Gandhi ‘outstanding' for PM – really?

The announcement by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that he would not serve another term was hardly unexpected – the man is, after all, 81 years old and has been in the job for a decade. The fact that he has anointed Rahul Gandhi as his successor in the coming elections is not a surprise either, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty having dominated the ruling Congress Party since independence, providing three of the nation’s Prime Ministers.

Singh described the 43-year-old Gandhi as having “outstanding credentials” to be the next Prime Minister of India, although it is hard to see what these credentials are apart from being the son, grandson and great-grandson of former leaders.

Gandhi is a back-bench MP in the Lok Sabha (Lower House) of the Indian Parliament. He has never held Ministerial office, and indeed declined the offer of one under Singh. Moreover he has been a lacklustre and unenthusiastic performer on the campaign trail. In recent State elections his presence did nothing to stop a rout by the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

 He is a vice president of Congress, a post he has occupied for less than a year (his mother, Sonia, is the president) and is on record as saying he would prefer to work behind the scenes reforming party structures.

Singh also launched an attack on Opposition Leader and Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi saying he would be a disastrous Prime Minister. “Anyone who has presided over the massacre of citizens on the streets of Ahmedabad should not be made prime minister,” Singh said in a reference to the Gujarat Hindu-Muslim riots of 2002 in which more than 1000 died.

BJP leaders have been quick to point out that the riots occurred very early in Modi’s first term and in the intervening years Gujarat State has become a model of economic development. Modi himself has always claimed he did everything in his power to halt the bloodshed.  

Singh, who served as Finance Minister in the Government of P. V. Narasimha Rao during the 1990s, is rightly credited with liberalising the country’s economy after decades of doctrinaire socialist stagnation.  The early years of his leadership saw these reforms continued, to applause both at home and overseas, but in recent times his administration has been mired in a succession of corruption scandals, which he has seemed powerless to control.

Manmohan Singh deserves to be remembered as one of India’s better Prime Ministers. GDP has grown at an annual rate of 7.6 per cent over the last decade and the national income is close to $2 trillion, but his subservience to the Gandhi dynasty and his promotion of yet another Gandhi to lead his country may well prove to be at odds with the tides of history.

 

     

 

Why Kerry has to keep visiting

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has predictably gone on the offensive for his meeting with the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, during the current round of attempts to find a peace framework between Israel and the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

In his opening statement Netanyahu said he did not believe the Palestinians were taking the peace process seriously, pointing to the welcome given by President Mahmoud Abbas to the release of more than 100 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

The Israeli leader referred to the group as “terrorists”; however it is unlikely he would have authorised the release of anyone regarded as a serious terrorist threat to the State. Israeli security forces regularly trawl up rock-throwing demonstrators useful for later release as goodwill gestures during a high-profile visit such as Kerry’s

Netanyahu has also brought a temporary halt to the approval of new settlement housing on the West Bank, but again this is window dressing designed to put Israel in the best possible light during this brief period of world attention. The building of settlements has become an increasingly thorny issue as Palestinians see more and more of their already tiny State being whittled away.

Despite Kerry’s dogged optimism – “the time is soon arriving where leaders are going to have to make difficult decisions…but it is not mission impossible,” he said – the prospects for a lasting settlement remain as elusive as ever.

I believe Netanyahu would genuinely like to go into serious negotiations, even to the point where territorial concessions could be made over the settlements. However, the reality of Israeli politics means that the views of religious extremists and nationalists have to be taken into account.

The Palestinian side is a mess. Abbas’ claim to legitimacy is under severe question as constitutionally elections should have been held in 2009. His Fatah Party remains in deadlock with Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Despite several attempts elections still seem a long way off.

The determination of the US Administration to find a solution cannot be in doubt. Kerry has made 10 visits to the area in less than a year, but even this effort by the world’s major power the talk is still about a “framework” to set “guidelines” for “negotiations”. In other words talks about talks about talks.

The US has to persist. Its influence and interest effectively blocks the involvement of other more radical Middle Eastern elements from interfering in the Israeli-Palestinian equation while keeping Israel’s finger off its nuclear trigger. 

It would be a dangerous day for the world should any Washington Administration decide to walk away from this problem, however intractable it seems.  

 

Risky path for Egypt’s rulers

Growing concern over the escalating political strife in Egypt has led to the military Government taking the ultimate sanction of declaring its main opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist group, blaming it for a spate of bombings and attacks against the police.

This is far from a new tactic: countries around the world regularly declare troublesome organisations to be terrorists. In many cases there are very good reasons for doing so, in others it is simply a political move to silence opposition.

Australia recently went down this path by declaring the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, currently a participant in the Syrian Civil War, a terrorist group, with the aim of stopping the steady trickle of Australian nationals heading over to Syria to fight for it.

In Egypt’s case there is a difficulty. The Muslim Brotherhood was until the middle of last year, the national Government. By some estimates it still has the support of some 30 per cent of the population, and in a country of more than 86 million, that’s an awful lot of people to prosecute and lock up.

