding for embryonic stem cell research, in which 50 Republicans voted with Democrats. Recently, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist broke with President Bush and the conservative wing of the Republican Party and came out in support of embryonic stem cell research.

Senator Frist, a heart-lung transplant surgeon by training, who might be a presidential candidate in 2008, said: “I am pro-life, I believe human life begins at conception. I also believe that embryonic stem cell research should be encouraged and supported.” Supporting him, former First Lady Nancy Reagan said, “Embryonic stem cell research has the potential to alleviate so much suffering. Surely, by working together we can harness its life-giving potential.”

Much has be said about Ronald Reagan’s intriguing legacy, his sunny disposition that made one feel the USA is a promised land; his denunciation of the Soviet Union as an evil empire and the call to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, tear down the wall; his ability to bond with the American people through his empathy and earthy oratory; his bold, unorthodox and sometime wild ideas such as Strategic Defence Initiative, and space-based protective shield, Star War in popular imagination.

But as has been said, the way we go away is no less important than as we live. It was frightening the way Reagan lived the last decade of his life, stricken with an incurable degenerative mental disease that deprived him of the most precious gift of life in his old age, remembrance of things past, his life-long accomplishments as a movie actor and a world statesman, closeness to his loved ones through small acts of daily kindness. One might say gods were unkind to Reagan; but it need not be so in the future if embryonic stem cell research is pursued.

It is difficult to know how much an Alzheimer patient suffers but we can imagine how much Mrs Reagan must have endured as she saw the wasting away of her husband with the knowledge that one day if the stem cell research continued there might be hope for one of the most dreaded human illnesses. Anytime an older person stumbles upon a word, a name, the place where he parked his car or placed his keys, we wonder if this could be the beginning of a slow end.

But in this land of eternal optimism, we look to science and medicine to improve the quality of life. We know that embryonic stem cells could be the beginning of a new life for persons suffering from fatal ailments, brain damage, heart and kidney malfunctions, diabetes, Parkinson’s, spinal chord injuries and a host of other devastating diseases.

Stem cells that are derived from aborted and discarded embryos could be directed to grow into any kind of specialised cells to repair damaged human parts and trigger a self-regenerative process in the human body. It is an example of how life feeds upon life to renew itself, which no doubt creates some ethical dilemmas.But because of his personal faith, President Bush has limited the funding of stem cell research to 78 useable lines that were available prior to 9 August, 2001, just to allow the existing research in the pipeline to continue. Those lines have dwindled to 22 only.

There is no ban, however, on private research and many companies and private universities are pursuing it. Last year, California voters approved a $3-billion bond to promote research in the state.

Turning away from research that might be the next step on the evolutionary ladder and which also holds the promise of reducing human suffering is an act of cruelty. Choosing life over potential life is practical ethics at its best.

While Americans have been embroiled in the controversy regarding embryonic stem cell research, it is amazing that no serious question has been raised in India about its moral and ethical ramifications. India’s minister of science and technology and ocean development, Kapil Sibal, told the Rajya Sabha that his ministry was working on a strategy for promoting embryonic and adult stem cell research for therapeutic applications.

I am cautiously in favour of embryonic stem cell research, but to develop a strategy without a national debate, without a national policy, could be disastrous. India should explore the ethical boundaries of embryonic stem cell research including therapeutic cloning, duplicating animals (as South Korean scientists have done cloning an Afghan puppy), and even gender selection of children by parents in India who prefer boys to girls. Research in regenerative and therapeutic medicine and technology should not be entirely left to the marketplace.

Give Bangladesh a chance

Bangladesh as a dangling metaphor
CYBER AGE
From The Statesman
ND BATRA

There is a reason for Bangladesh textile exporters to be optimistic about the long-term outcome of China’s revaluation of the yuan. Of the $7.57 billion export last year, its textile accounted for 75 per cent; but since the phasing out of quota in January 2005, Bangladesh exporters have feared that they might be mauled by China’s cheaper exports.

Fazul Haq, Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers Exporters Association president, was quoted as saying, “The appreciation of the Chinese currency means a lot of Bangladeshi exports and jobs since Chinese products are a competitor in the global marketplace.” Chinese products, though cheaper, are certainly not better. The cost-conscious American consumer does not care who made it.

In other words, by pegging the yuan to the dollar and keeping it artificially low, China has been indirectly siphoning off jobs from Bangladesh, a proud democratic Muslim country which needs US help in keeping Islamic militants at bay. To some extent it has been successful. Creating jobs is one way of doing it. But Americans have been more interested in seeing what free market capitalism does to Communist China than its transformational effects upon a Muslim society, which might fall into the kind of hell hole that the Taliban created in Afghanistan.

It is a specious argument that the American consumer would have to pay more if Wal-Mart, JC Penny, Target and other global buyers and mega stores could not buy cheap goods from China. They would look somewhere else and countries like Bangladesh, the quality of whose garments compares favourably with China’s, could easily provide an equally attractive alternative source of supply.

But the political and social consequences of a dollar going to Bangladesh are far more momentous than a dollar going to China. Consider what Jeffrey D Sachs, the Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University says about Bangladesh in his remarkable new book, The End of Poverty: “Not only is the garment sector fuelling Bangladesh economic growth of more than 5 per cent per year in recent years, but it is also raising consciousness and power of women in a society that was long brazenly biased against women’s chances of life.”

Since most of the employees of export-oriented garment industry are women, just imagine if, Wal-Mart, for example, which buys most of its garments from China, shifts its production by 10 per cent to Bangladesh, the social consequences would be tremendous and would reverberate throughout the Muslim world. Henry Kissinger once called Bangladesh an international basket case, but he has been proved wrong. Bangladesh has climbed the first rung of the development ladder and its growing middle class is proud of the biggest shopping mall in Asia, Bashundhara, with 2,000 stores, which recently opened in Dhaka. Bangladesh might yet escape the fate of becoming another Afghanistan.

Continuing how the garments industry is transforming life in Bangladesh, Dr Sachs says, “The job for women in the cities and rural off-farm microenterprises; a new spirit of women’s rights and independence and empowerment; dramatically reduced rates of child mortality; rising literacy of girls and young women; and, crucially, the availability of family planning and contraception have made all the difference for these women.” But what has this to do with China?

If the global marketplace is a level playing field, economic growth would take place in many countries and prosperity would spread globally. But the USA has been timid in dealing with China, fearing that if China stopped investing its export-earned dollars in the US Treasury, US interest rates would go up, mortgages would become more expensive and the housing bubble would burst.

Since the Chinese don’t buy much from the USA, the surplus dollar is invested in the US Treasury at a low rate. In other words, China has been providing cheep loans to Americans to buy goods from China. China holds $270 billion in US Treasury bonds, which is a kind of threat to the US dollar. What if China shifts its investment from the US Treasury to euro?

This question would not have arisen, if American companies had diversified their buying and let countries like Bangladesh accumulate dollars. In July, a Chinese General threatened to nuke several US cities in case the US intervened in the China-Taiwan conflict. Do you think a Bangladeshi General would have been foolish enough to utter such a diplomatic stupidity? Even a country like the USA that believes in free market capitalism cannot separate foreign trade from public diplomacy. Wal-Mart is not politically neutral. The question is whether China’s announcement of the revaluation of its currency by 2.1 per cent, unpegging it from the dollar but tying it to a basket of undisclosed currencies, is simply a rope trick to muffle American criticism.

Hong Kong, “whose currency,” according to Financial Times, “is considered a proxy for the Chinese currency,” has not revalued its dollar, which means that what China is giving with one hand is taking with the other.

