QUAD Grouping in Indo Pacific - The Hindu (28.02.18)

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Cornered by the Quad? (28.02.18)

Last November on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila, the Quadrilateral arrangement involving Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. saw a revival as officials exchanged notes on regional and global security. It has been a remarkable turnaround in the prospects of an arrangement which had collapsed a decade ago under the weight of Chinese démarches. In 2017 it was an assertive Beijing that brought the four Indo-Pacific powers together to manage the externalities arising out of the scale and scope of China’s rise.

Challenging China

Despite an initial meeting, there has been a range of questions on the viability of the Quad arrangement, and specifically on its agenda given that the grouping has often been wary of explicitly annoying the Chinese.

But there are signs of emerging priority areas. Last week it was revealed that the four countries are working to establish a joint regional infrastructure scheme as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Though the plan is still in its nascent stage, it is clear that the normative order China is trying to construct in the economic sphere will not go unchallenged. As Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop said recently in a media interview in London,“We want to work with China to ensure that their infrastructure investment is commercially sustainable, is transparent and adds to the economic growth that is so needed in our part of the world.”

The Quad has expressed reservations on the BRI in its own ways. But the four countries have rightly recognised that merely opposing it will not advance their agenda given the hunger for infrastructure in large parts of the world. According to some estimates, developing nations in the Indo-Pacific itself need around $26 trillion through 2030 for their infrastructure needs. As a pet project of Chinese President Xi Jinping, the BRI is aimed at situating Beijing at the core of the global economy by building global transport links across the world. China’s ambitions in this regard have also kept expanding with its first official Arctic policy white paper which talks of a “Polar Silk Road.” The Quad nations will have to present their own model if only to underscore the normative differences between the Chinese and their approach. China with its BRI is providing a new economic template to the world, and it is important for those powers which view Beijing’s approach as top-down, opaque and self serving to pro-actively provide credible alternatives. The scale and scope of the Chinese economic footprint can only be tackled if the Quad nations combine forces. Unlike the military option, this is a softer side of the “Quad” engagement and its members are already undertaking connectivity projects around the world. India and Japan, for example, are working on an ambitious Asia-Africa Growth Corridor linking Southeast Asia to Africa. The idea of an Indo-Pacific “quad” has been much talked about but this will be the first concrete manifestation of the idea in operational terms.

Pushing back

The biggest concern about the BRI is that it is a means of cementing Chinese economic hegemony and, in the process, challenges the foundations of the extant liberal economic order. While underlining their support for the need for global and regional connectivity in principle, the Quad members have been pushing back. India’s opposition has been the strongest partly because the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is a part of the BRI, passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. India was the only major power which did not attend the BRI summit hosted by China last May. Japan has laid down specific conditions for its participation in the BRI even as it is looking to use its official development assistance to promote a broader “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy” including “high-quality infrastructure”. Australia has challenged the principles which frame the BRI. U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has suggested that “no one nation should put itself into a position of dictating ‘One Belt, One Road’”. After the U.S. pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, raising apprehensions about America’s continued commitment to Asia’s future, infrastructure investment in the region will bring it back in the game.

Beijing has already expressed its unhappiness at the emergence of the “Quad” and will see moves to counter the BRI as an attempt to shift the balance of power in the wider Indo-Pacific. China’s worries will only increase as the combined might of these four powers is quite formidable. The possibility of major power coordination on managing global connectivity still remains a possibility but as more and more countries recognise the limits of Chinese approach, the Quad’s attraction will get even stronger.

Harsh V. Pant is Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi and Professor at King’s College London

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Looking for balance in power (15.12.17)

A month after India was part of the ‘Quad’ discussion on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila involving Japan, Australia and the U.S., New Delhi hosted foreign ministers of Russia and China this week. The Russia-India-China trilateral held its 15th meeting in what can be construed as New Delhi’s attempt to get a semblance of balance in its ties with Moscow and Beijing.

Scope of talks

The broader discussions, according to a joint communique of the 15th meeting, “took place in the backdrop of the political scenario in West Asia and North Africa, numerous challenges in putting the world economy back on the growth track, concerns relating to terrorism, transnational organised crime, illicit drug trafficking, food security, and climate change.”

But what was perhaps interesting was Russia and China’s continued attempts to frame global and regional politics through a similar lens, and the growing divergences between India and them. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it clear that he believes that India can benefit by joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “I know India has problems, we discussed it today, with the concept of One Belt, One Road, but the specific problem in this regard should not make everything else conditional to resolving political issues,” Mr. Lavrov said. Targeting India’s participation in the ‘Quad’, he also underlined that a sustainable security architecture cannot be achieved in the Asia-Pacific region with “closed bloc arrangements.” Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi also cautioned against “spheres of influence” and “cliques” by arguing that China opposed “hegemony and power politics and disagree with the sphere of influence and cliques and promote the democratisation of international relations.”

China, meanwhile, continued to take an aggressive posture on Doklam and its aftermath. Mr. Wang said in a speech before his Delhi visit: “We have handled the issue of cross-border incursions by the Indian border troops into China's Donglang (Doklam) area through diplomatic measures.” Though he suggested that “China and India have far greater shared strategic interests than differences, and far greater needs for cooperation than partial friction,” he maintained that “through diplomatic means, the Indian side withdrew its equipment and personnel which reflected the value and importance of China-India relations and demonstrated sincerity and responsibility of maintaining regional peace and stability.”

Tension in the air

The tensions in the trilateral framework are inevitable given the changes in the global geopolitical environment. The original conception of this framework was a response to a very different global environment. The proposal for a Moscow-Beijing-Delhi ‘strategic triangle’ had originally come from former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov during his visit to India in 1998, when he argued that such an arrangement would represent a force for greater regional and international stability. This did not elicit as enthusiastic a response from China and India as Russia had perhaps hoped for. Thereafter, the three countries continued to focus on improving the nature of their bilateral relationships, maintaining a safe distance from the Primakov proposal. But, this idea of a ‘strategic triangle’ took a tangible form when former Foreign Ministers of Russia, China, and India — Igor Ivanov, Tang Jiaxuan and Yashwant Sinha — met on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2002. Despite the fact that nothing concrete emerged out of that meeting, it represented the first major attempt by the three nations to deliberate on world affairs, and since then has become a regular feature of interactions among the three states.

The three nations had very different expectations from this trilateral. Russia’s role was key as its loss of power and influence on the world scene was a major cause of concern for its leadership. There was a growing and pervasive feeling in Russia that it surrendered its once-powerful position on the world stage for a position of little international influence and respect. It is against this backdrop that Russia tried to establish itself as the hub of two bilateral security partnerships that could be used to counteract U.S. power and influence in areas of mutual concern. While Russia witnessed a downward slide in its status as a superpower since the end of the Cold War, China emerged as a rising power that saw the U.S. as the greatest obstacle, if it was to achieve a pre-eminent position in the global political hierarchy. As a consequence, China recognised the importance of cooperating with Russia to check U.S. expansionism in the world, even if only for the short term. In fact, American policies towards Russia and China moved the two states closer to each other, leading to the formation of a new balance of power against the U.S.

India’s stance

India, on the other hand, had different considerations, as it was still far from becoming a global power of any reckoning. India saw in the trilateral a mechanism to bring greater balance in the global order as it believed that a unipolar U.S.-dominated world was not in the best interests of weaker states like itself, even as strategic convergence deepened between Washington and Delhi. Moreover, all three countries realised the enormous potential in the economic, political, military and cultural realms if bilateral relationships among them were adequately strengthened.

As a consequence, the trilateral did not lead to consequences of any great import. It merely resulted in declarations which were often critical of the West, and of the U.S. in particular. Yet this was also a period which saw significant shifts in Indo-U.S. ties as bilateral relations expanded while Russian and Chinese links with the U.S. have witnessed a downward shift.

The joint declaration of the recent trilateral meeting said: “Those committing, organising, inciting or supporting terrorist acts” must be held accountable and brought to justice under international law, including the principle of “extradite or prosecute.” It stopped short of naming Pakistan-based terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, something that India would have liked in line with the most recent BRICS declaration.

An arrangement that had started with an attempt to manage American unipolarity is now being affected fundamentally by Chinese resurgence. Both Russia and India are having to deal with the externalities being generated by China’s rise. While Russia is getting closer to China, India is trying to leverage its partnership with other like-minded states in the wider Indo-Pacific region. As a multipolar world order takes shape, India will have to engage with multiple partners so as to limit bilateral divergences.

