India Celebrates Freedom and Democracy

Freedom under the shadow of hope and terror

ND Batra
From The Statesman

On the occasion of India’s Independence Day observed yesterday, while the world has plunged into gloom because of the pre-emptive discovery of the terrorist plot to blow up ten transatlantic airlines ~ only a month after the horrific train attacks in Mumbai ~ I still believe the good will ultimately prevail.

The bonds between the United States and India are very strong. Terrorism will be finally beaten, if the free world continues cooperating. There is so much common between India and the United States that I can’t love one without the other. Freedom deeply rooted in secularism makes every one a productive citizen in the United States, for the simple reason that when an individual cannot assert his superiority or make a special claim on the basis of his race or religion, he has no choice but to show his natural born abilities and talents to succeed, which has turned the United States into a merit-based a society, more or less.

The idea that success, in whatever terms it is defined, is possible for any one with talent, from Wall Street to sports arena, Silicon Valley to Holly-wood, is essentially everyone’s ambition. It is a secular version of the Biblical oration: “If you knock, it shall open until unto you.” The price of not knocking at the door is that you are left in the cold. There’s no choice but to try and try again, which has made the US a highly competitive society.

Secular freedom has proved productive not only in economic terms, but in every field of human endeavor. It breeds in you a sense of equality, dignity and self-worth, and your heart cries out, Go and take the risk. Every field of activity in the United States teems with talented people drawn from various nationalities, cultures, races, and colors. Americans are so unafraid of the otherness of “others,” though it has not always been so if you recall the burning of witches to Japanese-Americans’ incarceration during WWII and the McCarthy era terrorism.

The foundation of secular freedom was laid in the United States with the Declaration of Independence, as it was done in India when Nehru evoked India’s “Tryst with Destiny” at the mid-night hour on the 15th of August 1947. It has been a long struggle to keep up with the demands of secularism, freedom and equality in the United States as it has been in India. The struggle isn’t over. It will never be over. It has been a long struggle when you consider how much it has taken for African-Americans to reach their present status. A generation ago it would have been impossible to think of an African-American woman occupying one of the most powerful diplomatic and political positions in the United States.

The rise of Condoleezza Rice as US Secretary of State demonstrates the truth that talent matters and freedom has many possibilities. So does the rise of a Muslim scientist to become the President of India; a Sikh to become the Prime Minster of India; an Italian-born Christian woman to become the leader of a major political party. The richest man in India is a Muslim. Some of the most successful and glamorous Bollywood personalities are Muslims. Christians in India run some of the best schools, colleges and hospitals. That’s what India should be celebrating. But the elevation of a few in the United States from the dungeon of invisible oppression might also give a misleading impression that all American Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans are upwardly mobile. Far from it.

The painful truth is that racial profiling is a common occurrence in the United States, which prompts the police sometime to shoot first then ask question, if the non-White person, especially if he is Black, Hispanic, or Middle-East/South Asian-looking, is not properly responsive. In India the equivalent of racial profiling is caste-and-religious profiling. A Muslim might be under suspicion for no reason except that terrorism has become associated with Islamic extremism with its hub in Pakistan. Like the United States, India has a long way to go to eliminate blind and irrational prejudice, though the most heartening aspect of it is that no one is giving up the fight. Acceptance of diversity has become a necessary condition for political survival both in India and the United States, which is another fascinating parallel between two great democracies founded on multiculturalism and secularism and now both fighting Islamic terrorism.

For me freedom has no meaning unless it breeds equality in the sense of equal opportunities for everyone, a level playing field where a person can prove his best and give his best and be rewarded for it. That’s more than a personal sentiment if you consider it from India’s national interest. You cannot have a strong market economy in upwardly perpetual motion unless the best and the brightest are allowed to come forward and compete for and expand economic opportunities.

The marketplace, howsoever Darwinian it might be at times—rather than one’s caste, gender, or religion—should determine the competition and reward the best. The government’s obligation is to build the infrastructure, maintain law and order and take care of the poor because the marketplace cannot solve these problems.

It is only through the power of the open marketplace that minorities and other left-behind-people could be integrated into the fabric of India. Hope is the best front against despair and terrorism.

On this Independence Day let’s keep our hearts and minds open, as Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru would have wanted us to do.

TV and Attention Disorder

Make TV children-friendly

From The Statesman
By ND Batra

What happens in the cradle is much more important than what is happening in the killing fields of Iraq and Lebanon.

Children’s brain undergoes rapid development in the early years and exposure to violent and sexually explicit television might interfere in the neural wiring of the brain. Research shows that apart from triggering violent behaviour in children, television may be responsible for obesity in children, because instead of playing outside and doing physical activities children become couch potatoes.

A study published in the journal of the American Academy of Paediatrics showed that early exposure to television by children increases the risk of attention disorder. The research done at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center at the University of Washington, Seattle, led by Dr Dimitri Christakis concluded that for every hour of television viewing by children in the one to three age group, the risk of attention disorder increased by nine per cent.

The study did not mention what kind of content caused attention disorder. Would slow repetitive programmes such as Sesame Street, Mr Roger’s Neighborhood, for example, have the same effect as fast moving programmes such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bugs Bunny? It is important to keep in mind that a child having attention disorder does not necessarily suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADHD children (and adults) suffer from some chemical imbalance in the brain. They can’t stay still, chatter incessantly, get bored easily, forget things and can’t finish the work they are doing.

To some extent all children show such tendencies, therefore, parents should not jump to hasty conclusions. Attention disorder is a matter of degree. At some point it becomes a serious illness. The question is whether rapid-fire television programmes cause or aggravate the condition.

Or could some programme reverse attention disorder?
While the University of Washington study concluded that an early exposure to bad television programmes might skew brain development, another study showed the tremendous learning potential of television for toddlers. The researchers found that toddlers as young as 10 months have the potential to learn when they watch television. The right kind of television programmes promote intellectual development and could help children to learn language skills, such as matching names to the objects they represent, and do things by watching them being done on television. For example, a toddler could take apart a toy and also put it together after seeing it being done on television, researchers had found. Psychologist Dr Mabel Rice of the University of Kansas concluded from her research on language acquisition that children at a very early age have the potential to learn from television if the programmes were specially made for them, such as Sesame Street.

Infants’ television programmes that create sharp focus on an attractive object, and a friendly person who repeatedly talks about the object stimulates infants’ brain to learn. Music plays a big role in learning. To be sure, fast-paced, slam-dunk children’s cartoon programmes, which are nothing but infomercials for action toys and sugared cereals, are not going to help children anyway except to turn them into passive-aggressive consumers of the multibillion-dollar toy marketplace. What goes into the programme content is important.

Television is not the enemy of children.
Children’s programme makers driven by commercial lust are children’s enemies.

A few years ago, The American Psychological Association suggested four steps that could be taken “to mitigate, moderate and minimise” the toxic impact of violence on children: (1) Watch at least one episode of a programme the child watches to know how violent it is. (2) When viewing together, discuss the violence with the child; why the violence happened and how painful it is. Ask the child how the conflict could have been solved without violence. (3) Explain to the child how violence in entertainment is “faked” and not real. (4) Encourage children to watch programmes with characters that cooperate, help, and care for each other. APA said these programmes have been shown to influence children in a positive way and suggested making “TV violence part of the public health agenda (as with smoking and drunk driving) publicising ~ through a vigorous public information campaign in all information media ~ its perils and effects.”

Television violence in children’s programming has not gone down for the simple reason that Hollywood has passed on the responsibility to parents, expecting them to use the V (violence)-chip to block out objectionable programming. Since each television programme in the USA is rated for violence and sex and all sets have programme or channel-blocking mechanisms, it is left to the parents to protect children from bad television. But the survey shows that parents are not pro-active, partly because of the pressures of daily life. Besides, there is little choice on television.

The First Amendment freedoms have been cornered by Hollywood greed, which has left little incentive for creativity. In this war-torn world, children have become a forgotten constituency. On the minds of most American parents, there are weightier issues: job security, retirement, healthcare, and the seemingly endless Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon.