Maybe the yuan revaluation is a clever diplomatic move to soften Congress anger and make way for a red carpet treatment for President Hu Jintao’s US visits in September. And there lies the danger. As China continues mesmerising Americans with its phenomenal export-oriented economic growth, spectacular attempts to take over American companies like Unocol and Maytag, and Machiavellian manoeuvres to oust the USA from Central Asia, I am afraid, Bangladesh—a metaphor dangling between Bashundhara and the Taliban, an exemplar of what the dollar could do to a Muslim country struggling to keep itself away from destructive Islamic extremism — would be forgotten.

Bush's Bold Move

Indian Diplomatic Initiative Pays Dividends
Shaping the New Century

Partnership for prosperity
From The Staesman
ND BATRA

By offering India “full civilian nuclear cooperation nuclear energy,” President Bush has made a bold move in establishing long term strategic and economic relations with a country that many US experts perceive as a reliable global partner.

Mr Bush did not let the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty stand in the way of his new global vision, where an economically strong democratic India would play a stabilising role in world affairs, especially in Asia. The partnership to help India “become a major power in the 21st century” is not about containing any other rising power but to let India develop as an alternative model of economic growth without compromising fundamental freedoms.

Rapid economic growth of India, 8-9 per cent a year for the next few decades, would lift millions of Indians out of abject poverty.

Besides, an economically dynamic India would make the military containment of China by the USA unnecessary. More equal players in the Asian drama, less the possibility of a single hegemonic power rising. Mr Bush did not welcome India to the nuclear club; nor was that India’s diplomatic goal. He just removed hurdles in India’s search for alternative energy sources to fuel its growing economy.

In the process, however, Mr Bush did acknowledge India “as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology”, recognising it as an exception to the rule, and accepted the fact that India should “acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states.”

When Congress approves the deal, India would be able to buy nuclear fuel for its existing nuclear power plants and shop for building new ones, but in the course of time as trust in partnership increases and diplomatic relations improve further, a whole new world of sophisticated American technology would be open to India, enabling it to leapfrog decades of past sluggish economic growth.

In return India has agreed to do what other nuclear powers have been doing under the nonproliferation treaty, that is, open its civilian nuclear power plants to the International Atomic Energy Agency and continue the moratorium on nuclear testing. Its nuclear military arsenal remains off limit.

Critics in India who fear that the deal would create co-dependency relations with the USA need to consider how South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China have benefited from strong economic partnership with the USA without compromising their sovereignty.

India must go beyond information technology outsourcing and penetrate deeply into corporate America. Had Mr Bush decided to back India’s claim to UN Security Council permanent membership - instead of lifting nuclear sanctions — he might have flattered the ego of the Indian elite, but that would not have helped India solve its energy and infrastructural problems.

The Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline is certainly in the realm of possibility but even if it materialises, it may not be enough to meet India’s gargantuan need for energy. Clean coal technology, nuclear energy and solar energy are practical alternatives for which the USA has opened its doors to India.

India needs hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign direct investment in building power plants and world-class infrastructure to increase its manufacturing base to create employment opportunities. Nuclear energy would reduce excessive dependency upon oil from West Asia.

Eventually the USA would support India for a UN Security Council seat too. The greatest applause Prime Minister Singh received during his address to the joint session of US Congress occurred when he reminded them “that the voice of the world’s largest democracy surely cannot be left unheard on the Security Council when the United Nations is being restructured.”

It is only a matter of time when India, with one-sixth of the world population, would be offered its rightful place in the Security Council. Partnership was also one of the themes of Dr Singh’s marvellous address to the joint US Congress session on Tuesday. In his impeccable Indo-British accent, Dr Singh told his appreciative audience that India and the USA are natural partners because both are open societies and share similar values. “There are partnerships based on principle, and partnership based on pragmatism. I believe we are at a juncture where we can embark on partnership that we can draw both on principle as well as pragmatism.”

Democracy, multiethnic diversity, and human rights are some of the values that bring the two countries together, but equally important is the fact that India and the USA need each other to fight global terrorism. Mr Bush’s relentless and determined campaign against militant Islamic and Al-Qaida terrorism has begun to change the mindset in Pakistan where there is a growing feeling that negotiations are the only way to resolve long-standing issues. Mr Bush’s policies have helped India fight its own terrorism.

For the next decade or so, India’s diplomacy should have a laser-like focus on one primary goal: speedy economic growth. Would the partnership with the USA help India hasten the pace of economic growth? Yes, of course; therefore, in India’s national interest, this partnership is justified.

It is by far the greatest achievement of the Singh administration, and its diplomatic corps deserves applause for its hard work, bold initiative and creative imagination.

USING LEAKS AS POLITICAL TOOLS

Revenge politics and Press freedom

ND BATRA
From The Statesman

In 2003 CIA asked diplomat Joseph Wilson to investigate whether Saddam Hussein procured uranium (yellow cakes) from Niger. Wilson found no evidence and was publicly critical of the Bush administration for making such a claim.

Immediately after Wilson’s critical report, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote that “two senior administration officials” told him that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA secret agent working on weapons of mass destruction issues. The information was leaked to him to discredit Ambassador Wilson and to compromise his wife’s career.

The true culprit in this diabolical case is the columnist Novak, who violated the law. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act, enacted in 1982 to protect undercover CIA agents, makes it a crime to intentionally identify a covert agent.

Judith Miller, The New York Times reporter, who never published her story but might have talked with some White House officials about the leak, was subpoenaed to reveal whom she talked to. But she refused. While Miller has chosen to go to jail to protect her First Amendment freedom to gather news, another journalist, Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper, privy to the leak, has agreed to testify before the grand jury but only after **Time** handed over the source of the leak to investigators.

Recently, The New York Times wrote that it was “a proud and awful moment” for the newspaper because of one of its reporters, Judith Miller, “has decided to accept a jail sentence rather than testify before a grand jury about one of her confidential sources.”

In the USA, authorities give journalists hell by using subpoena power. Journalists cultivate confidential sources to uncover corruption; and sometimes they know more about a case than crime investigators. Jim Taricani, a Rhode Island television reporter, was put under house arrest for four months for his refusal to disclose the source of the videotape showing a state official taking bribes from an undercover law enforcement informant. Whistle-blowers leak documents or talk on the promise of confidentiality to reporters. Reporters must report if they have information that impacts society. Not to report truth would be not only complicity in crime but also an unethical and unprofessional behaviour.

Sometimes courts, and even legislatures, issue subpoenas demanding information including notes, photos and videos that have not even been published, failing which they exercise contempt power. Contempt power tends to chill freedom of the Press. Why? Because journalists would dread going behind public relations handouts to find out the truth about the misbehaviour of public men.

State shield laws that are supposed to protect journalists from unnecessary disclosures are not always helpful. “In opinion after opinion,” says the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Agents of Discovery, report, “judges fail to acknowledge any special role for the media in a democratic society, or any public interest in ensuring that the media remain impartial and disinterested both in perception and reality.”

American society, for more than four decades, has been struggling with how to strike a balance between the news media’s obligation to do investigative reporting by cultivating confidential sources and the needs of the courts and law enforcement for access to crucial information that journalists might possess.

When a journalist is the only source of information that constitutes a crucial piece of evidence in a legal case, information so compelling that without revealing its source there is a danger of justice being miscarried, in such a circumstance the source must be revealed regardless of the promise of confidentiality. The right to a fair trial is no less important than freedom of the Press. But how do you draw strike the balance?

With time, the US Supreme Court began to use a “preferred position balance theory” in deciding conflicts between freedom of the Press and other rights.

