Month: January 2016

An Execution that Inflames Sectarian Cleavages Across West Asia

1413442963sheikh nimrThe new year has commenced with the execution of Saudi Arabia’s firebrand Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, the attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and the Saudi decision to break diplomatic ties with Iran by asking its ambassador to leave Riyadh in 48 hours.

These events mark the culmination of the steady deterioration in relations between these two Islamic giants over the last five years, poisoned by the infection of sectarianism that has divided West Asia since the Islamic revolution but which has gained resonance since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In Saudi Arabia, the Shia are said to constitute about 13% of the national population, which makes them a substantial three million or more in the Kingdom. They are concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where they number 2.6 million in a population of about four million.

The ruling ideology in Saudi Arabia is “Salafism”, a belief-system that demands that all Muslim faith and practice be founded on Islam’s two basic texts, the Koran and the Hadith, the “traditions” of the Prophet. This literalist and restrictive approach sees as kufr (disbelief) all beliefs and practices that are not drawn from these basic texts. Animosity for the Shia and the conviction that they are not Muslim lies at the heart of Salafist doctrine.

In the Arabian peninsula of the 18th century, this belief-system was revived by the reformer, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab. His thinking might have remained a marginal reform movement in the region but for the adoption of its precepts by a prominent local family in the Najd area, the Al-Saud, which affiliated itself with this ideology, and legitimised its territorial conquests and the setting up of its Kingdom by making the rigid tenets of Ibn Abdul Wahhab the basis of its state order. In line with Salafist thinking, Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab accused the Shia of “heresy, apostasy, corruption and a vicious sin”. Thus, hostility to the Shia has remained an integral part of the Saudi state order, with the community being subjected to religious, social, cultural, economic and political discrimination as state policy.

In the wake of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Shia in the Eastern Province began agitating for reform so that they are treated as equal citizens. In the early 1990s, they associated themselves with the reform movement of Sunni scholars in the kingdom known as Sahwa (‘Awakening’). After the crackdown on this movement from 1994, the royal family reached out to the Shia leaders and promised to release prisoners and end discriminatory policies. But this was done only to split the opposition and no reforms were actually effected.

Saudi policy after 2003

The US-led regime change in Iraq in 2003 and the emergence of a Shia-led government in Baghdad had serious implications for domestic and regional affairs: with Iran now firmly ensconced in Iraq, it seemed to hold sway across West Asia, forming, in the eyes of the Saudi rulers, a “Shia crescent” encircling the kingdom. The kingdom also feared that its own disgruntled Shia community, emboldened by Iran and Shia empowerment in Iraq, would mobilise itself to assert its rights and, in a nightmare scenario, even seek the secession of the Eastern Province.

It is in this context that Saudi Arabia began to play the sectarian card: in Iraq, the kingdom and its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) allies extended full support to the Sunni insurgency led by the vicious jihadi, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who directed his firepower at the Shias with the same vehemence that he did at the US occupation. At the same time, it adopted an “iron-fist” policy against Shia agitations in the Eastern Province and also allowed its clergy to spew venom on the Shia and their beliefs. This is what brought Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr to the forefront of the kingdom’s Shia politics.

Sheikh Nimr (b.1959) came from the village of Al Awaniya near Qatif, the principal Shiite centre in the Eastern Province. After religious studies in Tehran and Damascus, he returned to Saudi Arabia in 1999. Some of his early remarks were intemperate, including seeking Iranian help to promote the secession of the Eastern Province. Later, he denied making them and insisted on wide-ranging reforms to end discrimination. His appeal for “greater dignity” resonated powerfully with the Shia youth who favoured him over the older leaders, who increasingly came to be seen as ineffective and even as agents of the royal family; Nimr on the other hand was “the tiger of tigers”.

The next four years saw an increasing sharpness in Nimr’s rhetoric: the distinguished writer on Saudi Arabia, Robert Lacey, has described his remarks as “positively incendiary – angry, inflammatory and notably uncompromising”, expressing contempt for the older leaders who were in dialogue with the government and calling for the overthrow of the royal family. In 2009, he attacked the government for its violence against Shia demonstrators and said that secession was the only option before them.