So obviously the current Government must adopt other tactics – that is the arrest some key leaders, agitators and a few ordinary Brotherhood supporters trawled up at one of the many often violent demonstrations taking place across the country; the hope being that the vast majority will be cowed or at least persuaded to give up their radical ways and return to business as usual.

As is often the case, journalists are among the targets. In Egypt it was the arrest of  four Al Jazeera journalists (one was later set free) accused of joining the Brotherhood and making biased and false reports that damaged the country’s reputation abroad.

If biased reporting is a crime then the staffs of organisations ranging from Fox News to the Sydney Daily Telegraph had better watch out. The arrests are simply a way to silence reporting that does not accord with the Government’s line – something that in this information-charged world where anyone with a mobile phone is both reporter and camera-person, is doomed to failure.

The Government could quite possibly have more success with its overall strategy of silencing dissent, although judging by the examples of Libya and Syria the harder the crackdown, the more the population tends to push back.

What it is in danger of doing is creating a vacuum that will be filled by even more radical Islamic groups bent on turning Egypt into an Iranian-style Islamic State - that would be a savage blow to any hope of future peace and stability in North Africa and the Middle East.

 

    

 

 

 

Ukraine on a knife-edge

Refusing to buckle to pressure from Moscow, the former Soviet republics of Moldova and Georgia have signed trade and political association treaties with the European Union – moves that have set them on the path to eventual full EU membership.

The Kremlin’s outrage at this rebuff to President Vladimir Putin’s long-term plan to rebuild the old Soviet Union through a Russian-dominated Eurasian customs union, was tempered by the refusal of Ukraine to also sign up to the agreement, leaving that country open to seek closer ties with its giant neighbour.

On the face of it, the choice between the Russian grouping and the European Union seems a no brainer. The EU has 500 million consumers and an economy six times the size of the Eurasian Union. As an example of the kind of support available in Europe, Brussels immediately offered Moldova’s 3.5 million citizens visa-free travel within the 28-nation bloc.

But there are other considerations for Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, to ponder.

An elected leader, Yanukovych’s constituency is based in the eastern part of the country where attachment to Russia and nostalgia for the old Soviet Empire is much greater than in the capital, Kiev. While paying lip service to the idea of a future with the EU, his actions have been more in keeping with an old-style Soviet Commissar, principally with the jailing of Yulia Tymoshenko, the opponent who he narrowly defeated in the 2010 poll.

Many observers believe Yanukovych hankers for an authoritarian style of administration less sensitive to the rule of law and human rights, and looks enviously at neighbouring Belarus where President Alexander Lukashenko rules as though the Soviet Union never ended.

However Ukraine is not yet Belarus and in 2015 Yanukovych must face an electorate clearly weary of rampant corruption, organised crime, cronyism and a security service that models itself and uses the same tactics as the original and much-feared KGB - a population that has taken to the streets of Kiev in strident protest at his Government’s failure to embrace the EU.

The demonstrators are backed by a recent public opinion poll showing that some 45 per cent of Ukrainians favour joining the EU against just 14 per cent who preferred the Eurasian Union.

Sadly, in Ukraine today pay-offs and political pressure from Moscow can have just as equal force as public opinion. How Yanukovych deals with the latter will be keenly observed in the lead-up to the country’s 2015 poll.  

 

 

 

Is Yasukuni worth the fuss?

Here we go again: Japanese Prime Minister visits Yasukuni Shrine; angry protests from China and South Korea as this edifice is supposed to contain the spirits of Japanese war dead that include individuals who were convicted of war crimes after World War II; the United States, Japan’s ally, says “tut-tut” and leaves it at that; Japanese PM is totally unrepentant and likely to repeat the process again at some future date.

Come on, guys, isn’t it about time we used some common sense here? The war has been over for almost 70 years. Yes, there were some rather nasty things done by the Japanese during its occupation of parts of China, but aren’t nasty things done in all wars throughout history? Didn’t Genghis Khan do a few nasty things in his sweep through Asia? Aren’t there some pretty nasty things going on today is Syria and South Sudan? Wasn’t the Holocaust a nasty business as well?

Of course, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is being a bloody minded in visiting the shrine just at this time, but it should not take a Nobel Laureate to work out that it is nothing to do with the honouring Tojo Hideki and his crew back in the 1940s and everything to do with raising the finger to Beijing in 2013.

Abe, in common with many colleagues on the conservative side of Japan’s politics, is afraid his country is being sidelined in the Asia of the 21^st century, its efforts in lifting itself from the ruins of war to become a world economic powerhouse unappreciated. He has listened to one too many speeches made by politicians around the world and including Australia about “the rise of China”, and he has had a gut-full.

Hence the continuing row with China over the disputed island chain in the East China Sea, which Japan administers and calls the Senkakus and China the Diaoyus; hence the visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. It is essentially Abe telling the world that Japan is still around and specifically to Beijing: “you want to be Asia’s top dog? Then you’ve still got us to deal with”.

Beijing has been naïve to allow itself to be manipulated by the Yasukuni controversy. After all, the Head of State, Emperor Akihito has not visited the shrine since he came to the throne and his father, Hirohito, stopped going after the 1978 decision to include the war criminals. Surely that should carry greater symbolic weight than the occasional decision to visit by a transient political leader?