In numerous rulings, the court held that some freedoms, especially those granted by the First Amendment (freedom of speech and the Press), are fundamental to a free society and consequently deserving of more protection than other constitutional values. Nonetheless, freedom of the Press does not trump all other rights, especially the constitutionally guaranteed right of a person to a fair trial that may require access to crucial evidence in the possession of a journalist. Thus by giving freedom of the Press a preferred position in balance with other rights, the government bears the burden of proof that forcing a journalist to disclose his news source is absolutely necessary.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post depended upon a confidential source, Deep Throat, for their path breaking investigative reporting about Watergate that brought President Nixon down. Mark Felt, who revealed himself recently as Deep Throat, could not alone have brought down Richard Nixon. Leaks from the office of independent investigator Kenneth Starr enabled reporters to uncover the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Corporate whistle-blowers disclose corrupt accounting practices, faulty products and other malfeasances to journalists so that society might benefit.

But what happens if a confidential source is revealed? It damages the reporter-source relationship and threatens the news organisation’s image of independence. When sources suspect a collusion between law enforcement and news organisations, trust is lost. Free flow of accurate and reliable information is choked; and power begins to corrupt.

An independent judiciary and a responsible free Press are the watchdogs of an open, secular, democratic society; and they must be kept apart. Reporters must not become tools of vindictive officials or political operatives, as columnist Novak chose to become by revealing Valerie Plame’s name.

Now that we know the truth that a source of leak was the White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, a trusted confidante of President Bush, let the law take its course and the guilty be punished.

Food Chauvinism

Fascism of food
N.D. Batra
From The Statesman

The French were crestfallen after Paris lost to London in the 2012 Summer Olympics bid and more so because a day earlier French President Jacques Chirac had said about Britain that it’s difficult to trust people who eat such “bad food” and whose only contribution to European agricultural was mad cow disease.

The unsavoury remarks from someone whom the British media called “a man full of bile” might have affected the Olympics committee in its final choice. But there is no gainsaying the fact that the French do feel immensely proud of their food and wines, which are among the best in the world. About food one cannot be politically correct for too long. Britain is not known for great cuisine. Nor is the United States of America, except for its abundance.

A few years ago, I met Second Lieutenant Jerome Bibeyran, a handsome young man from Ecole Speciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, who was visiting Norwich University under an exchange program. I never fully appreciated what the Scottish poet Robert Burns said, “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursel’s as others see us!” I was to work with SLT. Bibeyran on his thesis on “crisis communication” with special reference to how Monsanto, the agribusiness giant, was dealing with the furore over genetically modified (GM) food. I had written an occasional column about GM food, butterflies and Prince Charles, but never understood the depth of hostility against the technology, especially in Europe.

In the course of time, I began to wonder how the French look at the American society. With SLT. Bibeyran’s consent, I decided to assume the dual role of a mentor and journalist, as we went along probing the topic of crisis communication. SLT. Bibeyran had come up with very probing questions regarding how Monsanto seemed to be handling the public relations crisis.

The preliminary research he had done gave him some idea about the nature of the communication problem. Monsanto had concentrated on the American farmer and did a very good job but ignored the consumer, especially in Europe where many people began to associate the British mad cow disease with GM, calling it Frankenstein food.

The growth and distribution of GM food is heavily regulated in France. Labeling is a requirement, something to which American GM food companies are totally opposed. There are no doubt big agri-businesses in France too and only one per cent of the working population is engaged in farming, but it is possible to have farm fresh produce.

Jerome talked about the weekend farmers market in his hometown Bordeaux, southwest France, where people buy fresh produce as they do in Vermont in the summer, or in India throughout the year. I asked him what the French thought about American food. In December 1999, he said, a lone French farmer demonstrated in front of McDonald’s protesting that he was fed up with American “mal-bouffe,” but the media gave the one-man protest so much publicity that overnight he became a national protest symbol. Nevertheless, he hastened to add, young people, especially in the 13-18 age group, do like to eat American fast food especially when they go to the movies.

I drew his attention to a New York Times article on GM food. It quoted Pierre Lellouche, a Gaullist member of the French Parliament committee on environmental safety, who said, “The general sense here is that Americans eat garbage food, that they’re fat and they don’t know how to eat properly.” Jerome hesitated for a moment and then replied with utmost frankness: “Yes, American food is full of fat. Vegetables are not properly cooked. They taste like plastic. Everything has the same flavour.” I was not expecting this reaction but liked his honesty.

The French palate may be difficult to please, but many Indians visiting home have expressed similar prejudice: food tastes better in India, they say. In my younger days when I taught at St. Xavier’s College (Ahmedabad), we had a group of five exchange students from Harvard University. I gave some of them a crash course in Hindi and one night at a dinner I asked the group what they thought of Indian food. One of them said, “Spicy food has killed your taste buds. You don’t know what the real food tastes like.” I almost choked on the morsel. American vegetables taste like plastic and Indians’ taste buds are dead! Food generates such strong feelings in people!

But to get back to Jerome. What do the French in general think about the USA, I asked, trying to get out of the soup. Everybody in France has an American dream, he said. People envied him when they came to know that he was going to visit the USA. The French, he said, are fascinated with American technology, with America in general because everything is bigger here.

But soon the critic surfaced again and SLT Bibeyran let me have it straight: “Americans are the biggest wastrels in the world. The have lost a real sense of life. They don’t enjoy simple things, which are close to nature. They are messing up food, from the farm to the dinner plate.” President Chirac might have been too provocative in his remarks about Brits and their cuisine but he is certainly not alone how the French feel about others’ taste buds.

CREATIVITY AND DIVERSITY

Diversity matters
From The Statesman
ND BATRA

This is an age of smart ideas. Ideas are potential assets.
Creativity matters and sets a nation apart. There’s a new frenzy for reaching customers through newer modes of communications, including product placement in television programmes.

The busiest shopping season in the USA has always been Thanksgiving through Christmas, but for businesses it is too risky to depend solely upon the holiday season for profitability, market share or even survival. Which has led advertising and marketing agencies to find creative ways of persuading buyers to open their wallets. A decline of even 1 per cent in holiday sales ripples through every trailer park and leaves many people shivering in the cold. So shoppers are being offered unprecedented discounts on sales of all kinds of goods from cars to carpets to offset a bad holiday season, if it were to occur.

Even the pharmaceutical industry, especially the prescription drug industry, has entered into the game of direct marketing. Any idea that brings the shopper to the mall and seduces her to fill up the shopping cart is an invaluable asset. The USA desperately seeks ideas that can make things happen, whether it is to catch Al-Qaida operatives; or to persuade the shopper to take out the credit card and spend whether she has the money or not in the bank.

But how do you turn an idea into an innovation and bring it to the marketplace? “I am your idea”, said an Accenture blurb sometime ago.“One day you’ll look for me and I’ll be gone.” Ideas are ephemeral unless you grab them and make them do something. Make ideas work by sharing with people who know how to turn them into innovations and tangible goods.

Occasionally in social gatherings, someone would buttonhole me and say: India has some of the world’s brightest economists, why can’t their ideas be turned into something that would speed up economic growth in India? At such moments I nod in wonderment.

India is full of bright minds, indeed! And they would be returning to India especially with the introduction of dual citizenship, a brilliant idea that would generate unprecedented opportunities for investment in India. Besides, every time there is some discussion about India’s economic growth, naturally China’s sustained economic growth of 8-10 per cent during the last two decades comes up for comparison. Two decades ago both the countries were struggling at the same level of poverty.

But one day the Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had a revelation: Capitalism is good, he mumbled after returning from a visit to the USA. Make money, not revolution. And the floodgates of entrepreneurial spirit opened up in China, even without political freedom.

Keith Bradsher of The New York Times wrote sometime ago that China, “by quickly converting much of its economy to an unfettered and even rapacious version of capitalism, has surged far ahead…. China has high-speed freeways, modern airports and highly efficient ports that are helping it dominate a growing number of manufacturing industries.”