The government responded by stigmatising all demands for reform as sectarian and influenced by Iran. This approach continued with Shia demonstrations in the wake of the Arab Spring, when the kingdom permitted its clergy and media commentators to publish vituperative anti-Shia tracts and tweets and demonised Iran for its “interference” in the domestic affairs of Arab states and its policy of “encirclement” of Saudi Arabia in order to obtain the secession of the Eastern Province and establish Shia rule across the region.

The rise and fall of al-Nimr

In late June 2012, Nimr delivered a severe public attack on the Saudi royal family, rejoicing at the death of Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz, and imploring God to take the lives of the “entire Al Saud, Al Khalifa and Assad dynasties”. On July 8, 2012, Nimr was shot by the police as they tried to arrest him. Photographs of him lying bleeding in his car made him a heroic icon for young people across the province, a status he retained throughout his incarceration. He was sentenced to death in October 2014 for encouraging foreign interference in the affairs of Saudi Arabia, disobeying the kingdom’s rulers, and taking up arms against security personnel. The death sentence was carried out a day after the new year was ushered in, in spite of pervasive questions about the fairness of the judicial process, and domestic and international pressure for his release.

Sheikh Nimr’s execution can only be understood as part of Saudi Arabia’s insistence on using sectarianism as its preferred instrument to mobilise domestic and regional support to subdue the demands for political change at home. Externally, its aim – through military interventions in the neighbourhood that are framed again in sectarian terms – is to build a regional order that is congenial to its strategic interests.

Over the last five years, this approach has been successful to the extent that sectarian cleavage is now deeply entrenched both at home and in the region, and demands for reform have been substantially discredited. However, this approach has not yet yielded the anticipated military triumphs in Syria and Yemen, in spite of large-scale devastation in both states. More seriously, the interventions have provided space and opportunity for the proliferation of extremist groups like Al Qaeda and Daesh. Like Saudi Arabia, they derive their inspiration and ideology from the same source, Salafism, but take their understanding of its prescriptions to unprecedented levels of intolerance and brutality.

Sheikh Nimr’s execution has already had a polarising effect in sectarian terms. There have demonstrations in Tehran and Bahrain, two Sunni mosques have been bombed in Baghdad and the Hezbollah chief has described Saudi Arabia as “criminal and terrorist”. There are indications of some official complicity in the attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran, though President Hassan Rouhani has severely criticised it. The execution and the embassy attack will end the behind-the-scenes engagements between Saudi Arabia and Iran said to have been taking place for some time.

A Gulf commentator, Ahmad Obeid Al-Mansoori, had recently written that Saudi Arabia’s policy of conservatism at home and activism abroad had created a mindset in Riyadh of “you are either with us or against us”, propelled by militant Salafism and opportunistic alliances, on the basis of which it was asserting its leadership of the Arab and Islamic worlds. But, Al-Mansoori noted, while the kingdom seemed to be pursuing short term alliances of convenience, mainly to block the ambitions of rivals, it did not have a vision or strategy for long term regional stability.

This shortcoming in the Saudi approach could make itself felt very soon: Nimr’s execution, meant to project an image of toughness to cow down the domestic Shia community and Riyadh’s regional rival, Iran, could in fact mobilise its enemies, galvanise them into agitations and possibly violence, and in time pose a serious threat to the Saudi domestic and regional order.

Talmiz Ahmad is a former Indian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE

‘We Take Our Ornaments to Heaven’

Getting a godna, a tattoo on her forehead and cheeks, is an initiation for young tribal women in Jharkhand. It’s a vanishing practice, however, described in this excerpt from Nidhi Dugar’s new book.

Getting a godna, a tattoo on her forehead and cheeks, is an initiation for young tribal women in Jharkhand. It’s a vanishing practice, however, described in this excerpt from Nidhi Dugar Kundalia’s new book, The Lost Generation: Chronicling India’s Dying Professions.