The Russia-India-China template comes with its own set of challenges. China’s Global Times, commenting on the recent trilateral, suggested that “the leaders of the three only meet with each other on international occasions,” adding, “this indicates it does not have high status in diplomacy and cannot bear more functions.” While this may be true, New Delhi’s continued engagement with the duo suggests that India is today confident of setting its own agenda in various platforms. Just as China engages with the U.S. on the one hand and with Russia on the other, a rising India is quite capable of managing its ties with Washington, Beijing and Moscow simultaneously. It will not always be easy, but in an age when the certitudes of the past are fast vanishing, diplomacy will have to tread a complex path.

Harsh V. Pant is Professor at King's College, London and Head of Strategic Studies at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi

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Quad confusion (24.11.17)

More than 10 days after the Quadrilateral meeting, or ‘Quad’, involving secretary-level officials of India, Japan, Australia and the U.S., the dust is yet to settle on just what was decided among them. To begin with, the four participants issued not one but four separate statements after their meeting in Manila. A cursory look at these statements reveals the basic differences in intent: while all four referred to keeping a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, the Ministry of External Affairs statement did not mention upholding “maritime security” as an objective, while the statements of the U.S., Australia and Japan did. Similarly, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made no mention of enhancing “connectivity” as an aim, which the other three did.

The import of these omissions is clear. The Quad is yet to decide what its real aim is: maritime security, connectivity, countering China’s moves in the Indo-Pacific and on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or a combination of all three. Adding to the confusion were U.S. President Donald Trump’s own moves in Beijing. He lavished praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two signed a slew of agreements, including one for a joint fund for the $40 billion Silk Road Fund meant to finance BRI projects. Despite all the concerns expressed by the countries of the Quad, India remains the only one to openly oppose the BRI.

On the maritime front, India gave out confusing signals. It is the only country in the Quad that is not part of a military alliance. In June, India declined Australia’s request to join the Malabar exercises, and just days before the Quad, Naval Chief Sunil Lanba told The Hindu that there were no plans for joint patrols with the U.S., or any country that is not a “maritime neighbour” of India, which would rule out Australia and Japan too. If India’s intentions are only to patrol the Indian Ocean part of the Indo-Pacific, it remains to be seen what reciprocal value the Quad would have.

Then there is the question of where the government stands on India’s position in the world. While rejecting “non-alignment” in a unipolar world, the government has decided a course that wins the country a foot in the door to every membership club. While that may seem wise, the practicalities in an increasingly polarised world are difficult: how would India explain not joining a security cooperation arrangement within the Quad, for example, even though it joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation this year?

If India is willing to brave all of these contradictions and steer the course towards a closer Quad arrangement, then the final question to be answered is, to what end? A few years ago, a South Block mandarin said the basic difference between India and the U.S. was that the U.S. wanted India’s assistance, along with Japan and Australia, “to the East”, while India wanted the U.S.’s assistance in matters “to its West”. As a result, giving in to demands for greater engagement in the East with the Quad will need to be calibrated with concrete outcomes on India’s concerns with terror from Pakistan, and a free hand to pursue ties with Iran.

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Beyond big game hunting: the 'Quadrilateral' meeting (06.11.17)

By accepting an invitation to join the Japan-proposed, U.S.-endorsed plan for a “Quadrilateral” grouping including Australia to provide alternative debt financing for countries in the Indo-Pacific, India has taken a significant turn in its policy for the subcontinent. Explaining the need to invite other countries into what India has always fiercely guarded as its own turf, Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar was remarkably candid. “Our neighbours also feel more secure if there is another party in the room,” he said recently, giving examples of working with the U.S. on transmission lines in Nepal or with Japan on a liquefied natural gas pipeline in Sri Lanka. His words contain a tacit admission: that having India in the room is no longer comforting enough for our neighbours.

The Quad pivot?

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads to the East Asia summit in the Philippines next week, where the first ‘Quad’ meeting is likely to be held, it is necessary that India analyse the impact of this admission on all our relations. It would also serve as a useful exercise to understand why India has conceded it requires “other parties” in the neighbourhood, even as it seeks to counter the influence of China and its Belt and Road Initiative.

One reason is that as a growing economy with ambitious domestic targets, India’s own needs often clash with those of its neighbours. More connectivity will eventually mean more competition, whether it is for trade, water resources, or energy. Take, for example, the case of Bhutan, which is working, with India’s assistance, on its own goal of producing 10,000 MW of hydropower by 2020.

Even as Indian and Chinese troops were facing off at Doklam on land claimed by Bhutan, a very different sort of tension was claiming the attention of the government in Thimphu. The first indicator came on May 8, when in his budget speech at the National Assembly, the Bhutanese Finance Minister warned that the external debt is about 110% of GDP, of which a staggering 80.1% of GDP (or 155 billion Nu, or $2.34 billion) is made up by hydropower debt mainly to India. In April, the International Monetary Fund’s world economic outlook had already put Bhutan at the top of South Asia in terms of the highest debt per capita, second only to Japan in all of Asia for indebtedness. The budget figures attracted much criticism for the Bhutanese government, and opposition taunts that Bhutan could become the “Greece of South Asia” forced Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay to appoint a three-member committee. In a government order he said that said the negative media, public perception and “absence of strategy” could even affect the “larger and more important relationship between Bhutan and India.”

Among the committee’s findings were that Bhutan’s external hydropower debt financed by India at 9-10% rates was piling up, with the first interest and principal payments expected in 2018, and construction delays, mainly due to Indian construction issues, were taking the debt up higher. Above all, despite several pleas to the Ministries of External Affairs and Power, the Cross Border Trade of Electricity (CBTE) guidelines issued by India had not been revised, which put severe restrictions on Bhutanese companies selling power, and on allowing them access to the power exchange with Bangladesh.

In the Power Ministry’s reckoning, relations with Bhutan took a backseat to the fact that India already has a power surplus, and its new renewable energy targets come from solar and wind energy, not hydropower. Moreover, given falling prices for energy all around, India could not sustain the Bhutanese demand that power tariffs be revised upwards. Eventually, it wasn’t until early October that Mr. Jaishankar visited Thimphu and subsequently the visit last week of King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck began to address the problem that has been brewing for more than a year.

History of forgetting

Another problem is what one diplomat in the region calls ‘India’s big game hunting attitude’: “India chases its neighbours to cooperate on various projects and courts us assiduously, but once they have ‘bagged the game’, it forgets about us. As a result, crises grow until they can no longer be ignored, and the hunt begins again.” Over the past decade, since the defeat of the LTTE, India passed up offers to build the port in Hambantota, Colombo, and Kankesanthurai, despite Sri Lanka’s pressing need for infrastructure. At the time, given India’s crucial support in defeating the LTTE, Sri Lanka was considered “in the bag”. With the U.S. and other Western countries also taking strident positions over human rights issues and the reconciliation process, Chinese companies stepped in and won these projects, for which Sri Lanka recklessly took loans from China’s Exim bank.

New Delhi has changed its position on Hambantota several times, going from initial apathy, to disapproval of the Chinese interest, to scoffing at the viability of the project, to open alarm at the possibility of any Chinese PLA-Navy installation in Sri Lanka’s southern tip. Finally this year, upturning everything it has said, the government decided to bid for the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport at Hambantota, a $205 million investment for the empty facility that sees an average of two flights a day. Even as a ‘listening post’, it is an expensive proposition, with some officials now suggesting a flight training school at Mattala to defray the cost. India is also hoping to win the bid to develop Trincomalee port with several projects. Clearly India is moving in now to build a counter to China in the neighbourhood, but it may be too little, too late and a little too expensive.

India has also been ambivalent on tackling political issues in its region, often trapped between the more interventionist approach of the U.S., which has openly championed concerns over ‘democratic values’ and human rights in Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bangladesh, and the approach of China, which is to turn a blind eye to all but business and strategic interests. In Nepal, India lost out to China when it allowed a five-month-long blockade at the border, calling for a more inclusive constitution to be implemented by Kathmandu — but in the case of Myanmar, it lost precious ground in Bangladesh when Mr. Modi refused to mention the Rohingya refugee situation during a visit to Nay Pyi Taw. In both cases, India reversed its stand, adding to the sense that it is unsure of its next steps when dealing with neighbours on political issues.

Multiple rivalries

Finally, it is important to note that while the government’s new plan to involve the U.S. and Japan in development projects in South Asia will yield the necessary finances, it will come at the cost of India’s leverage in its own backyard. India’s counter to China’s persistent demand for a diplomatic mission in Thimphu, for example, could be to help the U.S. set up a parallel mission there — but once those floodgates open, they will be hard to shut.