In a matter of years, China has become a manufacturing hub of the world, sucking most foreign direct investments. It looks like all ships are sailing to and fro from China. China’s miracle is not based on any grandiose economic theory, but on a few simple ideas: Excellent law and order conditions; good transportation and communications facilities; and the courage to let the people make money. But this column is about ideas, how to take them from one field and make them work in another, for example, from the battlefield to the marketplace. Americans are good at this; for example, American advertisers are using Jean Piaget’s theory of child development, sensory experiences and visual stimulation to sell EZ Squirt Ketchup to grownups. Said Alissa Quart in Wired, “Piaget is only the beginning. Just as the pharmaceutical industry steers medical research, marketing and advertising are beginning to guide the way scholars investigate brain functions, perception, and language.”

Consider, for example, cognitive science, a multidisciplinary area that includes psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and computer science. At the highest level, it is associated with the study of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, but at the market level its ideas are being increasingly used to study “the psychology of acquisition and the science of material desire”, for better marketing and placement of products, anything from toys and cereals to jeans. What’s wrong with that? Ask some professors who make a lot of money in consultations. Many of us do have qualms about turning the academia into a handmaid of the marketplace but in the USA various fields of intellectual endeavour are not sealed shut from each other. Ideas flow from one field to another and flourish wherever they find the best applications, whether it is the shopping cart or fighting terrorism.

It is all about the psychology of desire that transforms an idea into an asset; turns driving a car into love and adventure; turns zeros and ones into an outsourcing industry. In the ultimate analysis, it is all about creativity, the third pillar of New Economics, the perpetual cycle of growth; the other two being venture capitalism that dares to turn the untried into wealth; and infrastructure that includes security and the rule of law.

DIGITAL SPIES, NOWHERE TO HIDE

cyber age: ND Batra
From The Statesman
Digital spies, nowhere to hide

From time to time many US Senators say how deeply concerned they are the way the USA is gradually slipping into a low-intensity surveillance society. Since the terrorist attacks four year ago, there’s a diffused sense of insecurity, which flares up occasionally. The Americans are quietly submitting to whatever brings them a feeling of assuredness. While they protest against intrusiveness by the government, businesses dig into their personal lives with near impunity. Protests remain muted.

Senator Shelby told a congressional privacy caucus a few years ago, “It would appear that while you use the Internet, the Internet is using you. You can get more information of a computer (about an individual) than a wiretap. What concerns me is the national implications to this.” The Senator was referring to web bugs and other online surveillance devices that 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 it in its privacy policy.

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 web bugs are different. These tracking technology devices can be programmed to collect whatever data is required without the user’s knowledge. For example, a web bug can be programmed to look at a data file on a networked desktop without leaving a trace that data has been touched at all.

When you look at your online mutual fund statement, the web bug too could be monitoring it. A few companies do inform their visitors about the tracking devices they use and for what purposes. Some companies use web beacon, a single-pixel picture, to count and identify users. A web beacon can track whether a particular message, including junk mail, has been opened and acted upon or not. 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. Web portals/search companies claim that the information enables them to personalise the surfing experience when a frequent user visits their sites. Some use beacons to do demographic research on behalf of their clients, but assert that no personally identifiable information gathered from the beacon research is shared with the clients.

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. 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 USA 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.

In July 2001, for example, Acme Rent-a-Car of New Haven, Connecticut charged one of its renters $400 for exceeding the speed limit, which it tracked with GPS; but the Connecticut department of consumer protection sided with the renter and did not allow Acme to collect the fine.

It also raised an intriguing legal question whether a private car company can act as traffic police and penalise the offender.

Many airports have been using digital fingerprint identification technology from Visionics Corporation 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; for example, a man with sunglasses could not be identified with face recognition technology. So far no terrorist has been apprehended by face recognition technology, but the security business is booming the USA. 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.

What’s our digital future? 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. It may not increase security, but it surely is going to be multi-billion dollar business, thanks to the perpetuation of fear created by Al-Qaida. How ironic that terrorism creates business opportunities for some.

All that's news but no ethics

cyber age: ND Batra
From The Statesman

Ethical cleansing: All that’s news

This is the Internet age. News spreads instantly. To set the world on fire, you don’t need six degrees of separation. In May, Newsweek’s report about the Koran being desecrated was based on an anonymous government source, which turned out to be false and caused massive streets protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where 15 innocent people were killed.

Newsweek’s apology and retraction has not helped the credibility crisis of news media. Newsweek saw something scoop-worthy and succumbed to the temptation of reporting it. That’s what tabloids do. Of course, since the uncovering of Abu Gharib prison abuses, there has been widespread suspicion that similar abuses might have been taking place in the Guantanamo Bay prison facility also.

This is a variation on profiling mentality, that is, you have a mental picture of something and you go on imposing it on similar looking situations. But that is not journalism. Sometimes the US news media is too deferential to the White House and faithfully reports what it is told; but at other times, it behaves as if whatever the government says must be false. The attitude of healthy scepticism, trust but verify, which distinguished US news media before 9/11, has not altogether vanished but has certainly become subdued.

Under the pressure of the 24/7 instant media flow, news organisations sometimes too hastily give up their gatekeeping functions and betray our trust, in spite of their good intentions. It is not only about the Bush administration’s pre-war propaganda about the weapons of mass destruction, which most American news media lapped up without much questioning, and later on began to discover to their dismay how wrong they were.

Some of them, for example, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have indulged in the luxury of critical self-examination, and published lengthy analysis why they ceased to think independently and swallowed the official line about weapons of mass destruction.

The American media mindset, excessively partisan or deferential, can be dangerous to the world. The behaviour of American media, especially after 9/11, shows that freedom of the Press does not necessarily lead to independent and objective reporting and analysis. American news media, especially wire services such as the Associated Press, dominate worldwide news gathering and dissemination.

They are the eyes and ears of the world in the sense that we see the world as much as they want us to see it and the way they want us to see it. This might sound like a conspiracy theory, but should we always trust news media? It is not so much their biases and prejudices in the selection and exclusion of stories; it is the matter of reporting facts that could be verified.

Because the world depends upon them about what is happening, they have an ethical responsibility to go behind the story and uncover the truth before they publish what they garner at the first attempt. Of course, sometimes it is a major dilemma for news media how to deal with events that are happening at a warp speed; nonetheless, disclaimers and caveats, or subsequent apologies and retractions, do not go far enough in explaining what is real and what is fabrication.

In an environment of distrust and fear, people would accept anything, even if it were a hoax. On the eve of Halloween on 30 October1938, when war drums were getting louder in Europe, the famed Hollywood actor Orsen Welles created widespread panic in Grover Mills, a small town in New Jersey, by broadcasting the hoax that Martians (based on HG Wells’ War of the Worlds) had landed in the town. Some people rushed to their churches believing that the end of the world had come while others got ready to fight the Martians.

Radio was the major news source in those days and people accepted as truth whatever they heard on radio. Welles wanted to debunk that blind faith with his radio hoax but instead aroused the wrath of the people and Congress.

The Federal Communication Commission would impose a criminal penalty on any station broadcasting a hoax today. While the Welles radio hoax fooled only the ordinary folks of New Jersey and no serious material harm was done, but it does show what rumours and hoaxes posturing as news could do.

Newsweek’s unverified story not only killed innocent people but also further spoiled the already tarnished image of the USA in the Muslim and Arab world.

Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “perpetrators were prisoners, not guards…. the most serious desecrations of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were committed by the Muslim inmates themselves. Some of the most inflammatory allegations, such as guards flushing a Koran, appear to be the result of unsubstantiated rumours spread by inmates who may have been following Al Qaida instructions to falsely claim mistreatment. Or maybe they were simply trying to deflect blame for all the Korans they were mutilating.”