THE LOST GEN_neeraj.inddA tribal hamlet appears a few kilometres into the jungle, about thirty thatched huts scattered about like drunken men after a merry revelry. A gathering of women have formed a circle in a cleared patch of land, some with chubby babies hanging at their waists. Two musicians from the village – a drummer and a man plunking at a stringed instrument – sit in a corner outside the circle. There is a volley of hooting cries and then a rattle of drums, the soundtrack to which a mother from a nearby hut drags her squealing daughter by the arm. Thick tears of protest flow down the child’s cheeks and on to her sleeveless frock as she is pulled to the middle of the circle.

‘This is the child’s godna ceremony,’ Salim, a local from Ranchi who has agreed to escort me through this Naxal-infested jungle, whispers as we watch from a distance. If a girl child is old enough to walk, she must be tattooed; the tattoo is known as ‘godna’. Rarely is the ritual deferred until the early teens, and in any case it must be accomplished before the girl is married. Tears drip down the face of the child, her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs as her mother whispers something in her ear—perhaps the promise of rice boiled in sweet milk to be prepared for her later in the evening. The mother rocks her rhythmically, soothing the harsh, painful thoughts in her daughter’s head; perhaps she is hoping the next child she is carrying in her visibly pregnant belly is a son who can escape this pain. The malhar, or the tattoo artist—who will engrave the godna—pulls out the tools with his soot-covered hand.

The crowd cheers as he picks up a three-pronged metal implement and meticulously begins to make a tilak on the child, Nekka’s, forehead—a teardrop-shaped mark between her eyebrows. With each rap of the malhar’s old instrument, droplets of blood begin to form around the lesions. They converge to form a stream of blood that spills down the child’s cheek. A few women break into song and dance, a ritual, going round and round in circles, the child momentarily distracted by them.

Ningan koy Nekka pello kakro parmiya
Ningan pelo ne chhorabao
Ninghai joodi jonkhas koda raji keras,
Ningan pelo ne chhorabao … Nekka

The crab is nibbling on you dear girl, Nekka,
Who will save you from it?
Your boyfriend has left for foreign lands
Who will save you from it?

They sing obscene songs about loose pyjamas that falls off a man’s smooth backside and then another about a cat chasing a dog up to the river, diverting the child’s attention with the debauchery. The child cackles with laughter, even as tears hang precariously on her jaws, like dewdrops from a leaf.

A few more songs later, the singers plunge down on to the dust with arms stretched out, signifying the celebration of the girl’s definite journey to heaven after death and her reunification with her ancestors. Just then, a needle slips and digs a bit too deep into the child’s skin, pulling it upwards like an earthworm on a fishing hook, making the child scream in pain. The singers sit up, shaking their heads, disapproving of the child’s weak will. An old lady— tall, lean and bent at the waist, with tattoo marks folding into a graceful network of fine wrinkles along her neck and face—jumps up and the drummer steps up the rhythm in anticipation.

‘The road to the Lord is full of obstacles,’ she addresses the audience in Kurukh, a Dravidian language. ‘The door is guarded heavily by large, black demons,’ the old one narrates, clawing her fingers and sticking her tongue out to signify the demon. The child quietens down, drawing images of the dark, the perilous dungeon of the Lord, in her head. ‘Those without the godna,’ the old lady roars, ‘will be branded with hot coals in hell, thrown on cacti and pushed through sugarcane extracting machines.’

This purgatory has been described to the child before, in the old folk tales and legends of the evil men who steal sweets from the village kitchens. The child sits quietly through the rest of the ceremony, wincing every now and then, as if wondering which woman in the crowd looked most like the demon that was just described. The rest of the ceremony is carried out on the instructions of the old lady, Nowri  Tikri, who turns out to be the child’s grandmother. There is more song and dance, and bananas from a wild tree nearby and tea are passed around to the assembly of about fifteen people. It is afternoon by the time the malhar finishes tattooing the child’s forehead, and even cheeks—on the insistence of the grandmother—to prevent evil spirits from casting their eyes on the child. The tattoos look more like angry, swollen welts than works of art; it will be another few weeks before they become dark, pigmented symbols in the shape of fat bellied raindrops, symbols to promote safe delivery during childbirth.