A Step For India-US Friednship

Nuclear deal takes an initial step
But ND Batra says Indian diplomats still have their work cut out for them

By ND BatraAsiaMedia Contributing Writer

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Those of us who watched last week's debate in the U.S. House of Representative over the United States and India Nuclear Cooperation Promotion Act of 2006 had very tense moments at the closing.
Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, introduced a motion to recommit the Bill to the House International Relation committee to include a provision that India must make a full commitment to U.S. efforts to isolate Iran in its nuclear ambitions. It was a daring political subterfuge that would have killed the deal.
The intensity of debate over the Markey-Upton motion, and the thin margin (235-192) by which the motion was defeated, showed not only how strongly U.S. lawmakers feel about Iran's development of nuclear weapons, but also that India has significant hurdles to face in making the nuclear deal.
The impression given by the final count, 359 votes to 68, that the House gave overwhelming support to the India-US nuclear deal is misleading. There is a strong substratum of opposition, which cuts across party lines as well as scholarly and journalistic communities, to let India bypass the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and indirectly become a member of the nuclear club.
In the coming months, Indian diplomats have their work cut out for them because some Americans have yet to be fully persuaded that an India-U.S. civil nuclear deal is good for the United States.
Of course, the nuclear deal is good for India.
By offering India "full civilian nuclear energy cooperation," President Bush made a bold act of statesmanship to establish long-term strategic and economic relations with a country that many Europeans and Americans are beginning to perceive as a reliable global partner. The pragmatic partnership to let India grow and play its rightful constructive role in global affairs is not about containing any other rising power. It is rather a partnership to let India develop as an alternative model of economic growth without compromising fundamental freedoms.
The rapid economic growth of Indian economy, which some estimate will increase 8 to 9 percent a year for the next few decades primarily through the efforts of its rising entrepreneurial class, would lift millions of Indians out of poverty. An economically dynamic India would make the military containment of any rising Asian power unnecessary. The more equal players there are on the Asian stage, the less chance there is for a single hegemonic power to rise.
The deal would remove hurdles in India's search for alternative energy sources to fuel its growing economy. In a joint statement with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Bush administration has accepted India as a "responsible state with advanced nuclear technology," recognizing it as an exception to the rule, a country that should "acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states."
After the Senate vote in September, when Congress finally approves the deal, India will be able to buy nuclear fuel for its existing nuclear power plants and shop to build new ones. In the course of time, as trust increases and diplomatic relations further improve, a whole new world of sophisticated American technology would be open to India, enabling it to leapfrog past decades sluggish economic growth. In return India has agreed to do what other nuclear powers have been doing under the nonproliferation treaty -- to open some of its civilian nuclear power plants to International Atomic Energy Agency inspection and to continue the moratorium on nuclear testing. Its nuclear military arsenal would remain off limits.
Critics in India, particularly the Left parties, who fear that the deal would create co-dependency relations with the United States need to consider how China has benefited from its strong economic partnership without compromising its sovereignty. India must go beyond information technology outsourcing and penetrate deeply into corporate America.
An Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline -- if not a pipedream -- is only a very remote possibility; but even if it materializes, it may not be enough to meet India's gargantuan need for energy. Clean coal technology, nuclear energy and solar power are practical alternatives to which the United States has opened its doors.
Prime Minster Manmohan Singh was right when he told a joint U.S. Congress session last year, "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."
For the next decade, India's diplomacy should have a single-minded focus on one primary goal: speedy economic growth, which a partnership with the United States would hasten. Ironically, the opponents of the deal in the United States are banking on the Indian Left to scuttle the deal in the Indian Parliament.
The views expressed above are those of the author and are not necessarily those of AsiaMedia or the UCLA Asia Institute.
Date Posted: 8/1/2006

Battling Terrorism

Lessons for India in homeland security

CYBER AGE
by ND Batra
From The Statesman


India has much to learn how comprehensively and efficiently the United States of America goes about managing its homeland security by keeping a hawk-eye on the Islamic jihadi menace.
Last week, two men from Georgia ~ Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, a naturalised American of Pakistani origin and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, an American by birth and of Bangladeshi descent ~ were charged with planning attacks against the World Bank headquarter in Washington DC, the US Capitol and other civilians targets. Both were accused of preparing for violent jihad in the USA and abroad after undergoing “rudimentary paramilitary training”. One of them, Sadequee, was earlier charged for having gone to Toronto last year to hobnob with “like-minded Islamic extremists”.
Clearly these two Muslim young men had not actually committed any violent act but were found to be planning and conspiring to do so. Following the preemptive policy of dealing with terrorists, US Attorney David E. Nahmias said: “We no longer wait until a bomb is built and ready to explode.” Similarly, the plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago was at a stage “more aspirational than operational”, according to the FBI, when the plotters were apprehended in June this year. Preemption is preventing acts at the inspiration, aspiration and thinking stage before they become a concrete reality that leads to the kind of train bombings in Mumbai that killed more than 200 people and injured hundreds more on 11 July. However, when reason takes precedence over anger and dismay, it becomes possible to see with clarity that to a great extent most disasters could be anticipated and even prevented.
The concept “what’s anticipated can be prevented” would especially apply to a crucial aspect of India’s homeland security, that is Islamic militant terrorism of which the Mumbai outrage was the latest manifestation. If the worm, jihadi terrorism, has already made its home in India and could surface on any street, as was recently pointed out by a senior Indian journalist in a Wall Street Journal piece, the case for India’s homeland security to be modelled on the US system where since 9/11 not a single terrorist attack has taken place is very strong. Al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorists have not given up on the USA, and they keep trying.
Uncle Sam sleeps with one eye open. Early this year, Congress renewed what to most liberals would be a draconian anti-terrorism law, The US Patriot Act.
The Department of Homeland Security’s constantly changing red, yellow and green alerts have made life a trifle uncomfortable. Personal liberties have been affected, especially in big cities, though most of the USA is as free as ever. Airline travel security checks take longer. But on the whole, there is no fear psychosis in the USA. You wouldn’t feel afraid of walking in the streets of New York or elsewhere; living in America is safer than living anywhere else.
The US homeland security doctrine is coherent, pragmatic and ethical. And it has a simple premise: Choose the lesser evil. It is better to put a few thousand people in jail ~ yes, some of them might be innocent ~ than let terrorists strike, which might push millions and millions of people into a state of perpetual fear.
The Patriot Act, which allows intelligence and law enforcement authorities to go into places of worship, investigate the working of charities and snoop on telecommunication of suspected militants is not what a free society should do. But it is a lesser evil than letting Islamic militants take advantage of constitutional freedoms to commit mass murders.
From Pota to its successors, Indians think up marvellous schemes but lack the will to implement them. A mantra is no substitute for action.But there’s hope. Contrary to popular expectation, India showed remarkable composure in the face of the dastardly acts in Mumbai. Sure the Sensex wobbled for while but it stabilised, reinforcing the hope that economic recovery and growth is on a firm footing.
There was some tough talk by politicians but the fire did not spread. Which is no guarantee for the future, of course. Of course a similar pattern of attacks has been taking place in Pakistan too, though it is between Sunnis and Shias. If the pattern is the same, the same underlying force, Sunni Wahabisim, must be operating in both countries. In that case, India and Pakistan have a common enemy, though unfortunately they don’t see it that way. That’s why the continuation of dialogue is so important because with the course of time, perceptions would change. When terrorists’ bonds with local people become weak, it would be easy to gather intelligence, and isolate and annihilate terrorists’ networks. That’s what is being done in the USA ~ destroying the infrastructure that supports terrorists’ networks.
Simi and LeT would cease to exist if they are isolated from the local people. Indian Muslims must feel reassured that India is their country and that their children have a future. That kind of social and cultural re-education is important. India’s two-pronged strategy for fighting terrorism should be: Ruthlessly implement a no-holds-barred policy of dealing with militants. Secondly, continue pursuing peaceful settlement with Pakistan through a policy of cool and cautious engagement at multiple levels, including trade and widespread official and people-to-people contacts.
The first step necessitates widespread human and digital intelligence gathering and the rigorous enforcement of terrorism laws already in place.
The second step requires sensible diplomacy with total control over hotheaded political rhetoric. Flaming tongues can sear hearts.
Dealing with Pakistan is not easy, especially when the Pakistan government does not have full control over what is happening there. Apart from the continuous simmering rebellion in Baluchistan, some powerful sections of society in Pakistan, including the ISI, are feeding and supporting the Taliban to re-establish their hold in Afghanistan. And they are not done with Kashmir, regardless of the opening of bridges and India’s generosity in giving millions of dollars to earthquake victims.