Regardless of the Pentagon’s conclusion based on Brigadier- General Jay Hood’s internal investigation that no desecration occurred, and Newsweek’s retraction and apology, it is going to be difficult to undo the damage to public diplomacy. The Afghanistan Islamic clergy once again has demanded, “Whoever is responsible for these crimes should be handed over to an Islamic country to face trial.”

India's Economic Growth as a "Virtuous Cycle"

India readying plan for China-like grip on US

India and knowledge economy

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Recently, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the establishment of a National Knowledge Commission, “on matters relating to institutions of knowledge production, knowledge use and knowledge dissemination”. Which is recognition of the fact that India like the USA and other developed countries is moving toward an information technology and knowledge-based economy.

According to the World Development Report 1999-2000, most advanced economies today are “truly knowledge-based”, in which “the balance between knowledge and resources has shifted so far towards the former that knowledge has become perhaps the most important factor determining the standard of living — more than land, tools and labour”. Today’s technologically advanced economy is a triangulation of knowledge, labour and capital. But the driving force is knowledge produced by information technology, innovations which make labour and capital more efficient, the kind of knowledge that is being generated in India’s technology parks in places like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon and so on.

A handful of technology-based knowledge producing cities could lift the whole country through surging ripple effects. Technology-based knowledge, unlike capital and labour, is inexhaustible and is “non-rivalrous”, as economists say. Sharing knowledge does not diminish it, though patent and copyright protections may be essential. But there is a caveat. In a thought-provoking essays, “Beyond Information Revolution”, published in The Atlantic Monthly a few years ago, Peter Drucker said “bribing knowledge workers”, who are leading the Information Revolution, with stock options and other incentives may in the long run prove nonproductive and even disastrous in the 21st century. The dotcom bubble bust gave us much to think about.

Drucker talked about Victorian England, where some of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution were developed. Because of the British class system which valued a “gentleman” more than engineers, traders and entrepreneurs, the industrial leadership passed on to the USA and Germany in the 1850s. England raised Cecil Rhodes, Robert Clive, East India Company (a trading rather than a manufacturing venture) and commercial banks but no venture capitalist, like JP Morgan in the USA, a person “who has the means and mentality to finance the unexpected and unproven”. Drucker is right about venture capitalists who are mostly responsible for the information technology growth in the USA, though we should not forget the role of the federal government because initially The National Science Foundation and the Pentagon financed the Internet’s development. No less important than the venture capitalist, it is the idea of the Internet — open standards and communal sharing of software — which has bred the Information Revolution.

Drucker said that at the heart of the Information Revolution is not the computer, which at best is a tool to routinise information processes; nor is it software, which is nothing but “the reorganisation of traditional work, based on centuries of experience, through the application of knowledge and especially of systematic, logical analysis”. It is rather the creation of knowledge, which is fuelling the next wave of the Information Revolution. Paul M Kennedy of Yale speculated in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Economic Powers (1989) that since the USA had become a global robocop and was spreading its economic resources too thinly, it too would meet the fate of the earlier imperial powers, which had declined by overextending themselves. But look what has actually happened. Instead of economic and political decline, the USA is going through a healthy economic growth period, in spite of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2000 dotcom bust, outsourcing, and recent corporate scandals. The unemployment rate is 5.1 per cent, which is the envy of the world, thanks to technology-based knowledge and venture capitalism. The future economic growth, according to Drucker, would come not so much from the booming stock market and Internet industry; but from those industries where the knowledge worker would be as important as the financier or the capitalist, for example, biotechnology where the gestation period is long and rewards for workers cannot be stock-market driven.

He suggested that since “performance in these new knowledge industries will come to depend upon running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers”, we would have to do something else, something symbolic, for example, giving knowledge workers the status of “fellow executives and partners”. In the knowledge factories of the 21st century, there will be hired workers. You may call them principals and partners and give them flexible work hours or freedom to work-wherever-you-go with the wireless laptops. But there would still be the need for command and control and visions of venture capitalists.

While the mandate of the Knowledge Commission is to sharpen India’s “knowledge edge”, and “promote excellence in the education system to meet the knowledge challenges of the 21st Century”, the greater need is to create a system where entrepreneurs and venture capitalists grow and accept the challenge of “the unexpected and unproven”.

The Knowledge Commission should study how the marketplace, apart from the universities and the IITs, could be harnessed to create knowledge that generates innovations that can raise India’s growth permanently in a kind of what economists such as Stanford’s Paul Romer and others call as “a virtuous cycle”.

No Captain could have saved the Titanic

cyber age: From The Statesman
Globalisation exposes India’s dilemmas
ND Batra

Globalisation has raised the curtain on India, exposing its strength and its weaknesses. So it is not unusual to come across a person asking a question, such as: If Indians are so smart, why are there so many poor?
The quick answer is that corruption and poor fiscal management have bogged down India.

But on the other hand, many fast growing Asian countries, including China, have not been free from these problems either. Of course, one could blame the socialist politics of the post-Independence generation that believed that a bad shaving blade made in India was a sign of self-reliance and spiritual strength. It is true to some extent that protectionism and crony capitalism of the socialist era proved a poor substitute for the challenge and response of the competition of the marketplace.

Initially the foreign exchange crisis of the early 1990s forced India to open up its doors to privatisation and market economy. But India was sucked into globalisation aided by the information revolution that had begun to sweep the world.

India’s diaspora, especially in the IT field, began to show its unusual ingenuity for developing new products and services as well as for solving complicated problems, including those arising from Y2K.
Bangalore was able to leapfrog its poor infrastructure and transformed itself into a cyber module that smoothly docked with the rising digital world, thanks to Indian satellite technology, which ironically developed during the era of socialism and self-reliance.

While the spectacular success of Bangalore and IT showed what India could do for the world, at the same time it exposed India’s vulnerabilities, its slow-moving rural economy, massive shortfalls in investment for infrastructure development, more than 300 million illiterate people, and a high rate of underemployed and unemployed people.

The world began to look at India’s underbelly, as it were, and the exposure has challenged Indian sensibilities. Indian policymakers and intellectuals began to grapple with the problem of slow growth and rising expectations as never before.

Bimal Jalan, former Governor of Reserve Bank of India, has argued in his book, The Future of India: Politics, Economics, and Governance, that the euphoria created by IT and other industries might not last, not unless India develops the political will to succeed.

Mr Jalan suggests that a stronger Parliament and more powerful judiciary would make politicians and bureaucrats more accountable and responsive to public needs. Individuals who exercise political power should be made answerable for not only how they make use of the power vested in them but also whether they achieve their goals.

“If ‘powers’ can be exercised without collective responsibility, then there is an equally strong case for ministers to take individual responsibility for their ‘duties’ in certain vital areas like poverty alleviation,” says Mr Jalan.

But some problems are systemic and individuals can do so much, howsoever honest they may be. Poverty reduction depends on the rate of economic growth and how widespread and decentralised are the economic opportunities. The system as a whole has to be geared to growth, which means a national consensus on growth strategies rather than holding any individual minister responsible for poverty reduction.

Mr Jalan leaps to a surprising generality: “If there were no corruption, India’s growth rate would have been eight per cent per annum in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than close to six per cent.” I don’t know how Mr Jalan came to this 20/20 hindsight of econometric calculations, but being a banker and economist he must have done his homework before writing the book. If economic growth jumps to eight-nine per cent, would that be an indication that corruption level has dropped in India?

How strong is the correlation between corruption and economic growth? How strong is the correlation between infrastructure and economic growth? What are the other factors of growth?

If India cannot eliminate corruption immediately, or to put it in another way, if corruption is a social constant (C), are there other factors that can be manipulated to spur growth to a double digit?

That’s the challenge; nevertheless, that does not obviate the necessity of reducing corruption. The source of corruption is unaccounted exercise of power, of course. Elected officials can be removed, though one might say cynically, only to be replaced by another bunch of corrupt people. But democracies do have methods of dealing with corrupt people in high places.