In Sri Lanka, the U.S. and Japan will now partner in India’s efforts to counter China’s influence, but whereas India objected to Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean, it will not be able to object to an increase in U.S. naval warships and Japanese presence there. Writing about Myanmar in a new book, India Turns East: International Engagement and US-China Rivalry, the former French diplomat Frédéric Grare says the emergence of new players like the U.S., Europe and Japan has only increased multiple regional rivalries in the region.“This does partly benefit India, who is no longer isolated vis-à-vis Beijing,” he concludes. “But New Delhi’s political profile has consequently diminished.”

Mr. Modi, who began his pitch for his “neighbourhood first” plan by inviting the neighbours to his swearing-in ceremony in 2014, must look before he leaps while inviting other powers, howsoever well-meaning, into the neighbourhood.

suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in

(All of the above articles have been taken straight from The Hindu. We owe it all to them. This is just an effort to consolidate opinions expressed in The Hindu in a subject-wise manner.)

Pakistan on FATF Watch List - The Hindu (28.02.18)

(Guidelines for Reader: Latest Op-Ed First; Verbatim Compilation of The Hindu Op-Ed; Best to read in the order of oldest to latest article to get a comprehensive understanding; Consider repetition to be revision)

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Going grey: on Pakistan and the FATF watch list (28.02.18)

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) that monitors countries on action taken against terror-financing and money-laundering has decided to place Pakistan back on its watch list, or “greylist”, from June. The decision is both appropriate and overdue, given Pakistan’s blatant violation of its obligations to crack down on groups banned by the Security Council 1267 sanctions committee that monitors groups affiliated to the Taliban (which originally included al-Qaeda affiliated groups), such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Haqqani network. Their leaders like Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar continue to hold public rallies and freely garner support and donations. In the process, both the LeT and JeM, which continue to praise and claim credit for terror attacks in India, have grown their bases in Pakistan, with fortress-like headquarters in Muridke and Bahawalpur that the authorities turn a blind eye to. By doing this, successive Pakistani governments have jeopardised ties with India, and shown disregard for the outcry against terrorism worldwide. One violation was a Pakistani court’s bail to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, LeT operational commander and a key planner of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Under the 1267 sanctions ruling, banned entities can get no funds, yet Lakhvi received the bail amount, and the authorities have since lost track of him.

It is surprising, then, that the first round of talks of the International Cooperation Review Group that makes its recommendations to the FATF plenary failed to reach the consensus needed to list Pakistan, despite a formidable team of the U.S., U.K., France and Germany proposing the resolution against it. That the initial support for Pakistan came from China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries is cause for concern in New Delhi, given the recent diplomatic outreach by India. Equally significant, however, is China’s turnaround in the plenary session two days later, when it dropped objections to the resolution, indicating that its support for Pakistan is negotiable and not set in stone. The FATF listing will not miraculously change Pakistan’s behaviour, and this is not the first time it has been listed as a country with “strategic deficiencies” in countering terror-financing and money-laundering. However, if the greylisting comes as part of a concerted campaign to hold Pakistan accountable, and pressure is ratcheted up with financial strictures on its banks and businesses and targeted sanctions imposed against specific law enforcement and intelligence officials, it may yet bear fruit. The hope is that such sanctions will persuade Pakistan to stop state support for these terror groups and become a responsible player on the global stage and a responsive neighbour.

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The fight Pakistan must wage within (18.02.17)

The suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwanis not the first terrorist attack on a place of worship in Pakistan, and is unlikely to be the last. Imbued with their extremist ideology, jihadis have targeted several Sufi shrines all over Pakistan for several years. As the shrine is a major attraction for devotees, the Sehwan attack resulted in a very high number of fatalities, just like the attacks on the popular shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore in 2010 and that of Hazrat Shah Noorani in Balochistan last November. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s ruling elite still sees terrorism through a geo-strategic lens, not as the consequence of its appeasement and sponsorship of Islamist extremism.

Jihadi justification

The jihadis justify their violence against Sufi shrines as attacks against ‘impure’ manifestations of the Islamic faith. Killing ‘unbelievers,’ ‘heretics’ and ‘deviants’ is an integral part of their plan to create a purer Islamic state. The same justification has been used in the past to attack Shias and Ahmadis as well as Pakistan’s Christians and Hindus. Although jihadi groups were originally nurtured by Pakistan for proxy wars in Afghanistan and against India, at least some jihadi groups consider Pakistanis as legitimate targets. To them Pakistan is as much their religious battlefield as Afghanistan or India. Pakistan would have to delegitimate the jihadi ideology in its entirety to ensure that more extreme offshoots of its protégés do not kill its people.

Despite periodic noises about making no distinctions among good and bad jihadis, Pakistan’s leaders have shown no interest in defining all jihadis as a threat to Pakistan. The country’s military still sees terrorism in the context of its geo-strategic vision. The jihadis responsible for attacks within Pakistan are deemed ‘agents’ of Indian intelligence or the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS).

For Pakistan’s military, Pakistan has only one enemy and all acts of violence against Pakistanis must be attributed only to that enemy. At a recent event in Washington DC, I was confronted by a fellow Pakistani who argued that terrorism in South Asia would end if the Kashmir issue was resolved in accordance with Pakistan’s wishes. He had no answer to my question how resolution of any international dispute would diminish the fanaticism of those who kill Shias and Sufis as part of an effort to purify Muslim society.

In all four provinces

Over the last week, jihadi offshoots claiming links to the Islamic State (IS) have demonstrated their capacity to strike in each one of Pakistan’s four provinces. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Taliban, publicly claimed responsibility for some of the attacks and threatened to attack further Shia, Ahmadi and Pakistan military targets as part of its ‘Operation Ghazi’. Simple research on Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and other similar groups reveals that their members are homegrown Punjabi jihadis ideologically convinced of their narrow sectarian worldview.

But Pakistan’s reaction to the Sehwan attack was to blame groups ‘based in Afghanistan’. Some were silly enough to suggest that the latest wave of attacks was aimed at preventing the Pakistan Super League (which plays its cricket in Dubai due to poor security in Pakistan) from having its final in Pakistan. There was no attempt to answer the question how Afghanistan-based terrorists could travel vast distances within Pakistan without being intercepted by Pakistan’s security services. After all, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which prides itself at being the ‘world’s best intelligence’ service, shows a high degree of efficiency in dealing with secular critics, ranging from little known bloggers to political activists, but is remarkably incompetent at interdicting suicide bombers.

The only reasonable explanation for why Pakistan is unable to intercept jihadi terrorists targeting its own people is that the state apparatus does not consider jihadis as the enemy in the same manner as they pursue secular Baloch and Muhajir political activists or other critics of Pakistan’s policies.

For decades Pakistan has seen jihadi groups as levers of its foreign and security policy and periodic assertions that the policy has changed have proved wrong. Every step against jihadis is followed by one in the opposite direction. Thus, the much publicised ‘Operation Zarb-e-Azb’ targeted out-of-control Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan but spared groups based in Punjab and Karachi. Hafiz Saeed’s recent detention was accompanied by blocking action against him and Masood Azhar at the U.N. with Chinese support. It is almost as if the Pakistani state is continuously telling jihadis, “Those of you who do not attack inside Pakistan will not get hurt.”

More about image

For Pakistan’s civil and military elite, the priority is Pakistan’s international image and its external relations, not the elimination of terrorism or confronting extremist ideology. Pakistan’s publicly stated view of its terrorist problem is that it is the victim of blowback from its involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad during the 1980s. Former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, described Hafiz Saeed as Pakistan’s hero in a well-known interview on Pakistan’s Dunya TV in October 2015 and argued that Pakistan had “brought Mujahideen from around the world” and “trained the Taliban” at a time when Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and Osama bin Laden were heroes for both the CIA and the Pakistanis.

In this version of history, there is little acknowledgement of Pakistan’s role in allowing the ideology of jihad to flourish and grow for two decades after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Americans started telling Pakistan to shut down the jihadi enterprise. Pakistanis spend more energy defending themselves against U.S. and Indian criticism over safe havens for the Afghan Taliban than they do on figuring out how to rid Pakistan of the cancer of jihadi terrorism.

Twenty-five years have elapsed since then Secretary of State James Baker threatened Pakistan in 1992 that its support of jihadi groups could result in the U.S. declaring Pakistan a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

Over a quarter century, Pakistan has offered excuses and explanations as well as made promises that have not been kept. It has itself faced terrorism, lost lives and fought certain terrorist groups. But its essential policy of using jihadi groups for strategic advantage in the region— in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir and against India — has not drastically changed.