DO NOT MESS UP WITH INDIA

Pre-emption needed, not despair

CYBER AGE by ND Batra
From The Statesman

A nation that has been gradually and steadily building up its economic and technological strength to raise a billion people to a decent standard of living and seek a rightful place in the global community cannot allow itself to be drowned in pessimism.
The quick return to normalcy of work and life in Mumbai, one of the greatest cities in the world, and a city whose creative dynamism sums up the best of India, has been so assuring that there’s a certain gut feeling ~ that India shall overcome. However, it hurts badly ~ irrespective of whether one lives in India or abroad ~ because we have become so much emotionally bonded and identified with what is India and what India ought to be. Yet, there is so little room for despair that we end up consoling ourselves with India’s resilient spirit every time there is a fresh attack. Resilience is not a substitute for action.
Terrorism is a local and global phenomenon and it must be fought at every level with imagination, intelligence and persistence, with all the available resources, as the USA has been fighting. Americans have come to believe that terrorism is preventable and must be prevented whatever the cost.
The 11 September attacks have been a kind of sourcebook for the US Homeland Security and whenever any attack occurs anywhere in the world, London, Madrid or Mumbai, the authorities redouble their vigilance, and freshen up their plans to meet any contingency. It could happen here, they acknowledge, but it must not, and that’s the steely determination writ large on their faces.
As soon as the images of wrecked trains and mutilated bodies appeared on American television screens, Homeland Security authorities shook themselves up once again and reassured the people that the New York commuter train system ~ that carries 4.5 million Americans to and from work every day ~ is well-protected and under constant watch, though there is no place for complacency. More patrolling, more bag searches, more surveillance, more inconvenience, more protests, but no letting up. Altogether 32 million Americans use trains everyday for work and leisure and protecting the vast network of transportation system is not an easy task.
Only a few days before the Mumbai train attacks, US authorities had uncovered a plot to blow up the underground tunnel system that connects New Jersey with New York City.
The discovery of the plot was not accidental or a serendipitous occurrence. The Homeland Security since the 11 September episode has been on the lookout for terrorists in order to pre-empt any kind of attack. They would not allow a failure of imagination and anticipation for America to be taken by surprise again. Apart from the Federal government, every state has a list of potential terrorist targets for which there are contingency plans.
The most common response to terrorism is to wait for the attack to occur and then swing into action; or issue a bravado statement like the one that came from the Indian Cabinet after the Mumbai attacks: “Nothing will deter us from our firm policy to fight this menace till it is wiped out. We are determined to apprehend and bring to justice all those responsible for the evil acts in Mumbai.” As if in response to this jejune statement, a BBC correspondent observed, albeit cynically, that during the last decade so many attacks have taken place in India that no one has been apprehended, no serious action has been taken and eventually nobody cares.
For a moment I thought the BBC correspondent had summed up a history of India in one sentence. Throughout the ages, India has been attacked, and attacked, and attacked… but without any response.
Islamic terrorists in India whether they belong to Students Islamic Movement of India, Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba or some other outfit know that nothing serious would happen to them even if they were apprehended. Politically and financially, they are well provided for; otherwise they would not have been in business so long. Who is protecting them in India?
In the USA and increasingly in Europe, especially after the London and Madrid bombings, there has been a paradigm shift. The policy has been not only to nip the evil in the bud but also to eliminate the evil at the conceptual stage.
The plot to blow up New Jersey-New York rail tunnel, for example, was at the most preliminary conceptual stage, when its thinking head and organiser, an Al-Qaida associate Assem Hammoud, at Lebanese International University, where he taught economics, was arrested along with other suspects in cooperation with investigators in foreign countries. “The primary emphasis has to be,” said NBC’s counter-terrorism analyst Michael Sheehan, “on the investigation and to find and detect any cell that may be plotting against the system.”
In India such plotting cells would not be found in the slums of Mumbai but in places where people think and tinker and assemble. It should not very difficult to find them. Unless India adopts and ruthlessly executes a policy of zero tolerance toward Islamic terrorists, which means using all the available means to hunt them under the law, we would be wondering ~ What after Mumbai: Kolkata, Bangalore or some place where India’s brain, wealth and creativity thrive? India needs to re-balance its priorities, freedom and domestic security.
Despair is not an option for India. Pre-emption is the key to eliminate terrorism.

It is good to be an American

A just society

ND Batra
From The Statesman

The American dream is some kind of El Dorado, a state of immense wealth and achievement which when attained, enables a person to exclaim, “Ah! It’s good to be an American.”

You can see it in the life of a man like Andy Grove who survived the Nazis and the communists and entered the USA as a refugee. He worked so hard that he had no place to go except up and up until he reached the stratosphere. He built a microchip empire that runs the information superhighway and serves America’s global interests. But he did not do it through the largesse of affirmative action and racial preferences. Nor does Intel, of which he was the CEO, hire people based on quotas, racial preferences, compensatory guilt, or the need for diversity.

Multinationals thrive on competitiveness, not on affirmative action. But do affirmative action preferences create a just society? For about 40 years, US society has been helping African-Americans and other minority groups to cross the race line by creating for them preferences for jobs, contracts and admissions to universities. In the case of higher education, the original intent was to desegregate and diversify the student population by requiring colleges and universities to lower the admission criteria for minority students. The policy might have worked in some cases.

It has been argued that the rise of Colin Powell, who reached the top in the US military with an extraordinary record of achievements and served the Bush administration as the secretary of state in a very difficult era of American diplomacy, would not have been possible without affirmative action. Affirmative action might have opened the door for Mr Powell but it did not catapult him to the top and make him one of the most esteemed Americans living today. In his book, My American Journey, he wrote, “Equal rights and equal opportunity... do not mean preferential treatment. Preferences, no matter how well intended, ultimately breed resentment among the non-preferred.”

Consider the achievements of Hollywood star Bill Cosby, pop culture’s global icon Michael Jackson, and basketball’s once supreme athlete Michael Jordan. They rose to the top on the basis of their guts and talents. Such remarkable achievements would be diminished if they were correlated with racial preferences and quotas. As Powell said: “If affirmative action means programmes that provide equal opportunities, then I am all for it. If it leads to preferential treatment or helps those who no longer need help, I am opposed.” Powell rose to the top on the strength of his character and the power of his brain. But what about those who live in ghettos, inner cities and rural poverty? “If a history of discrimination has made it difficult for certain Americans to meet standards, it is only fair to provide temporary means to help them catch up and compete on equal terms,” the General added. But there are other voices.

Race, as Prof Cornel West of Princeton says, matters a lot in America; prejudice is widely prevalent, and it is the colour of your skin, not character and merit, that determines where you live and work, and how a policeman treats you in the middle of the night when he sees you at a street corner, or when you go to the airport and you are “randomly selected” for special inspection because you look like an Asian or an Arab-Muslim. But these are the imperfections of a great society. Decades of affirmative action policy, which in reality amounted to creating preferential quotas for minorities, have not created a colour-race-gender blind society. No wonder affirmative action has been getting into disfavour as a public policy. In 1998, California voters ended preferential treatment based on race and gender for public employment, education and contracting by approving a ballot initiative.

Berkeley and other top schools of the California Higher Education System no longer admit African-Americans and Hispanics by lowering the admission standards. For a long time, the dominant mood in the country has been: end racial preferences because they create reverse discrimination. But the question still remains: does diversity of race, religion and opinion matter? Diversity is socially desirable because it engenders new ideas that enrich society and encourages tolerance and acceptance of the USA, which is increasingly becoming multicultural and multiracial.

The challenge is to use affirmative action to give some deserving people a head start without creating entitlements, to make possible the rise of people like the secretary of state, Ms Condoleeza Rice, General Powell and Andrew Grove in the future.

Ironically, millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere do not ask for affirmative action or preferential treatment. All they want is a chance to work and to build a good life for their families and in the process, to add to US wealth. Those who cannot stand the idea of the American dream want to blow up the USA as Islamic jihadists want do.