There is a two-fold solution to the problem. Public accountability through media exposé, especially the Internet and television, as the American experience shows, is a strong corrective. Second, privatisation could act as an antidote to corruption because it takes power away from bureaucrats and gives it to entrepreneurs and corporate leaders.

But they too, as the American experience shows, abuse power. Nevertheless, if laws were enforced rigorously, the corrupt would find their rightful place in jails as many American CEOs have discovered. Fighting corruption is a never-ending process. So is the case with poverty.

Dedicated ministers no doubt have a crucial role to play and some do so with great gusto, for example, India’s energy minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, who has put India on the world energy map. India has begun to make a giant, energy sucking sound.

A person of similar zeal and dedication is needed for controlling the spread of AIDS. India should appoint a high-powered AIDS czar and give him necessary funds and authority and make him accountable for fighting the disease, which is much more widespread than we have been given to believe.

There are other areas where individual ministers could be held accountable for doing their duties well and fulfilling their political commitments, but on the whole in a parliamentary system, as Mr Jalan knows, it is the collective responsibility that matters. It is not only the captain who matters, but it is the ship as a whole.
No captain could have saved The Titanic.

Watching India race to the top

CYBER AGE From The Statesman
India’s strength and ingenuity
ND BATRA

India is becoming an integral part of the globalised economy and is clearly thriving on the synergy between multinational corporations and its indigenous strengths, which come from a high quality of education from its top universities, democratic institutions that create transparency, and the ingenuity of its people for innovative solutions to complex problems.

A few years ago, I was paired to play golf with a South Korean businessman, let’s call him Tom Chung, who was visiting the USA for business and to meet his children studying in New England. He was keenly interested in India, where he had established a manufacturing facility for an ancillary product in collaboration with a local industrialist in western India. At the fifth hole my curiosity got the better of me and I asked Chung: How do you compare Indian and Chinese workers? He smiled thoughtfully and said, “Chinese workers are hardworking but they need clear instructions, a blueprint to follow, to complete the work. Indian workers are probably not as self-disciplined and hardworking as the Chinese, but they are resourceful and ingenious. If there is a problem, they won’t sit down and wait for someone to come and help them. They would find creative ways to solve the problem. If something were broken or missing, they would improvise a substitute and fix it.”

Being familiar with American pop culture, Chung called it “the MacGyver positive”: Don’t just sit down. Do something and get out of the trouble. MacGyver was the protagonist of a 1980s TV series in which he showed his uncanny ingenuity at making complicated machines out of ordinary things. In the pilot episode, for example, MacGyver used his remarkable ingenuity by using an unusual tool, chocolate, in sealing a dangerous leak from an underground lab and rescued the trapped scientists. Indian workers, even those who don’t have much education, Chung said, display the same aptitude for innovativeness.

Call it junkyard ingenuity, but it is so widespread in India that it is almost a national trait. Today, India and the USA, for example, talk of strategic partnership, peaceful nuclear technology transfer, and energy cooperation, but there was a time when the USA treated India as a pariah.

In 1991, for example, the US state department banned the sale of computers to India that could do more than 900 million operations per second. How did India respond? In no time, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing developed a powerful series, Param-1000, which at that time was one of the most powerful computers of its kind, capable of diversity of applications in fields such as engineering, business, industry, space and nuclear technology.

Indian ingenuity served the supercomputing needs of the Indian scientific community and made possible the development and enhancement of India’s nuclear weapons programme, however controversial. The USA’s ubiquitous eye in the sky, the orbiting American satellites, could not detect the preparation of Pokhran because the Indian space scientists had precisely calculated the orbits of the satellites and worked around them to escape notice. But this high-end technological ingenuity grew up on the foundation laid by some of the brightest Indians of the 20th century, men like CV Raman, S Chandrashekhar, Har Gobind Khurana, SN Bose, Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, and not the least, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose rational and scientific outlook on life guided him to establish some of the finest science laboratories and institutions of higher learning.

Indian ingenuity is written all over the Silicon Valley from the co-founding of Sun Microsystems to the development of Pentium, PowerPoint, Hotmail, streaming video, digital satellite television, MPEG audio compression standard, and much more, as wonderfully told by Shivanand Kanavi in his book, Sand to Silicon: The Amazing Story of Digital Technology. But Kanavi forgot to discuss the contribution of one of the most brilliant innovative minds in India today, Faqir Chand Kohli, the doyen of Indian software development and outsourcing and the chairman emeritus of Tata Consultancy Services.

Speaking with Manjeet Kriplani of Business Week last year, Kohli echoed what the South Korean businessman Chung had told me at the golf links: “Big companies are geared up for incremental innovation. For us in India, the cost of doing innovative technology is very low.
The capability of India is its people. We can assemble more good and intelligent people than anywhere in the world. I admire China, but our people are better.India has ingenuity. If an ordinary car mechanic is aided by computers and simulation, his productivity leaps.”

At 80 plus, Kohli has given himself a new mission: To harness digital technology for spreading mass education, especially in India’s more than a half million villages.

Ingenuity is another name for what systems experts call as “equifinality,” which means transcending a system’s limitations by finding an alternative route to reach the same goal. A creative and ingenious mind becomes restless when he hits a wall and asserts, there has to be another way; and he improvises by transferring intelligence from one application to another.

But individual entrepreneurial ingenuity has its limitations. Bangalore could transcend the limitations of its poor infrastructure, power and transportation, for example, by building captive power plants and satellite communications to reach its outsourcing clients in the USA and elsewhere. But the shining city on the hill has left rest of the country far behind. Now the question is whether Indian ingenuity and its “swarming intelligence”, to borrow a term from the science of emergence, can be applied to collective action to build 24/7 reliable highways, ports, railroads, power plants and airports to compete with a super-competitive China.

INDIA CAN DO BUT WHAT ABOUT INFRASTRUCTURE?

CYBER AGE

India’s infrastructural woes
From The Statesman
BY ND BATRA

In the early 1990s, power generation was thrown open to the private sector but India still suffers from frequent blackouts and brownouts, which makes me wonder whether the goal of electric power for everyone in the country by 2012 would be easily reached. It was thought that if you opened up the economy, investors would come in droves; but foreign investors don’t seem to be attracted to risking their capital in the power sector.

Without eliminating chronic power shortages, India would find it difficult to attract foreign investment in the newly approved special economic zones (SEZs) and continue falling behind China in economic growth. There is just not enough power available but wherever it is available the supply is not reliable. Industrial states like Maharashtra and Karnataka, for example, encounter four-eight hours of power outage in peak months.

Power theft, transmission and distribution losses, and other technical problems drain 40 per cent of power. Half the rural population is still without electricity. According to experts, India needs to add 10,000 megawatts of electricity per year for the next decade, which would require an investment of $180 billion, a great opportunity for the private sector if the investment climate is made attractive.

But how do you rebuild the confidence of the investor after what happened to the $2.9 billion Dabhol power plant, originally backed by Enron Corp, one of the biggest foreign investment projects in the country? The Maharashtra State Electricity Board, which like most other state public utilities, has been run like a public charity, could not afford to pay contractual Dabhol rates, and the plant was closed. It was a monumental embarrassment that this kind of failure in foreign collaboration should have occurred in India’s most industrialised state, which contributes 25 per cent to India’s GDP and has the potential to rival California.

Privatisation of production is meaningless unless producers are allowed to make a fair return on their investment. Multinational corporations invest to make money for their shareholders. They are not interested in giving free or subsidised power to farmers, however socially desirable that may be. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. GE and the construction firm Bechtel Group, which bought Enron’s majority interest in Dabhol after the scandal-struck US company went belly up, are in the final stages of negotiation to sell their majority stakes to a consortium of Indian financial institutions. The consortium would reportedly turn over the management to the National Thermal Power Corp. and Gas Authority of India and the power plant might be working soon.