For ‘strategic advantage’

In the process of securing strategic advantage, Pakistan has unleashed ideologically motivated groups on its soil that have morphed and mutated over time. While groups such as Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa speak of Pakistan’s national interest, other groups such as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar have an ideological perspective that is not limited by the concept of modern nation states. For them, Pakistan is as dispensable as other states for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and they have a God-given right to kill those they consider un-Islamic.

In a recent report co-authored by Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation and myself, we pointed out that Pakistan must focus on reversing the extremist trends in Pakistani society. Pakistani authorities — specifically the country’s military leaders, who control its foreign and security policies — need to take a comprehensive approach to shutting down all Islamist militant groups that operate from Pakistani territory, not just those that attack the Pakistani state.

As attacks like the recent one in Sehwan demonstrate, Pakistan’s tolerance for terror groups undermines the country. It corrodes stability and civilian governance, damages the investment climate, and inflicts death and injury on thousands of innocent Pakistani citizens.

Husain Haqqani, Director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC, was Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011

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Seeing through a glass darkly: on combating terrorism (20.12.17)

Yet another anniversary of the November 26, 2008 terror attacks on multiple targets in Mumbai has come and gone. Much has changed since then and terror has evolved into an even more dangerous phenomenon. Recent variants represent a paradigmatic change in the practice of violence.

A different genre

It is difficult to recognise the new generation of terrorists as a mere extension of the earlier lot of radical Islamist terrorists who were influenced by the teachings of the Egyptian thinker, Sayyid Qutb, and the Palestinian Islamist preacher, Abdullah Azzam, and adopted the practical theology of the Afghan warlord, Jalaluddin Haqqani. There is less theology today and the new age terrorist seems to belong to an altogether different genre of terrorism.

This is not to say that the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai were not different in the methodology and the tactics used in the September 11, 2001 attack in New York City. Nevertheless, the spate of recent attacks in Europe and parts of Asia, from 2015 to 2017 — beginning with the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January 2015, the major incidents at Brussels and Istanbul Ataturk airports as well as the Bastille Day attack in Nice, France, all in 2016, to the string of attacks in London, Stockholm, Barcelona and New York, in 2017 — are very different in structure and the morphology from attacks of an earlier period.

Standing out from the crowd

A large number of terror attacks in the past three years have been attributed to the handiwork of the Islamic State (IS), and reveal its leaning towards the “nihilism” of Sayyid Qutb. It is this which distinguishes the IS from many of the other radical Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The IS’s recruitment techniques, especially its ability to proselytise over the Internet, including “direct to home jihad” as also its more sanguinary brand of violence, set it apart from earlier variants of radical Islamist terror.

Even while the IS has gained a great deal of prominence due to its brand of violence, other terror networks have continued to be no less active. For example, al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The Boko Haram in Africa has been responsible for more killings than most people would realise. Closer home, the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network have carried out several spectacular attacks inside Afghanistan. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi have carried out several attacks inside Pakistan. Pakistan provides the wherewithal and the support to terror outfits such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad to launch well-planned attacks on Indian targets.

Most of these outfits continue to adopt earlier methodologies. These have proved no less effective than those followed by the IS. The terror attack on a mosque in North Sinai, Egypt in November this year, which killed over 230 persons, is one such example. In December, the TTP was responsible for a terror attack on an agricultural training institute in Peshawar, Pakistan. Differences among terror outfits, do not, however, preclude a complicated pattern of relationships when it comes to operational aspects.

Incorrect perception

Understanding the constantly altering trajectory of terror is important before charges of intelligence failure are levelled. It has become axiomatic to attack agencies of intelligence failure whenever a major terror attack takes place. This need not be the case in every instance. The usual charge levelled is of the failure of intelligence agencies “to connect the dots”. Most often, this is not true. There are many other reasons for adequate intelligence not being available to prevent a terror attack. The danger is that a wrong diagnosis could prevent further improvements in intelligence collection and analysis.

One common fallacy is that intelligence agencies have remained static, are rooted in the past, and that their personnel are inadequately trained to handle current day intelligence tasks. While there is room for improvement, it is a mistake to presume that intelligence agencies have not made rapid progress and kept up with the times. Intelligence agencies today are well-versed in the latest techniques of intelligence gathering and analysis. Agencies obtain vast amounts of information from both human and technical intelligence, not excluding signal intelligence and electronic intelligence, intelligence from satellites and photo reconnaissance, etc. This is apart from open source intelligence.

Agencies employ data mining techniques and are familiar with pattern recognition software. Today, noise and signals constitute valuable meta-data. Analysing meta-data has produced more precise information and intelligence than is possibly envisaged, and agencies well recognise the value and utility of this.

In addition, intelligence agencies have become highly adept in monitoring and exploiting open source material. Mapping and analysis of social networks is today a critical aspect of their work. This is especially useful when it comes to unearthing covert terror networks. Many intelligence agencies today have an extensive database of several thousands of terrorists and potential terrorists.

Admittedly, intelligence agencies, like many other organisations, are risk-prone. They do make mistakes. Intelligence analysts, like analysts in other fields, are particularly vulnerable. Problems also arise from inadequate sharing of intelligence across institutions and countries. All these, however, are a far cry from the charge of an inability or failure “to connect the dots”.

The real problem is that when dealing with terrorism and terror networks, no two situations in the actual world are identical. The nature of threats is such that they continue to evolve all the time. Both the 2001 terror attack in New York and the November 2008 attack in Mumbai were one of a kind with few parallels at the time. Anticipating an attack of this nature remains in the area of an “intelligence gap” rather than an “intelligence failure”. Most experts explain an intelligence gap as one denoting an absence of intelligence output while an intelligence failure is one where, based on available evidence, no warning was issued.

Newer challenges

One of the major challenges that all intelligence agencies face is a qualitative understanding of the newer, and many post-modern threats. These newer generation threats, including those by terror groups and outfits, often lie “below the radar” or beyond the horizon. Anticipating such threats and their nature requires intelligence agencies to be constantly ahead of the curve. Anticipating newer threats is only partly facilitated by today’s technical advances such as new computing and communication technologies. However, these alone are not often enough to meet today’s intelligence needs.

As problems become more complicated, and as terror networks become even more sophisticated, there has to be recognition that the situation demands better understanding of factors that are at work. Levelling mere charges or accusations against intelligence agencies of a failure to anticipate an attack by not “connecting the dots” could be misleading, if not downright dangerous. All professional analysts in whichever field they operate face the same problem as intelligence agencies, and vividly outlined by David Omand, a former U.K. Intelligence and Security Coordinator as “seeing through a glass darkly when the information available to them is incomplete or partially hidden”.

Alongside this, and to fill the gap, there is a case for far greater sharing of intelligence and information among intelligence agencies worldwide than it exists at present. This is important to prevent another terror attack on the lines of the Mumbai 2008 attack. It now transpires that certain foreign intelligence agencies had additional information about the possible attack which was not shared in time, and which led to an intelligence gap. This could have been avoided.

More important, such a situation should never arise in the future. Terror and terrorism is a universal phenomenon. Every nation is bound to share the intelligence available with it to prevent a possible major terror attack.

M.K. Narayanan is a former National Security Adviser and a former Governor of West Bengal

XXX

Pakistan and the Lashkar’s jihad in India (09.12.2008)

Praveen Swami

Were the terrorists who stormed Mumbai non-state actors?

“Whoever they are,” Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari said last week of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai, “they are stateless actors who are holding hostage the whole world.” “I very much doubt,” he continued, asked about the arrested terrorist Mohammad Ajmal Amir, “that he’s a Pakistani.”

President Zardari’s claims have disintegrated with media reports from Pakistan confirming that Amir is indeed a Pakistani national linked to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan, under intense pressure, has since begun a crackdown on Lashkar offices in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, although its seriousness of purpose is still far from clear. How events develop from here will settle the question of whether the Lashkar is, in fact, a non-state actor—or a covert instrument of the Pakistani state. In 1987, Osama bin-Laden’s ideological mentor and a professor of religious studies together founded the Markaz Dawat-ul-Irshad — the Centre for the Propagation of the Faith and its Teachings. It was to grow into an empire. Today, the Pakistan-based Jamaat-ud-Dawa runs a web of educational, medical charitable — and military — institutions on a sprawling campus at Muridke near Lahore.

Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian national who had taught Islamic studies in Amman and Riyadh, came to Pakistan in 1979 to set up the Maktab al-Khidmat (Office of Service), which helped funnel Arab jihadists arriving in Pakistan to mujahideen groups. Pakistani scholar Hassan Abbas has recorded in his seminal work Pakistan’s Drift Into Extremism that Azzam wished to revive the “lost art and science of the jihad.”

Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, born in a conservative, Punjabi family which lost 36 of its members during its Partition journey from Shimla to Lahore, was Azzam’s partner in the founding of the MDI. Like Azzam, he followed the Salafist tradition of Islam. Saeed was appointed by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq to the state-run Council on Islamic Ideology, and was later given a position at Lahore’s University of Engineering and Technology. In 1989, Azzam was assassinated in a bombing attributed to Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Saeed turned his attention to the emerging jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, and founded the Lashkar in 1990. Hussain Haqqani, now Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, candidly admitted in a 2005 article that the Lashkar had been “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.”

From the outset, the Lashkar made clear that it was not confined to Jammu and Kashmir. In an undated pamphlet likely issued around 1999, Hum Jihad Kyon Kar Rahe Hein (Why we are fighting a jihad), it argued: “Muslims ruled Andalusia for 800 years but they were finished to the last man. Christians now rule [Spain] and we must wrest it back from them. All of India, including Kashmir, Hyderabad, Assam, Nepal, Burma, Bihar and Junagarh were part of the Muslim empire that was lost because Muslims gave up jihad. Palestine is occupied by the Jews. The Holy Qibla-e-Awwal in Jerusalem is under Jewish control. Several countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Cyprus, Sicily, Ethiopia, Russian Turkistan and Chinese Turkistan were Muslim lands and it is our duty to get these back from unbelievers.”

Late in 1992, as communal tension began to rise across India, Saeed assigned to a trusted lieutenant the task of opening a second front — this time against India as a whole. Mohammad Azam Cheema — ‘Baba’ to his recruits, and like Saeed the son of middle class Punjabi family — first came into contact with Saeed while both men were teaching at the engineering university in Lahore.

Hindu chauvinists handed Cheema a gift in December 1992, in the form of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Lashkar operatives now reached out to Indian Islamist organisations. Indian nationals Abdul Kareem ‘Tunda,’ Mohammad Azam Ghauri and Jalees Ansari executed the first Lashkar-led operation in India on the first anniversary of the demolition, bombing several trains. Later, Indian recruits like Amir Hashim — who used the code-name Kamran — executed attacks in New Delhi, Jalandhar and Rohtak. By 1996, Cheema is believed to have been running over a dozen Pakistani agents across India, operating under fictions — the term intelligence professionals use for cover-identities. Mohammad Ishtiaq, the son of a shopkeeper from Kala Gujran in Pakistan’s Jhelum district, was, for example, dispatched to Hyderabad to build Lashkar cells in the region.

On December 13, 2001, terrorists stormed India’s Parliament. The former Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, under pressure, proscribed the Lashkar. He also promised an end to cross-border infiltration in Jammu and Kashmir. But the MDI and Lashkar leaders who were arrested were soon released. The MDI renamed itself the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and resumed public fundraising, recruitment and propaganda operations. Moreover, the Lashkar continued to operate freely out of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where the proscription order did not apply.

Even as Pakistan scaled back infiltration in Kashmir — violence has fallen year-on-year since 2002 — the Lashkar’s all-India offensive escalated. Between 2004 and 2006, Lashkar-linked cells, sometimes operating in affiliation with elements of the Bangladesh-based Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami, attacked several Indian cities, a project that reached its climax with the Mumbai train bombings in 2006.

India’s intelligence services have long said the post-2002 offensive was commanded by a battle-hardened Kashmir jihad veteran so far known only by code-names, ‘Muzammil,’ ‘Yusuf’ and ‘Abu Hurrera.’ Muzammil specialised in using the Lashkar’s fidayeen assets in Kashmir to attack targets elsewhere in India. In September 2002, for example, he ordered the south Kashmir-based Lashkar commander, Manzoor Zahid Chaudhuri, to despatch two fidayeen to storm the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar. Later, he put together a June 2004 plot to use fidayeen to assassinate the then Union Home Minister, L.K. Advani.

After the Mumbai bombings of 2006, Gen. Musharraf once again promised to end terrorism directed at India — but once again failed to act against the Lashkar. No clear answer just what this was has ever emerged: some analysts believe that the General wished to appease the anti-U.S. elements in the ISI by allowing jihad against Pakistan’s eastern adversary to continue, while others insist that the LeT was in a position to initiate a civil war with 20,000-odd men estimated to have passed through its military camps.

Muzammil — if that is indeed the name of the six-foot tall, long-haired and full-bearded Punjabi-speaking terror commander who operates out of Muzaffarabad, Lahore and Rawalpindi — worked hard to put a firewall between the Lashkar in Pakistan and its affiliates in India. The Indian Mujahideen, which executed a string of bombings across India in 2007-2008, was one product of his efforts. Most of the IM’s key operational figures, mainly drawn from the ranks of the Students Islamic Movement of India, had trained at Lashkar camps in Pakistan. However, the Lashkar had no direct role in the IM’s bombing campaign, nor did it commit Pakistani nationals to the attacks.

Even as the Lashkar focussed on its anti-India campaign, though, Pakistan began to descend into chaos. As jihadists battled Pakistani troops along the northwest frontier and Islamabad found itself compelled by the U.S. to take on the terror groups it had long patronised, the language used by the Al-Qaeda and the Lashkar increasingly converged. In April 2006, Osama bin-Laden issued a proclamation that denounced a “Crusader-Zionist-Hindu war against Muslims.”

Saeed’s public speeches began to draw on the same ideas. Just this May, for example, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief asserted “the Crusaders, the Jews, and the Hindus — all have united against the Muslims, and launched the ‘war on terror’ which is in fact a pretext to impose a horrible war to further the nefarious goals of the enemies of Islam.” Less than a month later, on June 12, he called on Islamabad to disassociate “itself from the war on terror and join the mujahideen to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir.”

By targeting western nationals in Mumbai, the Lashkar has initiated the third phase of its campaign, which first focussed on Kashmir and then all of India. The Al-Qaeda, the language of bin-Laden and Saeed suggests, had an ideological and tactical influence on the decision to open this fresh front.

Did the ISI or elements in the military also play a role? No hard evidence exists to support this claim but Pakistan’s long-standing failure to crack down on the terror group has led more than one analyst to make the obvious inference that the terror group has powerful friends. Although Pakistan continues to insist that the Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a charitable group, the U.S. State department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2007 insist that it is in fact a “front organisation” for the Lashkar.

It is likely that some in the ISI see the Lashkar as an ally in their campaign against India — a campaign that sustains the hostility which informs the foundation of the Pakistan Army’s political primacy in Pakistan. In August, The New York Times reported that the U.S. had intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and the terrorists who bombed the Indian Embassy in Kabul. And many commentators have argued that the Mumbai operation could have been backed by pro-Islamist ISI elements who wished to provoke an India-Pakistan clash that would compel the eastward diversion of troops now committed to fighting the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda.

Now, President Zardari has the option of speaking the truth and acting against the Lashkar — or giving weight to charges that the banned terror group is an instrument of the state he governs.

Corrections and Clarifications

The tenth paragraph in an article "Pakistan and the Lashkar's jihad inIndia" (Editorial page, December 9, 2008) said that he [Kashmir jihadveteran so far known only by code-names, 'Muzammil,' 'Yusuf' and 'AbuHurrera'] put together a June 2004 plot to use fidayeen to assassinate thethen Union Home Minister, L.K. Advani. The UPA Government was formed on May22, 2004, so Mr. Advani was only the Leader of the Opposition.

(All of the above articles have been taken straight from The Hindu. We owe it all to them. This is just an effort to consolidate opinions expressed in The Hindu in a subject-wise manner.)

Health Insurance Debate - The Hindu (28.02.18)

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No discrimination: on health insurance in India (28.02.18)

The Delhi High Court’s order striking down a discriminatory exclusion clause in a health insurance policy, and upholding the claim of a patient, should have the broader effect of eliminating similar exclusions. The case involved a rare heart condition based on which United India Insurance Company rejected the claim, viewing it as a manifestation of a genetic disorder. By its very nature, such exclusion defeats the purpose of the health policy. But then, policies sold to individuals invariably contain a plethora of exclusions in the fine print, diminishing their practical value. They are heavily weighted in favour of the insurer. The court has struck a blow for the rights of the individual by holding that exclusion of the kind invoked does not just involve a contractual issue between the two sides, but the basic right to health flowing from Article 21 of the Constitution. It has gone further to interpret the right to health as being meaningful only with the right to health care, and by extension, health insurance required to access it. This is good advice. The Centre, which has committed itself to a universal National Health Protection Scheme, and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority would do well to heed it. They must review all the policies, and eliminate unreasonable exclusionary clauses designed to avoid claims.