Nowri Tikri displays an array of Godna tattoo art on her forearm. Source: Nidhi Dugar

Nowri Tikri displays an array of Godna tattoo art on her forearm. Source: Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

The musicians and dancers have long retired to their fields, and the child is tired—dried blood congealed on her cheeks and eyes drooping with sleep. But she has to be washed, according to the grandmother, before being taken back inside her hut. ‘The malhar is from a lower caste,’ Nowri tells us as we arch closer. She bends over the child, closely monitoring the mother as she smears turmeric paste all over the child’s body.

‘Careful, now! Use the turmeric sparingly,’ Nowri spits, baring her remaining teeth. ‘My son works hard for this money!’

The touch of the lower-caste malhar on the child is believed to have caused contamination and requires a purging of the dirt with warm water and haldi. Nowri reminisces that as a young girl, when malhars came to the village for godna, they would use the route along the village that passed through the jungles. These untouchable men were not allowed footwear once inside the village and were barred from wearing clothes above the waist and below the knees, even in the cold winters of the forests. In those days, if the malhar or their womenfolk, known as malaharin, were given food for their services, the bowl which they had touched would be cleaned with cow urine (which was considered auspicious) and then heated over fire to be purified.

Nowri herself had never allowed a malhar into the house for each of her three daughters’ godnas. ‘We still don’t,’ she says assertively, slapping on some fresh gobar—a natural cooling agent as well as an antiseptic—on to the child’s wounds to prevent infection. Her thick silver bangles clang together like ancient temple bells, louder than the soft, clinking sounds made by the shiny glass bangles her daughter-in-law wears. Beneath the silver bangles, one can see the faded green marks of a tattoo all the way up her elbow.  

‘The ladies of the village envied my godna. I would sit still like a statue whenever I got them done. The more godna you get done, the stronger you become— both in terms of spirit and physical prowess,’ Nowri explains.

‘Children are weak these days. I got an entire arm done by a malhar when I was all of eleven years old. But Nekka’s godna will be split over the years till she gets married,’ she speaks of the child. ‘When the God of Death, Yamraj, approaches her during her time of death, he will immediately identify her and not confuse her with her husband. In a way, Nekka gets these tattoos to protect her husband from Yamraj.

A year later, we can get one done on her back, then another on her neck and some on her arms,’ she mutters, slapping another layer of fresh green gobar on to the now-sleeping child, her head resting on her mother’s lap.

‘More tattoos?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘These are our ornaments, our assets. The only things we take with us to the heavens.’ Nowri smoothens the wrinkles on her hand, revealing a complex pattern of dots and lines, like binary codes, engraved on her hand; an octagon with a dot in the middle near her elbow is a lotus – the pedestal of Goddess Lakshmi, the distributor of wealth; triangles along her upper arm represent Yoni – the goddess of femininity or womanly strength, translating literally to vagina or womb; and a set of concentric circles down to her wrist represent the nine planets that control the destinies of the wearer.  

‘It has healing properties too. Look at this,’ Nowri says, pointing to a dark mole-like tattoo on her throat. ‘I got it done a couple of years back to cure my goitre. It disappeared for a few years,’ she says, snapping her fingers, perhaps hinting at the acupuncture effects that godna is rumoured to have, ‘but then it came back … Pakhi, the village medic, suggested eating a medicine made of pig’s throat, and Durki, the old witch whom villagers prayed to, made me stand on my head every day for hours,’ she scowls.

‘But nothing worked. It is the work of evil spirits, that is it . . .’ She pauses, her face contorting into a frown as she spots something, pursing her lips and distending her nostrils – a grimace that her daughter-in-law immediately appears to recognise as threatening, for she holds the child closer. ‘Ai you,’ she screams at the malhar, hobbling rheumatically towards him. He is washing his face at a well near her dwelling. ‘Do not go near my well,’ she screams, hurling a few Kurukh curses at him. With a hand covering his mouth, making an irrefutably urgent excuse and offering an unspecific apology, the malhar scuttles away.