The revival of the moribund power plant would be a confidence-building measure and would hopefully attract more investment in the power field.

India’s need for investment in electric power is fathomless; and so is the case with harbours, airports, drinking water, railroads and highways in order for an 8-10 per cent economic growth, which is necessary to create employment opportunities for a growing youth population - India’s greatest asset.

Most high-strung nationalists and economic experts think in terms of India’s place in the world economy; for example, where India would be vis-à-vis China, Japan or the USA in the next 10 years. But they are missing the point, as did the Vajpayee government, that: The immediate goal of rapid economic growth and its ultimate measure is poverty reduction by generating opportunities for employment, especially for the rural population, about 600 million, which mostly depend upon agriculture.

An indifferent monsoon casts a grim shadow on the rural landscape. Rural India should not continue to be a hostage to nature’s vagaries.

India’s rural population is too heavily dependent upon agriculture. Most of the rural workers should be absorbed into agro-industries, manufacturing and service industries, and that again would necessitate massive investment in building new infrastructure and modernising the existing one.

A case in point is the Mumbai Trans-Harbour bridge, connecting Mumbai to Navi Mumbai. It should have been completed two decades ago. To suggest that it is party politics or the slowness of democracy that prevents projects of such magnitude to be completed on time is poor thinking.

Retarded political behaviour is not the essence of democracy; otherwise the USA would have been a Third World country. It is freedom with accountability that makes the USA a nation in perpetual motion.

Poor infrastructure adds to the cost of production and that’s one reason why India finds it difficult to compete with Asian countries like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and China, for example. At times it seems that India is like a giant stuck in a swamp, struggling to get out.

But if the challenge-response theory has any merit, India has no choice but to get out of the swamp, upgrade its clogged roads and overcrowded airports, eliminate frequent power outages and scuttle the red tape. Growing prosperity in India and rising expectations abroad “that India can do” are creating compelling conditions for the government to put its act together.

India’s software and outsourcing industry has been quite ingenious in transcending the poverty of infrastructure by building its own captive power plants and establishing satellite communications with its clients abroad. But to expand the manufacturing base for domestic employment and for export, India has little choice but to modernise its infrastructure, and the most efficient way is through a combination of public and private investments.

It is no longer a question of survival but building “The New India” about which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

AN INDIA THAT CAN DO

CYBER AGE

An India that does

From The Statesman

BY ND BATRA

India has been exciting the world’s imagination for sometime and many investors have begun to have a fresh look at the country and explore its potentials as an alternative to China.

George Evans, the director of international equities at the Oppenheimer Funds, Inc is one of them, who has been “much more enthused about India than China”.

International investors want growth with protection for their shareholders and India seems attractive because its legal system including property and contract law is well developed, Evans was quoted as saying in a Canadian newspaper, the Financial Post.

“India has some fantastic world class companies,” including Infosys Technolgies, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, among the software companies for which India has become a world leader, and in the growing field of biotechnology, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, where, for example, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd, Ranbaxy, Reliance and others have become international names.

These companies are creating a global buzz, an image of India that can do. The world has begun to trust India. The sentiment is widespread. Familiarising Israeli business leaders about expanding horizons in India, Simon Wasserman, chairman of AON Global, said at a recent conference on outsourcing, “India has everything that a multinational needs. It is a young country with creative minds and a huge market with almost 27 cities with more than a million population.”

In the next few years, according to a recent study by the Confederation of Indian Industry, India would be entering a new threshold of knowledge economy and could emerge as a global hub for specialised knowledge processing for global corporations.

Knowledge economy de pends upon extracting and creating new knowledge from data bases and is in a sense value-added outsourcing. That is an emerging trend, among other growing fields such as auto, genetic engineering, and high-tech healthcare that would transform India in the next decade. Probably the most exciting field of growth is healthcare, which according to the CII study would add seven-eight per cent to GDP and create nine million jobs by 2012.

Pressured by rising costs at home, the Americans have begun to realise that what a good Indian surgeon can do in the USA, he would do the same quality operation at a quarter of the cost in India. The Apollo Hospitals has become a highly regarded international healthcare brand and is attracting many bright young doctors of Indian origin in the USA back to India. Interestingly, as direct flights between India and the USA become more frequent, health tourism that combines Western medicine with yoga and meditation would become commonplace. Open skies tend to open minds as well as wallets.

Will India disappoint the rising global expectations or will it rise to the challenge? One might say that the Central government’s move for the establishment of export-oriented special economic zones (SEZs), recently approved by Parliament, is a partial response to the challenge of rising expectations. China’s special economic zones, where all labour laws seem to have been suspended to attract direct foreign investment, have played a tremendous role in making China an export-based global manufacturing powerhouse.

But India being a democracy couldn’t have ignored the human factor. Dr Manmohan Singh’s government had to drop a clause from the Bill that would have authorised a state government to enact laws “directing that any Act relating to trade unions, industrial and labour disputes, welfare of labour, including conditions of work, provident fund, employers’ liability, workmen’s compensation, invalidity, old age pension and maternity benefits, shall not apply to SEZs”. The insistence of deleting the clause came from the Leftist parties in the coalition government.

In authoritarian China, the ruling Communist Party can do anything; even suspend its own most cherished principles. Democratic India cannot afford to do that, so India’s SEZs might not become as wondrous manufacturing powerhouses as the Chinese. On the other hand, foreign investors might prefer to invest in a place where working conditions are at par with international standards and labour rights have not been vanquished.

Remember, it was Gandhi who started Majoor Mahajan, the textile labour organisation in Ahmedabad. You can’t ignore the old man, the Father of the Nation. But much more is needed to push India’s growth to eight-nine per cent than giving the industry fiscal incentives by setting up special economic zones. One of the biggest hurdles for rapid economic growth in India, according to impartial observers, is the red tape, which takes myriad forms, from expectations of illegal gratifications to turf war.

Quoting Dr Jayanta Roy of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the Financial Times (London) wrote recently, “(A) typical international trade deal from India involved up to 30 separate parties, 257 signatures and 118 copies of the same document. Imports on average sit in Mumbai’s port for up to three weeks compared to 24 hours in ports elsewhere in the world.”

This is one of the biggest challenges that SEZ authorities would face as they attempt to transform India into a nation that can do. In the digital age, business transactions are expected to be speedy and seamless, without which cost advantage that a country with cheap and smart labour like India has would be lost.

MALICE IS NOT JOURNALISM

CYBER AGE BY ND BATRA From The Statesman

Trustworthy news enables good governance

Reporting news is a hazardous job.

In 2004, 53 journalists were killed, 1,146 were maltreated, and more than 600 news organisations were censured worldwide, according to the UN. Last week (3 May) was the 15th World Press Freedom Day, celebrating the theme, “Media and good governance”. The emphasis is upon accountability of those who exercise power, whether political, corporate, religious or social. Power must be used for the good of society and journalists must act as watchdogs. Free, fearless and responsible media advance human rights and lessen tyranny.

In the USA, they don’t kill journalists; but they do give them hell, using the subpoena power. Recently about 30 American journalists have been subpoenaed or questioned about confidential sources used in their reporting. Journalists cultivate confidential sources to uncover corruption and sometimes they know more about a case than crime investigators.

Jim Taricani, a Rhode Island television reporter, was put under house arrest for four months for his refusal to disclose the source of the videotape showing a state official taking bribes from an undercover law enforcement informant. Sometimes whistle-blowers leak documents or talk on the promise of confidentiality to reporters. Reporters must report if they have information that impacts society. Not to report truth would be not only complicity in crime but also an unethical and unprofessional behaviour.