SUPREME COURT PLUCKS BUSH'S FEATHERS

From The Statesman
Cyber Age

Clipping the excesses of US power

ND Batra

The US Supreme Court majority ruling that President Bush exceeded his authority by establishing military tribunals for the trial of Al-Qaida detainees held in the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, came as a rude shock to the administration that believes and has been acting on the presumption that during war time the President is above the law.
In Hamdan v Rumsfeld, the Court said not only is the American justice system applicable to the detainees but also the Geneva Conventions, of which Article 3 enjoins that detainees be tried by “a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised people.” In a sharp rebuke, Justice Breyer, who concurred with the majority, said: “Congress has not issued the executive ‘a blank check’”. Along with other detainees, Salim Hamdan ~ former driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden ~ who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and has been held in Guantanamo Bay detention facility, the plaintiff for whose appeal case the Court gave its ruling, now would be tried in more transparent court proceedings than by a secretive military tribunal.
In the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks, the USA moved fast to “secure its liberties” by adopting draconian measures used only in war times. Some civil libertarians said at that time that President Bush had assumed dictatorial powers by issuing the executive order on 13 November 2001 that suspended the rights of enemy prisoners and non-citizens suspected of terrorism.
Captured Al-Qaida militants were to be tried in special military tribunals, where the normal rules of evidence were not applicable. “Given the danger to the safety of the USA and the nature of international terrorism,” so went the order, “it is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognised in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.” Trials were not open to the public or the media and could be conducted in any jurisdiction where the USA exercised control. The convicted person could be sentenced to life imprisonment or death, with no provision for appeal to a higher court.
It seemed ironic how Islamic terrorism had driven the USA closer to authoritarian regimes’ practice of speedy and summary execution of “justice”. The whole purpose of the executive order was to try captured Al-Qaida terrorists in a manner that would prevent them from taking advantages of the slowness of the American justice system. The dominant sentiment in the administration has been that the terrorists should not be allowed to enjoy the benefits of the system they so flagrantly abused. Vice-President Dick Cheney said at that time: “The basic proposition here is that somebody who comes into the USA illegally, who conducts a terrorist operation killing thousands innocent Americans… does not deserve the same guarantees and safeguards that would be used for an American citizen going through the normal judicial process.”
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected the argument and concluded that military commissions violated both US military justice system and international conventions. The prolonged detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay detention facility and the inhuman treatment meted out to them gave Al-Qaida a propaganda platform that has kept the Arab-Muslim world simmering with anger and disdain for the USA.
The administration argued this was not the first time that the USA reverted to this extraordinary method of dispensing justice. And that Franklin D Roosevelt too had done so. His military commission sentenced to death German marines who had sneaked in submarines to America’s shores to sabotage US military facilities in 1942; and again in 1946 when another commission sentenced to death a Japanese general for torture, rape and killings of citizens in the Philippines.
The Supreme Court upheld both the judgments. Abraham Lincoln too had allowed trials by military commissions during the Civil War. But those were different times. There is plenty of barbaric behaviour in every civilised society, but fortunately in the USA such bouts of collective insanity, for example, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, do not last for long. Until 11 September 2001 the American people enjoyed more civil liberties than any other people in the world. There was no distinction between citizens and non-citizens before terrorists hit the American soil. The threshold of judicial proof, when a person suspected of terrorism is tried in a military tribunal, is lowered from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to merely “preponderance of evidence” that is required in civil disputes. Unanimous jury verdict required in criminal cases is replaced by a majority verdict by a panel of judges. In a trial by a military tribunal any kind of evidence, even if it does not meet the standards of the rules of evidence, could be used against the suspect under trial.
The right of the defendant to have access to sensitive intelligence in the possession of the prosecution, which is normally respected in trials, may be denied in a trial by a military tribunal. In short, the constitutional protections are suspended in the case of enemy prisoners suspected of terrorism under trial by a military tribunal. The Supreme Court did not question the detention of enemy prisoners. Nor did it order the release of 450 enemy prisoners being held at Guantanamo. But by asking the President to go to Congress to seek a legislative solution so that detainees are given the right to defend themselves according to the law of war and international conventions, it re-established the tripartite balance of power, which had been tilted in favour of the executive after 9/11.
As Justice Kennedy said in his concurring opinion: “Concentration of power puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action of officials, an incursion the Constitution’s three-part system is designed to avoid.” In one bold stroke, the US Supreme Court has dismantled the American imperial presidency and reaffirmed the rule of law, thus making the world a safer place from the excesses of American power.

QUESTION OF THE DAY

Has Guantanamo affected American civil liberties?

There is plenty of barbaric behavior in every civilized society, but fortunately in the United States such bouts of collective insanity, for example, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, do not last for long. Until 11 September 2001 the American people enjoyed more civil liberties than any other people in the world. There was no distinction between citizens and non-citizens before terrorists hit the American soil.

Cyber adventures

Be all you want in cyberspace

ND BATRA
From The Statesman

On the Internet nobody knows whether a person is a dirty old man trying to seduce teenagers, a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a virtual game room, or a teenager posing as an expert. It is also true that eventually no one can hide in cyberspace. Cyber opacity is an illusion.
A few years ago, a California teenager Marcus Arnold, using his knowledge gained from television programmes such as Court TV or Judge Judy, and taking advantage of the pseudonymous freedom that a knowledge sharing company had provided, turned himself into a legal expert and began to dole out free legal advice. And he began to be noticed by people hungry for information.
Arnold’s direct and jargon-free approach to tough legal questions had a great appeal. Soon people began to call him at home seeking his legal advice. But then his conscience or may be the fear of being found out began to bother the 15-year-old boy. And one day he revealed his true self to his admirers.
Real lawyers poured scorn but the public rallied around him and he continued to give his non-expert common sense expertise on legal matters for sometime. AskMe, the online knowledge sharing outfit closed its free Website, but at its height about 10 million registered visitors posted questions and answers on everything from Armageddon to Zen mediation.
The Internet has created a new media environment that not only enables people to communicate, discuss and exchange information, give and receive feedback, but also provides an interactive collaborative environment in which words can become deeds and speech can become action.
Networked computers, the building blocks of the Internet, are much more than mere productivity tools and informatics appliances. Unlike the traditional media, they are capable of creating the cyber-environment that can be designed to be persuasive, that can motivate people to act and change their social behaviours. Stanford University researchers call this rhetorical concept as Captology, which “focuses on the planned persuasive effects of computer technologies”.
The next challenge for software programmers is to design virtual environments to motivate people, for example, not to drink and drive, to have healthy sexual behaviours, to avoid pregnancy, or to be successful corporate leaders. Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School believes that computer codes have the potential to control behaviour the way law does, that programmers in a manner of speaking could become lawmakers.
But the rhetoric of software design, the persuasive code that entices, builds relationships, arouses and fulfills desires and keeps the users coming back has not been fully explored in areas other than cybersex and virtual reality Internet games. There may be a fortune in developing codes that persuade the user to change his attitude, behaviour and actions.
One of the great strengths of the strength of the Internet is its interactivity, its ability to respond and give instant feedback. Feedback not only regulates the flow of communication but also gives some of the control back to the receiver of the message. Two persons in conversation establish a dynamic relationship to create shared meanings.
Human communication is essentially a transaction that takes place effectively if people have or can create a common field of experience.
Islamic jehadis share each other’s vision of “Paradise”, and for them suicide becomes a door to that mental image of the promised everlasting beauty, as Omar Khyyam said, “…A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou Beside me singing…”
Persuasion works through sharing of mental models. The Internet makes it easy to share mental models whether they are of instant access to Paradise through self-destruction, buying and selling on a virtual platform such as e-Bay, or sharing experiences in MySpace as millions of teenagers do.
Internet communication can transcend face-to-face communication, can be very persuasive, and in certain circumstances is even more desirable. Lack of face-to-face cues, physical appearance and vocal inflections, which might arouse scepticism, are absent in Internet communication especially when it is time delayed such as in e-mail or question-answer Websites.
Selective self-presentation makes it possible for people to open themselves up to others, which they would hesitate to do in face-to-face conversation for fear of contradiction, lack of control or sense of shame.
Even in chat rooms and instant messaging, communication can become what one researcher, JB Walther, called as “hyperpersonal”, that is, socially more desirable than we are likely to experience face-to-face. It allows the play of fantasy partly to compensate for the absence of aural and visual information that gestures and voice create in interpersonal encounters. Fantasy lowers our guards and makes cyberspace so seductively persuasive ~ and dangerous.
Many teenagers go astray in chatrooms because cyberspace lets them assume fake identities and gives them the freedom to pretend ~ 13 going on 18 ~ what they fancy themselves to be. Some of them become victims of con men and predators, who too assume identities desirable for their teenage victims.
The playfulness of virtual environment, an environment of “Be what you want to be”, creates a pleasurable experience, a sensuous flow, in which we feel control of our environment that real life might deny us. The strength of teenagers’ most popular portal MySpace is also its vulnerability, as many parents have been discovering.

Gates Giving

Bill Gates is retiring... So what?

ND BATRA
From The Statesman

The market shrugged off Mr Bill Gates’ announcement that he would give up the commanding heights of Microsoft, the digital empire he co-founded with his friend Mr Paul Allen in 1975. Gates plans to focus on philanthropy, especially global health and education work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This is not the end for Mr Gates but another chapter in the life of a most creative mind who began, like most American innovators, in his garage with an idea and transformed the world. Yes, Mr Gates helped usher in the digital civilisation. But I wonder if Mr Gates could have risen to the top in any other country except the USA, a country that brings out the best in ordinary people like Mr Gates and transforms them into extraordinary humans through the competitive ethos of the marketplace.

In his introduction to Mr David Brown’s book, Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse, Mr James Burke, a London-based television producer, commended America’s “can-do” spirit and said that the “readiness to adapt to circumstance is one of America’s most enduring characteristics and is what makes the American social environment more amenable to innovation than any other...”