‘Defiling the water in my well, that mouse …’ Nowri mutters under her breath.

‘Does he live here?’ I ask her.

‘No, no, they have no homes. They are nomads.’

‘So how did you catch a hold of him for the godna ceremony?’

‘They travel from village to village performing godna and making copper utensils in their free time. My brother told me that he had spotted this malhar, Dubru, near the village. He saw him while coming from the fields and summoned him immediately. We give them a bag of rice or a few coins in exchange. Dubru will stay here in the shed for a night and leave tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, the shed is near my well. I hope the midget doesn’t defile my well. Oh, it’ll be the curse of the Gods if it happens …” she says, disappearing into her hut, murmuring a curse about constipation plaguing him for the rest of his life.

Nidhi Dugar Kundalia is a journalist and the author of The Lost Generation: Chronicling India’s Dying Professions (Penguin-Random House India, available from January 5, 2015).

As Government Appoints Benegal Committee, an Old Report Lies Ignored

Was there really a need to set up a new committee to revamp the Central Board of Film Certification?

Film posters outside a cinema hall in Bangalore. Credit: Paul Keller on Flickr

Film posters outside a cinema hall in Bangalore. Credit: Paul Keller on Flickr

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s decision to form a three-member expert committee under the stewardship of Shyam Benegal to revamp the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) has been welcomed by a section of the industry but has left many others quite mystified.

Given the somewhat strange decisions being taken by the present Board, the news of a committee is clearly an indication that the government is far from satisfied by the current chairman, Pahlaj Nihalani. The film industry has been aghast at Nihalani’s overreach, his style of functioning his growing list of don’ts for film makers.

But here’s the catch-there is already a report, written by another expert committee formed two years ago to revamp the same Board, which is gathering dust with the ministry. Government websites feature a proposed Cinematograph Bill and the 19-page report of the committee that had, among its members, former CBFC chairperson Sharmila Tagore and Leela Samson, who resigned as chairperson in March 2015.

The new committee chairperson Shyam Benegal told The Wire soon after his name was announced: “Society is a dynamic entity, not static as many assume it to be, and therefore cinema needs to be in tune with what is happening in the society.”

Some censorship required, says Benegal

“I have always believed in artistic freedom, in allowing a creative person to think freely without official intervention but at the same time it is also true that what you are creating is mass media. It becomes a part of mainstream discourse. What you produce has the power to influence the public. Therefore, some amount of censorship should be there,” he argues.

The old report, dated September 28, 2013, has a long list of recommendations, some of which are aimed at giving a fresh lease of life not just to the Act.

It also suggested systemic changes in the Board, such as injecting more transparency in to selection of Regional Officers and their assistants, bringing the CEO’s post under the Act and largely delinking the post of chairperson from politics. It also suggested a new form of classification of films-

1. unrestricted exhibition as U

2. for persons who have completed twelve years of age as 12+

3. for persons who have completed fifteen years of age as 15+

4. restricted to adults as A

5. restricted to members of any profession or any class of persons, having regard to the nature, content and theme of the film as S

“In the current system, most filmmakers want an UA certificate since that gradation covers the largest number of viewers. We recommended bringing in gradations even in UA as we felt a film sometimes can be viewed by a 14-year-old but may not by a 12-year-old,” Tagore told The Wire.

In this context, ask film industry veterans, where is the need for another committee? Did the government even look at the 2013 recommendations, it was asked, or has the new committee been formed just to divert media attention from periodic embarrassment caused by Nihalani to the Ministry?

Or does the NDA government want to have its own report rather than consider one submitted under the UPA regime?

Former CBFC chairperson Sharmila Tagore, who was a part of the old committee, told The Wire that it was quite a comprehensive excercise: “Public money was used to engage all the nine regional offices of the CBFC. Many meetings were held with various stakeholders such as associations of producers, directors, social organisations, media persons, etc. to come up with a comprehensive document. We also received written material from various sources.”