Several studies have pointed out that health insurance in India suffers from lack of scale, covering only about 29% of the households surveyed under the National Family Health Survey-4, that too in a limited way. The health-care system also lacks regulation of costs. There is asymmetry of information, with the insured member unable to assess the real scope of the policy or negotiate the terms with the provider. Questions such as these led to the enactment of a new health-care law in the United States during the Barack Obama administration, whereby strict obligations were placed on insurers and unreasonable exclusions removed. India’s health insurance and hospital sectors closely follow the American pattern, and are in need of strong regulation. This is necessary to define costs, curb frauds and empower patients. As the Delhi High Court has observed, exclusions cannot be unreasonable or based on a broad parameter such as genetic disposition or heritage. Insurance law has to be revisited to also ensure that there is a guaranteed renewal of policies, that age is no bar for entry, and pre-existing conditions are uniformly covered. Problems of exclusion will be eliminated if the payer-insurer is the state, the financing is done through public taxes, and coverage is universal. Given its stated intent to ensure financial protection against high health costs, India should adopt such a course. The short-term priority is to remove discriminatory clauses in policies and expand coverage to as many people as possible.

XXX

Case histories: On National Health Protection Scheme (17.02.18)

The government’s intention to launch the world’s largest health insurance programme, the National Health Protection Scheme, raises an important issue. Should the focus be on the demand side of health-care finance when the supply side, the public health infrastructure, is in a shambles? Experience with insurance schemes, such as the Centre’s Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana and Andhra Pradesh’s Rajiv Aarogyasri, show how demand side interventions can miss the mark. While the RSBY and Aarogyasri did improve access to health-care overall, they failed to reach the most vulnerable sections. At times they led to unnecessary medical procedures and increased out-of-pocket expenditure for poor people, both of which are undesirable outcomes. These showed that unless the public health system can compete with the private in utilising funds from such insurance schemes, medical care will remain elusive for those who need it most. Policymakers behind the NHPS, which will cost the government around ₹5,000 crore in its first year, must take heed.

Both RSBY and Aarogyasri are cashless hospitalisation schemes. While both benefited people living below the poverty line, over-reliance on private hospitals and poor monitoring watered down their impact. According to one Gujarat-based study, a majority of RSBY insured patients ended up spending about 10% of their annual income during hospitalisation, because hospitals still charged them, unsure as they were when they would be compensated. A study in Andhra Pradesh found that beneficiaries spent more from their own pockets under Aarogyasri. They spent most of their money on outpatient care, and Aarogyasri didn’t tackle this adequately. Possibly the most problematic fallout was mass hysterectomies done in Andhra Pradesh. Between 2008 and 2010, private hospitals removed the uteri of thousands of women unnecessarily, to make a quick buck. Thus, perverse incentives can drive the private sector to sabotage schemes that are not well monitored. The second problem with over-reliance on the private sector is that it limits the reach of such programmes. Evidence from RSBY and Aarogyasri shows that as distance from empanelled hospitals grew in Andhra and Gujarat, fewer people benefited from them — most empanelled hospitals are private and urban. Scheduled Tribe and rural households typically missed out, while richer quintiles of the population benefited. There can be much gained from the NHPS if the government views it as the first step towards universal health care, rather than a panacea to all of India’s health-care woes. The second, and a long-awaited, step is to reform the public health system. Without this, an insurance scheme, no matter how ambitious, will be a band-aid.

XXX

Medicare is not healthcare (11.02.18)

Insurance is fine but infrastructure is crucial

What was perhaps the biggest announcement in the Budget didn’t actually involve any money. The National Health Protection Scheme, touted as the world’s largest healthcare programme, envisages providing medical insurance cover of up to ₹5 lakh each to 10 crore families. Assuming an average family size of five members, this translates to 50 crore people, or nearly 40% of the population.

This is a stupendous goal by any yardstick, and the first near-universal welfare measure in the health sector since possibly the 1980s, when governments, constrained by tightening resources and burgeoning populations, switched focus to targeting just the vulnerable sections of society, while leaving it to the private sector to take care of the rest.

And, as many have pointed out already, the Finance Minister did not allocate any money for this; he only promised to raise the resources when required.

A good idea?

I, for one, am willing to take Arun Jaitley at his word. I am willing to grant that when the time comes, North Block mandarins will pull some legerdemain and actually find the money to fund the share of the premium which the Centre will have to pay. Of course, if the contours of similar schemes in the past are any indication, this will still amount to only around 40% of the total required, with the balance to be funded by the States (health is a State subject, after all).

I am even willing to assume that the States too will fall in line and cough up the amount required, since aspirations have been already unleashed on this front and it will be difficult for any political party to swim against the tide and refuse to pay. So, assuming that the money is found and the insurance policies go live in a year or two, does this mean that a significant chunk of the population will be able to afford quality healthcare when they need it? Given the fact that out-of-pocket expenditure on healthcare is nearly 63% of the country’s total healthcare expenditure (one of the highest in the world — it’s 32% in China, 11% in the U.S. and the world average is 18.2%), and “catastrophic expenditure” on healthcare pushes millions back into poverty every year in India, an insurance scheme which provides up to a ₹5 lakh cover sounds like a great idea.

Or is it? There is one crucial difference between Medicare assistance (even of the Obamacare variety) and actual healthcare services. The former is a financial product which focuses on enabling beneficiaries to access existing healthcare facilities. It does not in itself ensure the creation of healthcare infrastructure — somebody will still have to build clinics/hospitals, staff them with doctors, nurses, medicines and equipment, and provide these at a cost which falls within the limits of the healthcare insurance policy.

The real challenge

This is where India has been slipping badly. For instance, it had only about 1,800 hospitals in rural areas, according to the government’s rural health statistics for 2017. The shortfall in percentage terms vis-à-vis the population (based on the 2011 Census) is 19% in terms of sub-centres, 22% in terms of primary health centres and 30% in terms of community health centres. As of March 2017, the number of buildings required to be constructed to meet requirements had crossed 40,000.

Worse, even if the buildings exist, they are often just that — shells, without the requisite staff. According to the Niti Aayog’s latest State-wise healthcare index, the proportion of vacant specialist positions (medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics, anaesthesia, ophthalmology, radiology, pathology, ear-nose-throat, dental, psychiatry) ranged from a low of 16.7% in Tamil Nadu (among the larger States clustering) to a staggering 77.7% in Chhattisgarh as of 2015-16. When it came to the availability of a doctor at primary health centres, even the best-performing States like Kerala and Tamil Nadu had 5.9% and 7.6% respectively, while over 41% of the primary health centres in West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand didn’t have a doctor available; this was 63.6% in Bihar. About half the primary and community health centres in Rajasthan, Haryana and Bihar did not even have a staff nurse; in Jharkhand it was 74.9%.

Given this dismal scenario, merely providing the amount is not enough. True, creating a potential addressable medical services consumer base worth ₹50 lakh crore will work as a tremendous incentive to the creation of such infrastructure in the private sector, but this will take time. Besides, the private sector will face the same challenges of getting trained medical professionals to work in remote and rural locations. It can, of course, pay more money to such people as incentive, but that again will push up costs.

The real challenge then remains unchanged: to create the physical healthcare infrastructure on the ground, equip it, staff it, and run it. The last is important. About a quarter of primary health centres in the country, for instance, do not have access to 24-hour power supply, and nearly a fifth don’t have water supply. After that comes the issue of meeting the costs.

XXX

Making health insurance work (06.02.18)

It is unusual for a health programme to become the most prominent feature of a Union Budget. The previous government missed the bus when it failed to implement the recommendations of the High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage (2011). Yet, those recommendations resonate in the Budget of 2018, with commitment to universal health coverage, strengthening of primary health care (especially at the sub-centre level), linking new medical colleges to upgraded district hospitals, provision of free drugs and diagnostics at public health facilities, and stepping up financial protection for health care through a government-funded programme that merges Central and State health insurance schemes.

Whatever be the time and resources needed to fully implement these initiatives, the Budget sends a strong message that health is now in the spotlight of politically attractive policy pronouncements. From now on, no government can ignore people’s legitimate aspiration to get the health services they desire and deserve. However, health care is not just a matter of health insurance, involving as it does many other elements such as the availability of a multi-layered, multi-skilled health workforce. Further, there is health beyond health care, dependent on many social determinants.