American society, for more than four decades, has been struggling with how to strike a balance between the news media’s obligation to do investigative reporting by cultivating confidential sources and the needs of the courts and law enforcement for access to crucial information that journalists might possess. Sometimes courts, and even legislatures, demand information including photos and videos that have not even been published. They issue subpoenas to get the necessary information, failing which they exercise the contempt power. Contempt power could chill freedom of the Press because journalists would dread going behind public relations handouts to find out the truth about the misbehaviour of public men. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press report, Agents of Discovery, 1,326 subpoenas seeking notes, photos, tapes or testimony, were served on 440 news organisations that responded to the 1999 survey. The situation is no different today. State shield laws that are supposed to protect journalists from unnecessary disclosures are not always helpful.

“In opinion after opinion,” says the report, “judges fail to acknowledge any special role for the media in a democratic society, or any public interest in ensuring that the media remain impartial and disinterested both in perception and reality.”

We have to, however, keep in mind that when a journalist is the only source of information that constitutes a crucial piece of evidence in a legal case, information so compelling that without revealing its source there is a danger of justice being miscarried, in such a circumstance the source must be revealed regardless of the promise of confidentiality.

After all, the right to a fair trial is no less important than freedom of the Press. But where do you strike the balance?

In the course of time, the US Supreme Court began to use “preferred position balance theory” in deciding conflicts between freedom of the Press and other rights.

In numerous rulings, the court held that some freedoms, especially those granted by the First Amendment (freedom of speech and the Press), are fundamental to a free society and consequently deserving of more protection than other constitutional values.

Nonetheless, freedom of the Press does not trump all other rights, especially the constitutionally guaranteed right of a person to a fair trial that may require access to crucial evidence in the possession of a journalist. Thus by giving freedom of the ress a preferred position in balance with other rights, the government bears the burden of proof that forcing a journalist to disclose his news source is absolutely necessary.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post depended upon a confidential source, Deep Throat, for their path-breaking investigative reporting about Watergate that brought President Nixon down. One day we might know the identity of Deep Throat. Leaks form the office of Independent Council Kenneth Starr enabled reporters to uncover the Clinton-Lewinskey affair. Bill Clinton was the second President in a generation who was humiliated but in the process the nation renewed itself. Corporate whistle-blowers disclose corrupt accounting practices, faulty products and other malfeasances to journalists so that society might benefit.

Reporters are not supposed to act as a handmaid of law enforcement. When the court or the government intrudes into the newsroom and news-gathering processes, consequences can be terrible for the freedom of the Press. What happens if information obtained from confidential sources is revealed? It damages the reporter-source relationship and threatens news organisations’ image of independence.

When sources suspect collusion between law enforcement and news organisations, trust is lost. Free flow of accurate and reliable information is choked, and power begins to corrupt. An independent judiciary and a responsible free Press are the watchdogs of an open, secular, democratic society; and they must be kept apart. But journalists do misbehave sometimes and they should be punished. In 2003, CIA asked diplomat Joseph Wilson to investigate whether Saddam Hussein tried to obtain uranium (yellow cakes) from Niger. Wilson found no evidence and was publicly critical of the Bush administration for making such a claim. Immediately after the critical report, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a syndicated column stating that “two senior administration officials” told him that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

Should Novak have published the name of the agent knowing fully well that she might have been killed once her name was known? Journalists should be watchdogs, not mad dogs. Malice is not journalism.

HOLLYWOOD HORRORS

FROM THE STATESMAN BY N.D Batra

Hollywood groans with pain, thanks to new DVD players with built-in editing features that can cut out scenes from a movie that might be deemed obscene and inappropriate for family viewing. Democratisation of digital technology is taking away the artistic control from movie directors and producers. Once again art and letters might become communal, as they were in the age of orality when stories evolved through communal sharing.

Consider Titanic, a great disaster epic and a most riveting love story, which seemed like a family entertainment; but many parents who took their children with them to theatres felt embarrassed to see a nude shot of Kate Winslet and a sexually explicit scene between Leonardo Dicaprio and her. Today many companies such as CleanFlick and CleanFilms sell cleaner versions of movies, without sex, violence and profanities.
As conservative Americans push family values to the forefront, they want to protect their kids from Hollywood’s toxic ideas. They argue that Hollywood, the land of Sodom and Gomorrah, has been responsible for a steep decline in moral values on which the USA was founded. The Hollywood movie rating system from general (G) to restricted (R) was developed by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1968 to regulate itself to avoid outside censorship.

But in the course of time the rating system, meant to provide viewers with informed choices, became porous, and sex, violence and foul language have been creeping into family oriented G-rated movies. It is called category creep. Besides, movie theatres don’t enforce rating restrictions since teenagers are most of the moviegoers and fill their coffers.

Since ratings have become an unreliable indicator of movie contents, conservatives now have the technology to re-edit movies on DVDs and make them suitable for children. In the pre-digital era, parents had no choice but to accept what Hollywood gave them. Empowered by digital technology, they believe that moviemakers and artistes would have to share control with the audience. The tyranny of Hollywood, its cultural hegemony, is over.

The Republican-controlled Congress recently passed the Family Movie Act, which legalises the sale of DVD players that can be programmed to edit obscenities and gory images of violence and rape, and in fact much more. Congressman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, who sponsored the Bill in the House, said, “It’s about families and parents and the rights of parents to raise their children the way they see fit.”
A recent documentary “Bleep! Censoring Hollywood?” explored the issue of editing the artistic work of movie producers without their permission versus parents’ right to control what their kids watch at home on DVDs. The movie industry, some say, driven by greed of global profits, has been giving a short shrift to its social and ethical responsibilities. Box office has been pushing the movie rating system down to the gutters, conservative Americans say.

Marshall Herskovitz, a well-known Hollywood film producer and director, whose credits include Troy and Traffic, wrote a piece in the Tallahassee Democrat in which he made a very valid point regarding the integrity of a work of art in a free society. “The great artistic works of our civilisation are littered with objectionable material: the nude sculpture David, the brutal murder in Crime and Punishment, the horrific blinding in King Lear, and on and on and on. And none of those great works would have been produced without their societies’ commitment to the integrity of the artist.Free of censorship. Free of editing. Free of the distortion of the original work. David was not sculpted with a loin cloth, and one can imagine Michelangelo being less than pleased at such a revision of his masterwork.”

That’s true but no one is asking Hollywood to stop making movies like Sin City, The Passion of the Christ, Saving Private Ryan, and other such movies where every fleeting emotion, passion and desire is visualised and nothing is left to viewers’ imagination.

But if a company buys a DVD of The Passion and cuts out long drawn out scenes of masochistic violence and torture, what is the harm done, especially if the sale of original DVDs is not adversely affected? The artistic integrity of the original movie remains untouched. In fact, taking out what is objectionable from a movie makes it more value-added in the economic sense since more people would be able to buy the sanitised version. Those who want to buy the uncut version could still buy it.

In the past too many works of arts were sanitised, and yet no lasting harm came to them. In 1807, Thomas Bowdler published a four-volume expurgated edition of Shakespeare’s work simply by deleting words and phrases that he thought were improper for performance in the presence of women and children; and so we had the expression “bowdlerize”, though now we call it sanitised. In a sanitised version of King Lear, Cordelia survives and marries Kent in the final Act. We go to museums to see original works of art, but a parody of Mona Lisa does not prevent us from admiring the original. Hollywood does make family-friendly versions of movies for primetime network television, movies that were originally made for the box office, but studios cry foul when some companies do it for the home market.

Movie sanitisation, apart from movie sharing over the Internet, is the greatest challenge that is shaping the future of Hollywood. When Hollywood gets into trouble, can Bollywood, the biggest moviemaker in the world, be left far behind?