The 2013 committee had suggested the need to bring advertising material of a film, such as posters, within the Act. “Till now, the posters are printed before the certification is granted. So even if you give an A certificate to a film, its posters often don’t flash it, resulting in people taking their children to those films. What is the use of such a certificate then?” asks Tagore.

Nothing new in committees

Said Samson, “That it will be headed by Benegal is good news for us all as I am sure it is for the industry. But having said that, committees are neither a novel thing nor is it to appoint an eminent person to head it.”

What is required, she said is to take a decision to implement the decisions. In 2013 itself — the year Indian Cinema turned 100, the Government (then the UPA II) could have “taken the trouble of gifting an updated and amended Act to the industry and to the nation. The Mudgal Committee report was before it. The bitter truth is, the arts and culture, the expressions of our people and the freedom of those expressions — a fundamental right, is of no importance to Government,” Samson said.  

Adds Samson, “The real problem is, those who review and judge films are appointed by the Government which is completely unacceptable. The job should be handed over to the film industry.”

Justice Mudgal hopes the Benegal Committee looks at his report and the proposed Bill considering the effort was put into it. “Benegal may not yet know about the recommendations and the Bill. I hope the new committee at least discusses those recommendations and improve them if necessary. I have no ego problems here and I wish them good luck,” he says.

Benegal avoids getting specific about those recommendations but adds, “There are several earlier reports on revamping the CBFC but you also need to look at why there was the need to have a fresh committee for the job.” 

Like the Mudgal Committee, the Benegal committee has also been given two months time by the Ministry to submit its report. Tagore says, “We found two months period a short time to engage with all the stakeholders of cinema including viewers. It took us nearly a year.” Benegal though feels, “There are a lot of enthusiastic people from the industry waiting to give their suggestions, so two months should be enough.”

Antibiotic Resistance is Inevitable But Not Insurmountable

Resistance is here to stay but it needn’t be apocalyptic. The challenge for the human mind is to keep pace with it and keep a continuing stream of new antibiotics with novel properties flowing.

Resistance is here to stay but it needn’t be apocalyptic. The challenge for the human mind is to keep pace with it and keep a continuing stream of new antibiotics with novel properties flowing.

Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA, brown) surrounded by cellular debris. Credit: niaid/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Scanning electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA, brown) surrounded by cellular debris. Credit: niaid/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

This article is the second of a two-part essay on antibiotic resistance. The first part is here.

Even before penicillin was commercially introduced, resistance to it was described! All organisms evolve at some rate, and bacteria with their large population sizes and fast reproduction times can generate, by random chance, a humongous number of genetic variants, some of which might carry the property of resistance to antibiotics. A bacterium does not necessarily have to mutate its own chromosome to become resistant, even though multi-drug resistant Mycobacterum tuberculosis evolved in this manner; bacteria can share determinants of antibiotic resistance amongst each other by a phenomenon called horizontal gene transfer.

Resistance is generally conferred by proteins that modify the antibiotic and convert them into non-toxic forms; proteins that throw the antibiotic out of the cell; alterations that block access of the antibiotic to its target locations inside the cell; modifications to the target of the antibiotic such that the target is no longer affected by the antibiotic.

In an environment that is saturated with antibiotics, those variants which can survive the drug onslaught outcompete their relatives and take over the population. Eventually, we end up finding that a large number of bacteria that we have to deal with are impervious to the weapons we use to tackle them. A bit like the fast-multiplying rakshasa on whom a helpless minor deva throws ineffective arrows.

It is easy to see how antibiotic overuse can result in a more or less permanent selection of antibiotic resistant bacteria: the bacteria rarely see an antibiotic-free environment and therefore the less likely that there will be some that are sensitive to the antibiotic. Resistance to drugs is not limited to bacteria. Variants of HIV are resistant to the protease inhibitors used in therapy; we know of chloroquine-resistant malarial parasites; and cancer cells do become recalcitrant to chemotherapy.