Henry Ford, for example, adapted a British Royal Navy-originated assembly-line idea of production and used it to usher in an era of “democracy of possessions”. Of course, the democracy of possessions also creates social and environmental problems that demand the application of new technology, thus, feeding the inventive-entrepreneurial spiral.

What makes a scientist more inventive and innovative in the USA than back in his native country might be puzzling to some of us, especially those who do not understand the ethos of American society. Consider the case of Mr Ashok Gadgil, one of the 35 inventors profiled in the book, whose invention of a drinking water purification system might save millions of people in developing countries where diarrhoea, cholera, hepatitis and water-borne diseases are widely prevalent. The “Bengal cholera” of 1992 that spread throughout India and killed approximately 10,000 people, challenged Mr Gadgil, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, to develop an affordable and effective water purification system using ultraviolet light. Mr Gadgil’s device, the UV Waterworks, may not be an earth-shaking invention but it is extremely useful for the masses in India and other developing countries, where drinking water contamination is commonplace.

It sounds incredible but Mr Gadgil says in the book: “You could disinfect one person’s drinking supply for a full year for a couple of cents.” Could Mr Gadgil have developed this invention in India, a nation with a quotas-and-reservations mentality and a straightjacket bureaucracy? The USA is the most inventive and innovative nation today.

In 2005, US residents received 85,238 patents out of a total of 165,485 granted by the US Patent and Trademark office. Burke wrote in his book that scientists and inventors follow the two-fold rule propounded by the 17th century French rationalist philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes: Be a doubting Thomas and reduce every system to its fundamentals. You cannot sit in your bathtub and wait for “Eureka” to occur. Inventing is sweating all the way (Thomas Edison’s 99 per cent rule) until a new configuration, a new way of doing things surfaces like an irrepressible force, an answer to a prayer, when you say, yes, yes, indeed, one plus one is equal to 11.

During the last 70 years, job categories (teaching, journalism, road-building, etc.) have increased from 80 to 800 in the USA. With global e-commerce rising, the job marketplace will explode the world over and will demand massive inventiveness and innovations. What will happen to a nation that does not invent and innovate?

In his foreword to the book, Mr Lester Thurow, an MIT social scientist, wrote that most scientific and technological advances in human history have occurred slowly and sporadically in civilisations, often vanishing from the place of their origin. After the end of Roman civilisation, Europe plunged into the Dark Ages when technological leadership passed on to the Islamic world. China was more advanced in the 15th century than in the 19th century.

There are no guarantees that a nation’s technological lead will last forever. The restless and questioning spirit in Europe began with the re-invention of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in the 15th century that unleashed simultaneously two forces, the Renaissance and the Reformation, which caused a tremendous upheaval in Europe and the rest of the world from the time of the discovery of America to that of the colonisation of Asia and Africa. One great invention led to another ~ the invention of steam engine led to electricity ~ and moved some countries to the rank of the first world and relegated many others to the third world.

But what has made scientific and technological innovation a sustainable enterprise in modern times, according to Prof Thurow, is the German idea that “systematic investments in research and development based upon academic science could lead to a much faster rate of technological progress.”

Universities have become the most important source of inventiveness and innovations in the USA and elsewhere. Great research universities, MIT, Stanford, Harvard and others, with abundant research funding resources, attract the best brains from all over the world and make the USA the most inventive and innovative society. That explains why the book celebrated Mr Gadgil as an American, not an Indian, inventor because the USA provides the socially supported scientific platform that India does not.

We know how German rocket scientists were persuaded after WWII to come to the USA to help beat the Soviet Union in the race into space. But Prof Thurow warns: “What has been gained can be lost.” Great Britain and Germany were the technological leaders since the industrial revolution began 200 years ago. So was China once, as were the Arabs.

What makes the USA so different from the past technological leaders is that it is culturally situated between the First Amendment freedoms and the awesome temptations of the open marketplace. The marketplace of goods and ideas, the Darwinian competitiveness, is fuelling the relentless pace of inventiveness and innovations in the USA which is the only place where a man like Bill Gates could rise.

THE MIGHTY HARVARD

Harvard v the Vatican

ND Batra
The Statesman

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

~ TS Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

When South Korean Scientist Dr Hwang Woo Suk admitted last December to have faked the result of his research regarding the creation of stem cell lines from cloned human embryos, it seemed a terrible setback to one of the most transformative and promising fields of medicine.
But last week’s announcement that Harvard Stem Cell Institute will begin doing research using Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer process to create specific cell lines from cloned human embryos has once again raised hopes for millions of people suffering from incurable diseases.
Harvard research will be diseases specific; for example, the nucleus of a skin cell of a diabetic patient will be inserted into an unfertilised donor egg, from which the nucleus has already been removed. The newly engineered composite egg will be nurtured on a petri dish where it will develop into an early embryo from which embryonic stem cell lines would be developed and guided into becoming healthy insulin producing pancreatic islet cells. These would replace the diseased ones, for example, in a child suffering from juvenile diabetes.
What would you not do to make your child disease free and healthy? But somewhere in the process, life begins. That has been an ethical dilemma for those who believe that human life is sacred at every stage, even on a petri dish.The late pope John Paul II, for example, admonished President George W Bush on a visit to the Vatican saying that a “free and virtuous society, which America aspires to be, must reject practices that devalue and violate human life at any stage from conception until natural death.”
The late pontiff was referring to proposals for the creation of embryonic stem cells for research purposes, which hold the promise to lead to a cure for diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, spinal cord injuries and much more. The pope himself was afflicted with Parkinson’s, one of the millions of sufferers of the debilitating disease. The promises of embryonic stem cell research for healing incurable diseases and rejuvenating life are so great that it appears inhuman to shut the door on it.
Many people wondered why the Vatican would deny the gift of stem cell miracle to the suffering humanity. Suffering is at the heart of Christianity, especially Catholicism. Suffering creates compassion and humanises us. Respect for life must begin at the beginning, and the beginning of life could be on a petri dish or the womb. Pope John Paul II warned: “how a tragic coarsening of consciences accompanies the assault on innocent human life in the womb, leading to accommodation and acquiescence in the face of other related evils such as euthanasia, infanticide…”
Would Pope John Paul II have refused the stem cell-based cure for his Parkinson’s, if it were available in his times? The Vatican, nonetheless, is not totally opposed to stem cell research; it favours the research based on adult stems cells, though the results of such a research at present are not promising. Embryonic stem cells have the potential of growing any specific stem cell, such as bone or brain stem cell, needed to heal the body. Cloning embryonic stem cells takes one more step toward creating life to heal life.
The Vatican’s view about the sanctity of life is a sharp condemnation of the practice of foeticide, especially the killing of female foetuses, a widespread practice in some parts of South Asia. It is difficult to surmise what happens to the conscience of a woman who learns upon pre-natal screening that she is carrying a female foetus and decides to abort it, especially now when abortion technology enables a woman to abort in a jiffy. That’s why many Americans have not been able to ignore the late pope’s warning that the destruction of embryos to extract stem cells, even when the purpose is to fight diseases and reduce human suffering, would dehumanise us.
Regardless of the views of the Vatican or the policy of the Bush administration to deny funding embryonic stem cell research with federal money, stem cell research, as the Harvard announcement shows, is unstoppable for the simple reason that the perceived health benefits not only in terms of fighting incurable diseases but also prolonging healthy life are immeasurable.
Stem cell revolution is as momentous as was the splitting of the atom; therefore, it needs protocols and safeguards to harness its benefits without the coarsening of our conscience.It requires a fundamental change in our thinking, a paradigm shift as significant as when Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens ~ away from the Vatican.
Now that that the mighty Harvard has put its moral authority, reputation, knowledge and wisdom at stake in pursuit of health and happiness for mankind, let us hope the marketplace, the ultimate test of everything in the USA, does not coarsen life in the process.