As it is, Abe has achieved his purpose. The world’s attention is switching back to Japan. China, while making its usual comments about Abe’s "extremely dangerous" direction, is looking rather powerless. The deterioration in Sino-Japanese relations to new lows is something to be deplored and, indeed, feared, but it seems unlikely that there will be significant improvement as 2014 dawns.       

   

Khodorkovsky will fight from afar

Former political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky can hardly be blamed for not wanting to get back into Russia’s political fray as an opponent to President Vladimir Putin. Ten years in detention, most of that time spent in a Siberian prison camp, would sap the energy of the most determined rebel.

There can be little doubt that Khodorkovsky regrets his initial decision that Russia’s new generation of wealthy businesspeople, the ‘oligarchy’, of which he was the richest and natural leader, could control the country’s strongman.

So for now the man who was once among the world’s richest, will enjoy the small fraction of wealth he was able to spirit away overseas in a semi-retirement spent in Germany and elsewhere. He is adamant that the struggle for power in Russia is not something in which he wants to be involved. He will not even return to the country for fear that he might be detained again, or at least have his passport confiscated.

But he will travel; he will give interviews and probably write books. His insight into the workings of Putin’s Russia – and the details of how opponents of the Kremlin are dealt with – will make interesting reading.

It should be remembered that Khodorkovsky is no saint. He started his business empire in the 1980s when then President Mikhail Gorbachev began to open up the Soviet Union to the world. After the Soviet collapse he was first on the bandwagon buying up former State-run enterprises at bargain basement prices and accumulating huge wealth through the acquisition of Siberian oil fields as the head of his giant company, Yukos.

A chancer who rode his luck until it failed him, Khodorkovsky was probably guilty of at least some of the things for which he was eventually charged – involving fraud and tax evasion – but then so were a lot of other people.

Getting on the wrong side of the Russian leader is a dangerous business and Khodorkovsky is right to fear Putin may be setting himself up as a President for Life. Centuries of living under the absolute rule of the Tsars followed by the equally totalitarian regime of the Soviets have left Russians with little experience or understanding of democracy. For many the authoritarian rule of a strong leader is preferable to the ‘democratic’ turbulence of the 1990s.

Putin has filled the gap: Two terms as President, followed by four years as Prime Minister with a trusted ally filling the presidency and now president again, means that his hands have never been off the levers of power. So far he has circumvented the Russian Constitution rather than destroyed it, but Khodorkovsky will not be the only figure in the West watching and waiting for the next move from the man in the Kremlin.     

 

US law enforcement goes over the top

The case of the Indian junior diplomat who was arrested and strip-searched in New York recently has inflamed passions in both countries. In India the focus has been on the insult and humiliation to Devyani Khobagade, the Indian Deputy Consul General in New York, while in the United States and other Western countries the emphasis has been on her alleged crime, claiming on a visa application that her maid was to be paid a certain amount while actually paying her considerably less.

While there have been demonstrations in front of the US Embassy in New Delhi and calls for counter reprisals against American diplomats in India, Ritwik Deo, writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper raged against India’s privileged and cossetted middle class for believing itself above the law and always expecting special treatment.

Ms Khobagade is not the victim, Deo wrote. Her maid is the victim. Indians are missing the point.

Except that what has being arrested, handcuffed, held in detention, strip searched and cavity searched got to do with the offence of visa fraud? Was there a need to arrest her at all? Would it not have been sufficient to have summonsed her to appear at a police station or a court to explain herself?

To this reporter, used over many years to the Australian way of doing things, US law enforcement has always seemed way over the top with defendants handcuffed for minor traffic offences and appearing in court in leg-irons.

In Australia Ms Khobagade would most certainly have been ordered to pay her maid at the stated rate with full back pay and possibly further compensation; she may have faced further prosecution for the fraudulent statement, and her Embassy would have heard about it. But it is highly unlikely she would have spent any time in detention being subjected to indignities to her person.  

This could be passed off as an isolated incident involving an Indian official in the United States, except that it is not. In April I wrote about the detention and apparent harassment of Uttar Pradesh Urban Development Minister Mohammad Azam Khan at Boston’s Logan Airport.

The Foreign Minister in the former BJP Federal Government, George Fernandes, was strip-searched twice in Dulles Airport while on an official visit and India’s then Ambassador to Washington, Meera Shankar, was given a public ‘pat-down’ at an airport in Mississippi in 2010, apparently singled out from a group of about 30 passengers because she was wearing a sari.

This diplomatic row will blow over. US Secretary of State, John Kerry has telephoned Indian National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon to “express regret” over the incident. In diplomatic speak this is the apology you make when you are not making an apology. Mr Kerry also hoped the incident would not harm US-India relations.

There lies the crux of the matter. For all the breast-beating about Ms Khobagade not being above the law and grossly underpaying her maid, the fact is when you start actions against a person who is in any way a representative of another country you will face consequences, whether your actions are justified or not.

Certainly justice has to be done, but surely in a less dramatic fashion than that occasioned in this case by Manhattan law enforcement officials.