The problem is compounded by the fact that most antibiotics are “broad-spectrum”, in that they are not specific to a small variety of bacteria but in fact target vast swathes of their range. There are good reasons for having broad spectrum antibiotics: it is not always practical for a doctor to specifically diagnose the bacterial variety causing an infection and in these situations a generalist antibiotic works. There are commercial reasons for the goodness of broad-spectrum drugs as well. On the flip side, having broad-spectrum drugs means that evolution of resistance need not necessarily arise in the specific bacterium that needs to be targeted but could evolve in any of the zillion other harmless bacterial species that the antibiotic affects, and then eventually find its way to a bacterium of our concern by horizontal gene transfer.

Resistance is futile inevitable

Let us take the case of cell wall-targeting antibiotics and track the emergence of resistance. The first source of resistance to penicillin was the presence of certain enzymes in target bacteria. These enzymes, called beta-lactamases, break down penicillin into harmless compounds. Bacteria may evolve a lot faster than humans but humans with their big brains do not have to evolve to come up with new ideas. So the scientists hit back and came up with penicillin variants that can do the originally intended function of penicillin, but be impervious to the action of the beta-lactamases. Excellent! The problem is that bacteria evolve and do it rapidly. The new strategy that the bacteria came up with was to find a mutation in the protein that penicillin targets, thus making the protein insensitive to penicillin and its variants. Take that and that – a one-two punch.

The bacteria even found other variants of beta-lactamases that could breakdown the wide-range of penicillin variants that humans could come up with. There are probably only two types of antibiotics today that can target what are called extended spectrum beta-lactamase producing E. coli, which cause infections in the urinary tract. There is hardly any pathogenic bacterium (with the possible exception of Treponema pallidum, the thing that causes syphilis) that is not resistant to the original penicillin today.

British scientists working with the company Beecham discovered that we could inhibit beta-lactamases themselves using something called clavulanic acid – the famous Augmentin (or Clavam) that doctors often give as a first-line antibiotic today is a combination of amoxicillin (a penicillin variant) and clavulanic acid. But well, all that bacteria have to do was find beta-lactamase variants that are resistant to clavulanic acid, and they did just that. And the story is endless. Even with last-resort antibiotics like vancomycin, whose structure and activity in affecting cell wall assembly are so complex that bacteria had to evolve entirely new systems of proteins (not one protein) to develop resistance, bacteria have found ways out.

We now realise that resistance is inevitable. As Julian and Dorothy Davies say in their article ‘Origins and Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance’, “if resistance is biochemically possible, it will occur”. Of course, it is not always clear that resistance is biochemically possible, at least within a few decades or even centuries. But as we will see below, there are good reasons why it is not just biochemically possible, but has been primed to be possible for millions of years!

The beginning was a few million of years ago

Most antibiotics are variants of natural compounds, and many produced by varieties of bacteria and fungi. Now you see, there lies a problem. Someone who throws out a noxious fume to destroy much of life around him, will try to make sure he does not succumb to the fume and will wear a mask, unless of course he is being suicidal. Similarly, if a bacterium had to produce antibiotics to keep its competition in check, it itself had to be resistant to the antibiotics. That means antibiotic production in nature, which has been happening for millions of years, should be associated with resistance. In fact, the afore-mentioned last resort vancomycin is produced in nature by a bacterium, which carries the entire set of proteins it needs to ensure that vancomycin production is not suicidal.

And bacteria targeted for killing by these antibiotic producing bacteria and fungi themselves would have evolved resistance, completely independent of human excesses. The arms race between microbial killers and their targets is fascinating. In fact, clavulanic acid seems to be an old strategy used by a microorganism to counter resistance among its competitors to the penicillin-like antibiotics it produces. It is not surprising that we now find antibiotic resistance in random bacteria isolated from natural environments; we have even found bacteria that eat antibiotics for breakfast, lunch and dinner, like an Indian movie hero would threaten to do to the villain and his minions.