The Mighty Harvard

Harvard v the Vatican

ND Batra

INDIA: A JUST & MERITORIOUS SOCIETY

CYBER AGE
For a just & competitive society
ND BATRA
From The Statesman

Quotas and reservations in India are merely populist measures to win votes for the next election; they would never churn up the backward classes to the fore. Even if some people were put on the creamy surface, they would go down unless they are intellectually prepared and enabled to stay on the top in a competitive environment.
The quota and reservation system is one of the biggest frauds being committed against historically deprived classes. This is the way to keep them down forever. The best way to raise them high is through a system of challenge and response; by providing them access through merit and need-based scholarships so that backward class kids can compete in the marketplace. Let’s keep in mind that historically deprived people are not genetically deprived.
Like India, the USA is an imperfect and messy democracy. The goal of inclusiveness, not merely desegregation, has been a struggle for every generation. Time and time again, the US Supreme Court has played a critical role in bringing the American people back to the basics, the vision of the founding fathers of an integrated society.
The Supreme Court is not only the ultimate authority in the interpretation of the Constitution; it has become the supreme moral authority in the USA. “In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.”
That was the opinion of the US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor regarding the affirmative action admission policy of the University of Michigan (23 June 2003). Justice O’Connor, who occupied a middle-of-the road open-minded position on the US Supreme Court, has retired but her legacy lives on.
When the Supreme Court speaks, the question of what is right and what is wrong is settled until the next time when another crisis brings the nine justices together to ponder over and argue once again what the Constitution means, after all. Its decisions are seldom unanimous and the voice of dissenting justices is never lost.
Even a lone dissenting opinion might become the voice of the Court majority in another time when the mode of consciousness of the society changes. That’s why there is so much partisan political struggle as to who gets appointed to the Supreme Court.
But by and large the Court is both a reactive and creative institution. It listens and questions; but when it does speak everyone listens.
That’s how it bonds American society whenever it seems to be coming apart, for example, in the 2000 presidential election. On 23 June 2003, the Supreme Court spoke about the affirmative action policy of the University of Michigan and its decision has impacted every private and public institution as well as businesses in their recruitment practices. Its decision has not gone unnoticed by Indian commentators struggling with the recently proposed nationwide quota for Other Backward Classes (OBC) for admission to Central universities.
One of the US Supreme Court decisions involved the University of Michigan Law School that used a method of admission in which race was included as one of the factors. The Court upheld the practice thus affirming the 1978 (the Bakke case) decision that allowed race to be considered as one of the many factors, a “plus” factor, for admission, emphasising that diversity enriches the educational environment.
The Court did not endorse the idea of a quota for any race. The Court was, however, troubled with the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts, which used a point system that automatically granted 20 points to a minority student (Blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans) toward a minimum of 100 (on a scale of 150) required for admission. The plaintiffs had complained of reverse discrimination that disqualified otherwise qualified white students. In this case a 6-3 majority led by the late Chief Justice Rhenquest called the numerical system not good enough to enrich diversity.
An individualised admission programme would consider the whole person, including race as a factor among others. In the Law School case, Justice O’Connor wrote for the 5-4 majority: “Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civil life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realised…. Access to legal education (and thus the legal profession) must be inclusive of talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity so that all members of our heterogeneous society may participate in the educational instructions that provide the training and education necessary to succeed in America.”
Since the enactment of Civil Rights Act of 1964, Americans have been given a legal recourse to fight against discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. It has opened many doors for minorities to advance in fields that were shut on them. The United States Military wouldn’t be what it is today without affirmative action. It is the biggest field of “the American Dream” and minorities are drawn to it with the hope that service to the nation would open up opportunities for them.
Former secretary of state Colin Powell, a retired army general, exemplified what a person could achieve once affirmative action opened a door. But his successor, secretary of state Dr Condoleezza Rice, another black person, has risen to international prominence on sheer guts and merit.
American businesses, too, have embraced diversity as something good for them to succeed in a multi-cultural global environment. The Supreme Court heard myriad briefs filed in support of the University of Michigan, and the Court’s decision embodies their collective voice: Diversity is a compelling national interest. But neither corporate America nor any social group has ever advocated that diversity and social justice should be achieved through a system of quotas and reservations for historically deprived classes, as it is being done in India.

Our Corporate Masters

CYBER AGE
Building corporate character
ND BATRA
From The Statesman

Last week, Kenneth Lay, former chairman of the defunct energy company Enron, and Jeffrey Skilling, former president of the company, failed to convince the jury that they had done nothing wrong personally, that Enron was a good company stampeded to death by market panic, speculators, and footloose media reports. Both were convicted on conspiracy and fraud charges.

Good for America, and a lesson for others.
A company that strode like a giant with global footprints, including one at Dhabol, Maharashtra, collapsed in 2001, taking down hundreds of thousands of shareholders, employees and pension holders’ funds. The collapse of Enron was one of the many corporate scandals that hit the USA at the beginning of the new millennium, shaking the faith of the American people in corporate America. Many top corporate executives were hauled to prison, handcuffed like common criminals, as will be the case with Enron’s Lay and Skilling, when the sentencing is done.

Corporate USA functions on command and control, with little internal checks and balances. The political system, however, is based on a built-in checks and balances system along with a free Press that keeps politicians under restraint by exposing them to public ridicule, threatening to impeach them or put them in jail.
Several American presidents, state governors and legislators have been disgraced because of their abuse of power. The notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff has named names and testified against members of Congress whom he bribed to buy favours for his business clients. It is worthwhile to watch the unfolding American drama of political corruption and how the system cleanses itself periodically.
The functioning of the political system is not left to the innate goodness of the people seeking power. Nor is the development of good political behaviour left to any kind of special education or training in ethics course work in schools or colleges or the culture of the sports arena, for that matter.
The temptation of power trumps everything else ~ transparency and accountability are indispensable to good governance. That, unfortunately, is not the case with corporate USA, where most Americans are vested through their pensions and other retirement accounts. Today, we live in a world where corporate power overshadows most of our activities. The class struggle of workers v capitalists has been replaced by public interest civic groups v global corporations.
Corporate leaders rise to power on the promise of maximising profit, market value and economic health of their companies. Shareholders’ interest is limited to annual returns and dividends. The boards of directors are amoral; their interest is limited to increasing shareholders’ value. They hunker for executives who maximise their investments. So long as an executive performs well and exceeds the expectations of Wall Street, he can get away with excesses.
Last year, former chief executive Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom (now MCI, Inc), whose $11 billion fraud drove the telecommunications company into bankruptcy, was sentenced to serve 25 years in prison. The former financial chief officer of the company, Scott Sullivan, who pleaded guilty and testified against his former boss, told the jury he had warned Mr Ebbers that accounting adjustments, creative accounting or cooking books, whatever you call it, could not be justified.
Mr Ebbers told him the company had to “hit the numbers,” and meet the financial and revenue targets. Underlings were, of course, blamed by Mr Ebbers for the fraud, said to be the largest in the US history. At its peak in 1999, WorldCom had a market capitalisation of $180 billion, and Mr Ebbers was a darling of Wall Street. But it was a reputation built on sand.
When WorldCom’s real earnings could not meet the forecast, Mr Ebbers asked the account department to “adjust the numbers”. Corporate accounting departments are notorious for slouching towards the powerful.
Wall Street analysts and financial journalists who, out of fear or favour, work as paid employees of big corporations rather than as watchdogs of public interests, went along with the web of lies woven by the WorldCom team until the whole edifice began to collapse in 2000, and the share price sank to $15 from a high of $65.
But Wall Street seldom forgives anyone’s trespasses. One cannot get away with lies for too long, but sometimes the price a company and eventually the public pay is too high, and the damage to reputation is irreparable.
Why do corporate executives misbehave? Deborah Gruenfeld, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford Business School, discussing the psychology of power and leadership in Stanford Business Magazine said: “Behaving badly may be natural at the top.” But why? According to her research, power creates “disinhibition”. In other words, power gives you a feeling of immunity from the consequences of your actions, especially when your salary and bonuses are in a stratospheric region. Consider the pay package of Exxon Mobil Corporation’s CEO Rex Tillerson for 2006, which at $13 million is the highest in US history. What does this man think about the rest of us struggling to fill our gas tanks? Can we make corporate bosses honest, even when we pay them so much?
Can we instill ethics into their souls? May be, the ignominious march of Enron’s Mr Kenneth Lay and Mr Jeffrey Skilling to prison will instill some sense of fear, if not ethics, into our highly paid “disinhibited” corporate masters.