The NHPS, operationally

The scheme will provide cost coverage, up to ₹5 lakh annually, to a poor family for hospitalisation in an empanelled public or private hospital. The precursor of the National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), provided limited coverage of only ₹30,000, usually for secondary care. Though it improved access to health care, it did not reduce out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE), catastrophic health expenditure or health payment-induced poverty. The NHPS addresses those concerns by sharply raising the coverage cap, but shares with the RSBY the weakness of not covering outpatient care which accounts for the largest fraction of OOPE. The NHPS too remains disconnected from primary care.

The NHPS will pay for the hospitalisation costs of its beneficiaries through ‘strategic purchasing’ from public and private hospitals. This calls for a well-defined list of conditions that will be covered, adoption of standard clinical guidelines for diagnostic tests and treatments suitable for different disorders, setting and monitoring of cost and quality standards, and measuring health outcomes and cost-effectiveness. Both Central and State health agencies or their intermediaries will have to develop the capacity for competent purchasing of services from a diverse group of providers. Otherwise, hospitals may undertake unnecessary tests and treatments to tap the generous coverage. The choice of whether to administer NHPS through a trust or an insurance company will be left to individual States.

Reduced allocation for the National Health Mission and sidelining of its urban component raise concerns about primary care, even though the transformation of sub-centres to health and wellness centres is welcome. If primary health services are not strong enough to reduce the need for advanced care and act as efficient gatekeepers, there is great danger of an overloaded NHPS disproportionately draining resources from the health budget. That will lead to further neglect of primary care and public hospitals, which even now are not adequately equipped to compete with corporate hospitals in the strategic purchasing arena. That will lead to decay of the public sector as a care provider. This must be prevented by proactively strengthening primary health services and public hospitals.

How will it work financially?

The NHPS is not a classic insurance programme, since the government pays most of the money on behalf of the poor, unlike private insurance where an individual or an employer pays the premium. However, the scheme operates around the insurance principle of ‘risk pooling’. When a large number of people subscribe to an insurance scheme, only a small fraction of them will be hospitalised in any given year. In a tax funded system or a large insurance programme, there is a large risk pool wherein the healthy cross-subsidise the sick at any given time. The NHPS will be financially viable, despite a high coverage offered to the few who fall sick in any year, because the rest in the large pool do not need it that year.

However, the NHPS will need more than the ₹2,000 crore presently allocated. As the scheme starts in October 2018, the funding will cover the few months before the next Budget. It is expected to require ₹5,000-6,000 crore to get it going in the first year and ₹10,000-12,000 crore annually as it scales up. It will draw additional resources from the Health and Education Cess and also depend on funding from States to boost the Central allocation. The premiums are expected to be in the range of ₹1,000-1,200 per annum. They may be lowered if enrolment is high but will rise if utilisation rates are high.

What will the States do?

In all the excitement about the Union Budget’s proposal of the NHPC, it is easy to forget that State governments have the main responsibility of health service delivery and also need to bear the major share of the public expenditure on health. The National Health Policy (NHP) asks the States to raise their allocation for health to over 8% of the total State budget by 2020, requiring many States to double their health spending. Will they be stimulated to do so, when the Central Budget has not signalled a movement towards the NHP goal of raising public expenditure on health to 2.5% of GDP by 2025?

The NHPS needs a buy-in from the States, which have to contribute 40% of the funding. Even with the low cost coverage of the RSBY, several States opted out. Some decided to fund their own State-specific health insurance programmes, with distinctive political branding. Will they agree to merge their programmes with the NHPS, with co-branding? Will other States, who will also contribute 40% to the NHPS, demand similar co-branding? In a federal polity with multiple political parties sharing governance, an all-India alignment around the NHPS requires a high level of cooperative federalism, both to make the scheme viable and to ensure portability of coverage as people cross State borders. For the sake of all Indians, let us hope an all-party consensus develops around how to design and deliver universal health coverage, starting with but not stopping at the NHPS.

K. Srinath Reddy is President, Public Health Foundation of India. Views are personal

 (All of the above articles have been taken straight from The Hindu. We owe it all to them. This is just an effort to consolidate opinions expressed in The Hindu in a subject-wise manner.)

Understanding Superstition - The Hindu (27.02.18)

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The power of persuasion 27.02.18

The Indian Constitution is unique in listing, among fundamental duties, the duty of each citizen “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” (Article 51A). Jawaharlal Nehru was the first to use the expression “scientific temper”, which he described with his usual lucidity in The Discovery of India (while also quoting Blaise Pascal on the limits of reason). And yet, decades later, superstitious practices abound in India, including among the highly educated.

Superstition exists

India may be unusual in the degree and variety of superstitious practices, even among the educated, but superstition exists everywhere. In his recent Editorial page article, “Science should have the last word” (The Hindu, February 17), Professor Jayant V. Narlikar, cosmologist and a life-long advocate for rationality, cites Czech astronomer Jiří Grygar’s observation that though the Soviets suppressed superstitious ideas in then-Czechoslovakia during the occupation, superstition arose again in the “free-thinking”, post-Soviet days. Superstition never went away: people just hesitated to discuss it in public.

Similarly, China suppressed superstition and occult practices during Mao Zedong’s rule. But after the economic reforms and relative openness that began in the late 1970s, superstition reportedly made a comeback, with even top party officials consulting soothsayers on their fortunes. In India, the rationalist movements of Periyar and others have barely made a dent. No country, no matter its scientific prowess, has conquered superstition.

On the positive side, internationally, increasing numbers of people live happily without need for superstition. The most appalling beliefs and rituals have largely been eradicated the world over — such as blood-letting in medicine to human sacrifice, and in India, practices such as sati. This is due to the efforts put in by social reform campaigners, education and empowerment (of women in particular). Yet, surviving superstitions can be dangerous too, for example when they contradict medical advice.

Explaining it

Why is it so hard to remove superstitions? Fundamentally, a belief may be difficult to shake off simply because of deep-seated habituation. In his memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the physicist Richard P. Feynman wrote about being hypnotised voluntarily (hypnosis is always voluntary) on stage, doing what was asked, and thinking to himself that he was just agreeing to everything to not “disturb the situation”. Finally, the hypnotist announced that Feynman would not go straight back to his chair but would walk all around the room first. Feynman decided that this was ridiculous; he would walk straight back to his seat. “But then,” he said, “an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn’t continue. I walked all the way around the hall.”

We have all had such “uncomfortable feelings” when trying to do something differently, even if it seems to be logically better: whether it’s a long-standing kitchen practice, or an entrenched approach to classroom teaching, or something else in daily life. Perhaps we are all hypnotised by our previous experiences, and superstition, in particular, is a form of deep-seated hypnosis that is very hard to undo. It is undone only when the harm is clear and evident, as in the medieval practices alluded to earlier. Such beliefs are strengthened by a confirmation bias (giving importance to facts that agree with our preconceptions and ignoring others) and other logical holes. Recent research even shows how seeing the same evidence can simultaneously strengthen oppositely-held beliefs (a phenomenon called Bayesian belief polarisation).

Disagreement in science

Dogmatism about science can be unjustified too. All scientific theories have limitations. Newton’s theories of mechanics and gravitation were superseded by Einstein’s. Einstein’s theory of gravity has no known limitations at the cosmological scale, but is incompatible with quantum mechanics. The evolution of species is an empirical fact: the fossil record attests it, and we can also observe it in action in fast-breeding species. Darwinism is a theory to explain how it occurs. Today’s version is a combination of Darwin’s original ideas, Mendelian genetics and population biology, with much empirical validation and no known failures. But it does have gaps. For example, epigenetic inheritance is not well understood and remains an active area of research. Incidentally, Dr. Narlikar in his article has suggested that Darwinism’s inability to explain the origin of life is a gap. Few evolutionary biologists would agree. Darwin’s book was after all titled The Origin of Species, and the origin of life would seem beyond its scope. But this is an example of how scientists can disagree on details while agreeing on the big picture.

How then does one eradicate superstition? Not, as the evidence suggests, by preaching or legislating against it. Awareness campaigns against dangerous superstitions along with better education and scientific outreach may have some impact but will be a slow process.