The future is digial

Going digital at full speed

N D Batra
From The Statesman

The enthusiasm about the Internet among the young and the old all over the world has been increasing steadily. Memories of the deflated dotcom balloon have faded. The digital age is rising on a solid foundation as more and more users begin to realise the Internet’s potential in diverse fields.
The main reason for the growing popularity of the Internet is that it makes the users’ lives easier. Though this is basically an adult view ~ teenagers value the Internet for different reasons ~ the fact remains that its popularity among all sections of society especially in the USA is widespread.
The phenomenal rise of Google shows that dotcom companies have not slowed down. The users regard the Internet not only as a limitless source of free information available at a mouse click but also a shopping mall, banking street and place to socialise. Of course, some people still don’t feel confident about trusting the computer screen ~ even if an online grocer gives free home deliveries; they would rather go to the store, browse and enjoy the sensuous experience of personal shopping.
Habits die hard, especially for the old. Some time ago, the Markle Foundation issued a report that confirmed the widely held view that the Internet is “a source of worry” regarding privacy, pornography, accuracy of information (“You have to question the truthfulness of most things you read on the Internet,” said the respondents) and accountability. As these concerns diminish, the dotcoms would become a pre-eminent engine driving the economy, as one can see happening in India to some extent. The question of accountability is a typical one that the American public normally asks, whether it is a tire manufacturer, pharmaceutical company or a television network.
But since the Internet is not owned by anyone and is “impossible to govern”, the question of accountability becomes intriguing and difficult to handle. As the report said: “The public is concerned about accountability online, in part because they believe they have fewer rights and protections when they use the Internet than in comparable offline activities.” The American public by a wide margin is worried about the government and private companies collecting information about them when they are online. Data-sniffers do make us vulnerable on the Internet. If in a shopping mall someone watches or stalks you, you become alert and take action; or may be choose to do nothing. On the Internet you don’t know who is watching you and why, which creates diffused anxiety and consequently reduces trust in the system.
The public wants the ungovernable to be governed, may be through some kind of commission, Federal Trade Commission, for example; or Interpol. Amusingly, to a hypothetically question as to who to include in a watch dog body for the Internet, the respondents mentioned two interesting individuals: Oprah Winfrey, a most trusted talk-show hostess, and Bill Gates about whom an American judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, who tried the monopoly case against Microsoft, said that he had a kind of a Napoleonic complex and wanted to dominate the world through his company, and recommended that the company be broken up. The judge had not foreseen the rise of Google; nonetheless, Bill Gates is even today a most admired person in the USA. The adult users’ view of the Internet contrasts sharply, in many respects, with what American teenagers think about cyberspace.
Teenagers love the Internet’s freedom and anonymity. For them it is an equaliser, a source of empowerment, “an authority free zone” where “they feel less likely to be judged,” a nowhere land that shuts out “curfews, homework, teachers, and parents”. Unlike adults who want the Internet to be regulated somehow, teenagers prefer the Internet to be left alone, to keep it “as anarchistic as possible”, lest its freedom be compromised. They are aware of the dangers of meeting strangers and predators online but feel confident of dealing with the situation on their own, a view that also finds expression in other reports about the Internet and teenagers. Teenagers are also not as much concerned about surveillance as adult users are, which seems a little puzzling. I believe teenagers’ indifferent attitude regarding data mining and profiling is due to the fact that they have very little to lose in material terms, for example, credit card identity theft, financial blackmail, bad credit, et al.
Fear grows, as we grow older. Like my own students whom I occasionally use as focus groups to see which way the social winds are blowing, the teenagers in the Markle survey felt that it is the responsibility of “the individuals to educate themselves, or for parents to take responsibility for looking after the safety of their children.” The survey was limited to teenagers coming from stable American families because it did not answer the question about vulnerable teen users of the Internet who come from single-parent families, or those where parental supervision is not available.
When the family bonds are loose and guidance minimal, how would teenagers deal with the freedom of the Internet, especially with portals like MySpace where kids can do whatever they want, posting personal and private thoughts, pictures, whatever. This makes it difficult to resolve the dilemma how to regulate the Internet, when the two main user groups, adults and teenagers, disagree sharply about the role of the government and private companies in cyberspace. Nonetheless, the world is going digital at full speed.

De-fanging Pakistan for world peace

Why doesn’t India take terrorism seriously?

The Statesman/CYBER AGE/ND BATRA

The heart-wrenching picture of Manisha and Anisha, daughters of the slain Indian engineer K Suryanarayana, wailing beside their father’s body at the time of his cremation, “Shattered Dreams,” as The Statesman captioned it, should open our eyes to the fact that war against terrorism will never ~ ever ~ be over.
Some analysts and commentators have been dumping Islamic terrorism with Maoist insurgency and incidents of communal violence, as if they were a continuation of the same problem. It is just like a quack telling you that cancer and malaria are the same disease because both kill their victims, much like traffic accidents kill people, which is no way of facing the horrific realities of international terrorism.
The modus operandi of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq is no different from that in Kashmir where in April 32 innocent people, Hindus only, were dragged from their homes and killed in Doda and Udhampur; or Varanasi where in a temple attack 30 people were killed in early March. You see the monstrous face of Islamic jihadism: death and destruction multiplied thousand times by an endless cycle of television images, disembodied end-of-the world sounds and images of scarred and mutilated humans and buildings, fear magnified and mirrored on hundreds of ghostly faces everyday.
Fighting terrorism is not a gentleman’s game. It consumes a politician, as President George Bush knows. Superb intelligence gathering, preemptive and preventive measures and anticipatory disaster plans could go a long way in minimising the damages, if India would take terrorism as seriously as the United States of America does, and politicians are prepared to pay the price in terms of popularity. President Bush’s popularity is down in the drains but he keeps fighting terrorism. Since September 11, 2001, there has been no terrorist attack in the USA. When would one say that about India?
Eradicating terrorism is not a simple matter of bringing one evil man to his heels; or killing a militant here and a militant there. Although its origin lies in religious fanaticism and a blind hatred of non-believes, at an organisational level terrorism must be considered as an enterprise that manufactures dread, customised for each political and cultural market. The response of each country, therefore, has to be different. Though the USA cannot directly help India fight terrorism, working together on a long-term basis, especially in Afghanistan, would strengthen both countries’ efforts in fighting terror.
Osama bin Laden alive and kicking in Pakistan is not alone. Nor could he plan and execute bloody carnages in so many places without the brainpower and resources of a multitude of strategists and financiers living in sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Arab world. Chris Patten, chancellor of Oxford University and former EU commissioner for external relations, last week wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal holding Pakistan singularly responsible for the prevailing instability in Afghanistan, and asserting that the nation’s primary export to Afghanistan today is terrorism.
“Every few days,” wrote Lord Patten, “the resurgent Taliban carry out another deadly attack on school children, aid workers, or local and international security forces... On the most basic level, attacks in Afghanistan, including suicide bombings, are often planned and prepared at Taliban training camps across the border.”
And Pakistan has done nothing to stop them in spite of President Pervez Musharraf’s protestations to the contrary. Lord Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, knows what he is talking about. So should US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, though for diplomatic reasons she may not be able to speak up as frankly as Lord Patten has done regarding runaway radicalism in Pakistan: “Demilitarising and de-radicalising Pakistan is truly the key to bringing about stability in Afghanistan and the wider region.”
The killing of Suryanarayana should be seen in the light that the Government of India or any other government wouldn’t be able to assure anyone’s safety unless terrorism is rooted out at its source, which according to Lord Patten flourishes in India’s neighbourhood. But the terrorists also flourish in open and secular societies in Western Europe, Canada, the United States of America; only more so in India. That’s what complicates the matter.
How do we recognise the enemy who may be also amidst us without violating the values of the open society that we are trying to protect? It is puzzling that the global financial system is very much intact and the confidence of the investor remains unabated, but wails of mourners continue.
Attacks against ethnic minorities adversely affect civil liberties, which are already under threat. In the USA, law enforcement authorities have been given expanded powers of surveillance including wire-tapping and e-mail scrutiny. Last week’s Washington Post-ABC News poll indicated that 63 per cent of Americans approve President Bush’s domestic surveillance practices to fight terrorism, though his overall approval rating has sunk very low.
Open societies face a serious dilemma. As law enforcement authorities try to locate and destroy international terrorist cells functioning openly or clandestinely in their own backyards, they need to do so with minimum loss of civil liberties and without endangering the security of ethnic and religious minorities.
Whatever happens in Kashmir should have no repercussion in the streets of Ahmedabad.The struggle against international jihadist terrorism is going to be a relentless, long drawn out global campaign from which India cannot escape. India has no choice but to keep fighting.

Pakistan's weapon: Terrorism

Why doesn’t India take terrorism seriously?

Branding Scotch but what about Taj Mahal?

Darjeeling, Basmati, Scotch

CYBER AGE From The Statesman
ND Batra

Recently, when I visited my colleague, he offered me a cup of Darjeeling brew. And whenever I used to visit my cousin in Mumbai, he would offer me Scotch.

I anticipated the pleasure and knew what I was getting. The recent Delhi High Court ruling that Indian brewer Golden Bottling cannot appropriate “scotch” or similar sounding words to brand its own whiskey is a most remarkable decision in the sense that it recognises a geographical region as the site of a global brand, which is in accordance with the Geographical Indications (GIs) clause of the WTO-TRIPs agreement. GIs confers intellectual property rights on a product from a region “where a given quality, reputation or other characteristics of the good are essentially attributable to its geographical origin”. Basmati and Darjeeling are no different from Scotch, are they?