Today, the topic of “persuasion” is popular in the psychology, social science and marketing communities. Perhaps scientists have something to learn here too. Pascal, whom Nehru cited on reason, wrote on persuasion too. He observed that the first step is to see the matter from the other person’s point of view and acknowledge the validity of their perception, and then bring in its limitations. “People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”

Such a strategy may be more successful than the aggressive campaigns of rationalists such as Richard Dawkins. Nevertheless, “harmless” superstitions are likely to remain with humanity forever.

Rahul Siddharthan is with the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

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Do we need an anti-superstition law? YES | MUKTA DABHOLKAR

India needs legislation on superstition, though what should go into it requires debate. Every superstition cannot be removed by the force of law. For that, a mental change is necessary. However, superstitious practices that are utterly dehumanising, brutal and exploitative need to be dealt with by a law that specifically addresses them.

Brutal exploitation

Maharashtra has implemented the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, 2013. The rest of the country could learn from it. In Maharashtra, the Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti and my father, Narendra Dabholkar, fought for 18 years for such a law to be put in place. There were several groups which tilted the conversation by projecting it as a law against religion. Narendra Dabholkar had to fight a relentless battle against them.

We need to understand that this is a law that addresses exploitation in the name of religion. Opponents to the legislation in Maharashtra had claimed that the law would affect the religious practices of Hindus; that it was anti-Hindu. But after examining more than 350 FIRs lodged across Maharashtra in the last four years, we found that these claims were unfounded. Data show that the accused persons belong to various religions.

I want to highlight inhuman practices in the name of religion. For example, in Maharashtra, there were several cases where people murdered or brutally injured others and held them responsible for some deaths in their families, merely on suspicion. We masked these practices by calling ourselves developed. Maharashtra, too, boasts of being a developed State. Around seven instances of human sacrifice have been reported since the passing of this law in 2013. Two such instances could have been prevented through timely intervention. Before this law, acts involving human sacrifice could not be stopped as they were preceded by some puja and offerings — not banned under any law. Now they are. The cognisance of human sacrifice is in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) only after the murder is committed. Thus, legislation has a capacity to act as a deterrent. The Maharashtra legislation has stopped the act of human sacrifice.

The present IPC is not equipped to take care of crimes committed on account of black magic and other superstitious practices. A separate law is necessary because the relationship between a devotee and so-called godman is of a peculiar nature, often marked by violence. Consider the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act, 2005. There are provisions in the IPC to punish violence, but the peculiar nature of the violence faced by women within the family needed a separate law.

Check on conmen

The anti-superstition law also makes it possible to curtail activities of so-called godmen before they become too powerful. Recently, the Maharashtra police arrested one who called himself Patil Baba and an avatar of god. He abused disciples by calling it his blessing; he prevented them from going to doctors. He had a huge following and if this law wasn’t in place, nothing could have been done to stop him. There is a section in the Maharashtra legislation which specifically addresses and checks claims made by ‘godmen’ who say they have supernatural powers. Once something is made illegal in the eye of the law, it will not be possible for anyone to openly support fraudulent godmen.

As told to Anuradha Raman

Mukta Dabholkar is an activist and assistant editor of the ‘Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti’ magazine

Do we need an anti-superstition law? NO | RAGHAV PANDEY

An anti-superstition law may seem necessary, but it cannot take cognisance of all realities.

The domain of such a law is to curb superstition, associated primarily with religious and occult practices. It has to be impressed here that almost everything associated with any religion can be considered superstitious for the simple fact that there is no scientific rationale behind the same. For instance, going to a temple, a mosque, or a church can be termed superstitious because there is no scientific data to support the fact that such a practice yields any good. Such practices can’t be curbed because they don’t harm anyone. The fundamental tenets of a liberal democracy give us the freedoms of conscience and to believe in things even when science and rationality don’t support them.

Existing laws enough

But certain other practices, like throwing children on thorns, parading women naked, etc., obviously harm others and can’t be allowed in the name of religion. However, the question of whether we need a separate law to curb such practices has to be answered in the negative. This is because the substantive legal framework of our country is sufficiently adequate to address such crimes. For instance, throwing a child on thorns is an offence under Sections 307 and 323 of the IPC. Similarly, parading a woman naked can also be addressed specifically by Section 354B of the IPC.

This is not to discount the fact that certain changes in the law pertaining to the procedural rules and the law of evidence may be necessary to establish the commission of such crimes. These can be addressed by amendments in the Criminal Procedure Code and Indian Evidence Act. If a further nuanced approach is desirable, then a separate law may also be enacted for framing a separate set of rules of procedure. However, a substantive law of such a nature is not required; it works to the detriment of the larger objective it seeks to work for.

The Karnataka Prevention and Eradication of Inhuman Evil Practices and Black Magic Act, 2017 prohibits the two above mentioned practices and several others. It can be stressed with authority that most of such acts, which have been made punishable by the Karnataka legislation, are already punishable by the IPC and other existing laws. Therefore, having a new law to re-criminalise such acts doesn’t make much juridical sense.

Bad implementation

Law and order is a State subject, so States are free to enact specific criminal laws. In the same way, States are also free to make amendments to Union laws. Therefore, ideally, Karnataka or any other State is free to amend the IPC, to accommodate specific requirements.

If the executive is serious about curbing such practices, active implementation and enforcement of existing laws need to be made more effective. Studies in criminology have already established that certainty of punishment curbs the rate of crime and not the type or the quantum of punishment.

We already have a reputation of having good laws but bad implementation. In legal parlance, it is known as ‘over-criminalisation’ — more laws but less ‘rule of law’. Therefore, the enforcement machinery needs a major overhaul to make criminal justice more accessible. Enacting special laws for each set of crimes is no solution and makes the problem worse.

Raghav Pandey is a Research Fellow with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay

Do we need an anti-superstition law? IT'S COMPLICATED | CHANDAN GOWDA

Religions are aware that faith is vulnerable to improper use. And stories of fake sadhus and deceitful sanyasis have long been around.

Other challenges

Bigger challenges to religion have come from mutually reinforcing, external sources. In their own distinct ways, modern science, secular statecraft and liberal legal principles question the validity of theological views and seek to limit their operation in social and political life. Religions in India came under the scrutiny of all three with colonial rule. In asking for a ban on Sati in the early 19th century, Raja Ram Mohan Roy argued that it did not have approval from within Hindu religious texts. This was a commonly heard refrain in later decades too — that vested social interests and not Hindu dharma were responsible for these practices.

Rationalists offered another response on the place of religion in modern society. Included among them are figures like Periyar, who debunked religion as superstition, and the communists, who felt religion distorted reality. Driven by more modest aims, many rationalists laboured tirelessly to denounce miracles and astrology as cheap tricks.

The superstitions of modern societies haven’t invited the same activist zeal. The slightest show of body temperature makes many reach for a paracetamol. The techno-smug moderns hold other superstitions too: if petrol runs out, we will switch to hybrid cars, okay?

In any case, whether integral to religion or a later accretion, practices like human sacrifice are hard to defend. And if it takes state legislation to prevent them, so be it.

Over recent decades, around 800 women in Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha have been killed for practising witchcraft. Laws that aim to prevent this practice exist. Faith healers, on occasion, inflict physical injury to exorcise spirits or cure ailments. The supporters of the recent law in Karnataka that aims to prevent “inhuman evil practices and black magic” across religions cite other practices like branding children with heated objects and using spurious surgical methods to change the sex of a foetus. Lacking access to proper health care, it is the poor, it is argued, who fall victim to such methods. The new legislation also forbids made-snana, a ritual where devotees from across castes roll over the leftover food of Brahmins in certain temples to cure themselves of skin diseases.

The best way forward

Is law the best means of addressing such practices? Wouldn’t a discussion initiated between the temple authorities and devotees throw up alternative rituals more satisfying to devotees? Put differently, can the moral resources for replacing unacceptable practices be explored within tradition? While activists rightly point to the continued silence of temple authorities, who host these practices, to show the need for legal remedies, one still wonders whether working through the belief systems is preferable to resorting to punitive law. This is the moral reform stance often seen among, for instance, Bhakti and Sufi saints, and, later, Gandhi.

Secular temptations and anxieties of money and power in the modern world explain better perhaps the growing popularity of astrology TV shows and the rise in need-based rituals for placating deities than inner tendencies within religion. The greater difficulty lies in how legal discussions view religions as essentially the same phenomenon that goes by different names. Monotheistic religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam and polytheistic ones like Hinduism are so different that the rationalities needed for a proper engagement with them cannot not be as various.

Chandan Gowda is professor of sociology at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru

(All of the above articles have been taken straight from The Hindu. We owe it all to them. This is just an effort to consolidate opinions expressed in The Hindu in a subject-wise manner.)