The only way to get a sensible grip on a widely misunderstood but fashionable concept, knowledge-based society, is to define it in terms of intellectual property rights. Much of the rest is propaganda to shock and awe the innocent.

Many of us still can’t get over the shock that that a Texas-based company, RiceTec, was given the patent for a supposedly new strain of Basmati rice. Something which has defined the Indian sub-continent for centuries was gobbled up by a knowledge-based society, where assembling, re-assembling, storing, patenting and branding of information is becoming a major source of wealth, power and hegemony.

Contrary to what you learn from the high-minded, a knowledge-based society is not one whose members are inquisitive, knowledgeable, skilled or willing to learn all their lives. Rather, it’s a society where information and knowledge are created for money. It is its ability to build legal infrastructure, enforce laws and claim ownership of information through copyrights, brands, trademarks and patents. Danjaq and United Artists warn that only they can make James Bond 007 television and film series. RiceTec too asserted the claim that only it should have the right to call its rice variety Basmati including its variants, Texmati, Kasmati, etc., and forbid others from using similar sounding brand names.

It goes much against the popular belief, but a patent’s legal force does not lie in giving one the permission to exploit an invention; rather it permits its owner to exclude others from making, using or selling the invention. If it had gone totally unchallenged, the RiceTec patent might have been be used to exclude Basmati traders and exporters of the sub-continent not only from the US market but also from the rest of the world markets. It may sound far-fetched and paranoid that this could ever happen, but the law, they say, is like an Indian donkey: it can hit anyone with any leg at any time. But mostly the donkey favours the rich and the powerful. Competition for a share in the world marketplace is so ruthless that few would disagree with Intel’s CEO Andy Grove when he says, only the paranoid survive.

It’s not so simple to answer the question, what is patentable? US law requires that the invention must be practical, deal with processes, machines, manufactures, compositions of matters; or the new uses of the above. It must be useful, novel and non-obvious (unique). Plant patents, under which rice plant falls, according to US Patent and Trademark Office, “are granted to any person who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced any distinct and new variety of plant, including cultivated spores, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than tuber-propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state.” But Basmati is not only rice. Like Scotch and Champaign it is the flavour of a region, a cultural icon.

Since the uses and unique attributes of Basmati have been known for centuries, so one might ask: What did RiceTec add to it for which the company was granted a patent on some varieties? Probably nothing worth patent-able, but it does give us a glimpse into the shape of the knowledge society to come: creation of brand names, trademarks, value added-information; and not the least the ability to exploit information for commercial purposes through international treaties, backed by diplomacy, legal chicanery, FDI or even brute force.

This is, however, not to belittle the importance of intellectual property rights, without which writers, creators and inventors will perish, and society will stagnate. But we must demystify the slogans of the emerging information society and understand its modus operandi, its terms of empowerment.

Consider the trademark law, which was originally enacted to prevent unfair competition, and is used to protect words, symbols or images that identify a business or its products. Trademarks have existed since the Middle Ages and they have been always protected under the common law of usage. Coke, for instance, is a distinctive trademark of the Coca-Cola Company and it would be unfair competition if some other company were to use it. So are Kodak, Xerox, Exxon, the Golden Arches, etc. But when Donald Trump, a New York real-estate tycoon, plunders a cultural symbol like the Taj Mahal and uses it as trademark for his gambling casino in Atlantic City in New Jersey, there is something wrong the way the world is turning into a global marketplace. If a knowledge-based society uses religious icons and other sacred names to sell sneakers and other consumer goods, it is time to challenge its presumptuousness.

Commenting upon India and Pakistan forming a working group to bring Basmati into the GIs fold, Ashfak Bokhari wrote in the Dawn: “More often than not, bio piracy occurs in the West and that too primarily because of the inherent western bias towards the Third World. The West still suffers from the ‘Columbian blunder’ and assumes it has the right to plunder the resources of the non-West countries by treating their people’s knowledge systems as non-existent, hence empty of prior creativity and prior rights, and hence available for ‘ownership’ through the claim of ‘invention’.”

The (mis) appropriation of Basmati, a defining culinary-religious symbol of the Indian subcontinent, into an intellectual property right, as RiceTec has done, is a cultural assault and must be fought tooth and nail, along with other misappropriations of cultural symbols and sacred images of ancient civilisations, wherever they happen.

Media smart CEOs

Advice for golfing CEOs

Cyber Age
ND Batra
The Statesman

While we were waiting to tee off, my golf buddy who happens to be the CEO of a global company, asked me how a company should deal with journalists for whom bad news makes a good story. The news media, I agreed, have begun to play a very significant role in the conduct of both national and international business. 24/7 television news is converging with the Internet, making events live and spontaneous beyond the control of gatekeepers. The rise of bloggers, Online whistleblowers and public interest groups, enables the presentation of alternative views of what companies are doing.

Gone are the days when a business could be conducted beyond the public view. The reason for this heightened interest in what companies do is simple. The impact on people’s lives even if they are not directly invested in a company is tremendous. The very presence of Home Depot or Wal-Mart in a town raises fear and expectations. This gives rise to the need for intense scrutiny by the news media. When India’s Ambani brothers of the Reliance conglomerate were fighting, Wall Street was watching keenly.

Of course, the news media is itself a global business and is subject to rules and regulations like any other business. But in the United States and in many other democratic countries, especially in Europe, Japan, India and Australia, the news media has a privileged position.

In the United States, it is extremely difficult to win libel damages against the news media because of the legal provision that the plaintiff must prove what is called “actual malice,” or “wreckless disregard for truth.” Proving media negligence only is not enough to win libel damages. The near immunity from libel gives the news media freedom and encourages investigative reporting and keeps society healthy.

Because of the inescapable fact that our economic well being, pensions, retirement savings, environment and quality of life have become dependent on the marketplace, no business can escape media attention. Bigger companies invite the healthy suspicion of the media about their activities. Add to it millions of blogs that feed upon each other.

The conspiracy of silence is possible only in a one-party authoritarian state like China, which probably is one of the reasons why global corporations want to do business there. There are very few anti-business reports from China, which nevertheless in the long run might prove counterproductive. So what can be done?

A company doing business globally has to become media savvy and must understand how news organisations work and how they produce stories. Corporate communicators and diplomats have to understand the media’s sources of information and their reporting methods, and have to learn how to influence them by providing them correct information.

Companies have been using advertising as a major method of influencing the public ~ for example, oil companies, BP and Exxon-Mobil, make advertisements to divert attention from the alleged price gouging at the pump. Advertising is still a powerful mode of direct communication with the public at large. But advertisements cannot beat headline news, breaking stories, or special reports with which the news media try to draw public attention that is distracted by infoglut.

It is a big challenge to be heard in the Tower of Babel and more so, when the reputation of the corporate world, because of a series of accounting scandals and the personal misconduct of some companies’ CEOs, has created an air of diffused distrust in the public. Let us keep in mind that no reporter could ever turn a bad story into a good one, especially in crises, when news organisations and celebrity journalists try to outdo each other.

News is a competitive business and no one can afford to keep silent over a story that has an impact on the public. In good times, a company that has excellent working relations with the news media can strengthen its position by presenting positive stories and thus enhance its reservoir of public good will. Consequently, when a crisis hits the company, it will be able to draw upon the public sympathy.

Building social capital is as important as building market capital.
The traditional method of issuing press and video releases is still relevant, especially in local news media outlets, where the paucity of resources might prompt a local television station or a newspaper to repackage a company’s story as a news item. But national news media organisations are inundated with e-mail news tips, and video and press releases and so, they hardly pay attention to junk mail. It is therefore important to target the right people in the news media.

Steps for effectively dealing with the news media require research. But the following points can be helpful:

First determine whether you have a definite story and whether it needs to be told to the news media and why.
What is the audience for the story and which news media would be the best to reach? Which reporters normally cover such stories and which one of them would be most sympathetic to your story?
Is the reporter accessible for pitching the story? What angle would he adopt and how to influence him?
When the news media come calling for information and comments, the company should offer full cooperation; and the spokesperson should be ready with facts and figures or promise to provide the data promptly to meet the reporter’s deadline.
Information should be provided thoughtfully and judiciously. It is difficult to undo or correct the information once it is out.
Providing reliable and prompt information is one of the best ways to build bridges with the news media; when the need arises, the company can count upon the media good will.
Most of all, do not be caught with your hands in the cookie jar. And play honest golf.