It’s been argued that resistance involves a tradeoff – a bacterium that is resistant to an antibiotic might lose out to a sensitive competitor if the antibiotic is removed from the environment, resulting in a cost of antibiotic resistance. Thus, would it be possible to “reverse resistance”? Probably not. Why? Even though high levels of antibiotics in the environment are definitely of anthropogenic origins, low levels of antibiotics should have always been there in the soils, in the waters, thanks to their production by bacteria themselves. Even with humans dumping antibiotics everywhere, the concentration of these molecules in the environment is probably less than what would be needed to be lethal to a bacterial population. As has been shown by Diarmaid Hughes and Dan Andersson, very low levels of antibiotics, even if insufficient to wipe out a population of bacteria, can still select for variants that are resistant to the antibiotic.

As predicted by Hughes and Andersson some years ago, and more recently shown experimentally by Aalap Mogre, a PhD student in my laboratory, bacteria growing in low concentrations of antibiotics can quickly find low-cost mechanisms of resistance. In other words, evolving resistance under low concentrations of antibiotic rapidly remove the above-mentioned tradeoff from the equation, cruelly shutting out the dim ray of hope that might have otherwise emerged. Low levels of antibiotics are likely within the body of the human who fails to adhere to the antibiotic dose regimen prescribed by her physician; so do think twice about buying an antibiotic from a pharmacy without a prescription, and do think twice before you decide to deviate from an antibiotic regime prescribed by your doctor.

A final problem with antibiotic resistance is that most proteins that confer resistance to an antibiotic are very closely related to ancient proteins that perform core functions in the bacterial cell. For example, beta-lactamases are related to the enzymes that help assemble the cell wall in normal bacteria. Thus, a bacterium does not necessarily have to create an entirely “new” resistance determinant; it can find something that it already has, make a few changes to it and get the job done. End of story!

A new beginning

With antibiotic resistance being recognised as a serious problem, there has been significant research activity in this field. We are trying to discover novel ways and means by which bacteria go about doing their daily routine; how antibiotics affect these processes; how the bacteria counter antibiotics. For example, the laboratory of J.J. Collins has argued that many antibiotics, despite having widely different direct targets in the bacterial cell, commonly affect certain other physiologies of the bacterium, and a level of resistance could evolve in the bacterium by altering these physiologies.

Novel antibiotic treatment strategies are being developed by academic laboratories. The laboratory of Roy Kishony has systematically shown that certain combination regimens of different antibiotics – not all given together, but in some alternating or cycling fashion – could delay resistance. Drugs that target the ability of the bacterium to cause disease, but not quite kill the bug, is an idea that has been floated and being tested. The problem with this approach of course will be if the disease process itself is necessary for survival; then selection would result in resistance. Treating bacteria with viruses that feast on them can be traced back to Félix d’Herelle in the 1910s, and remains an experimental therapy in certain Eastern European countries. May be the time is ripe to open our eyes to these approaches.

My colleague Varadharajan Sundaramurthy has worked on mechanisms of countering Mycobacterium tuberculosis not by directly hitting the bacterium but by resetting host physiologies that are upset by the bacterium. This may sound at one level like the ideas of our ancients but we must note that this operates at a significantly higher level of sophistication at the molecular level. This can be considered as a class of experimental therapies that can be based on the idea that virulence evolved as a result of immune system over-response, and targeting the latter would be a strategy to counter the former.

Finally, a group of laboratories, including biologists and researchers in the humanities, have reconstructed an anti-microbial recipe described in the Anglo-Saxon Leechbook of Bald, and after a systematic investigation showed that it could kill multi-drug-resistant MRSA bacteria. While on this subject, it is also prudent to remember the antimalarial artemisinin. With regard to reviving herbal remedies, one needs to consider the logistical problems of scaling up production to levels that are socially relevant.

At the end of the day, resistance is here to stay. But it need not be apocalyptic. The challenge for the human mind is to keep pace with it and keep a continuing stream of new antibiotics with novel properties flowing, and also finding ways by which resistance can be slowed down, including tight regulatory controls for ensuring their prudent use especially in countries like our own. It is doable, as long as we do not let our guard down.

The author thanks Dr. Savitha Kamalesh at the St. John’s hospital, Bangalore, and Dr. Varadharajan Sundaramurthy at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, for their critical comments on this article.

Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee runs a laboratory researching bacterial biology at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. Beyond science, his interests are in classical art music and history.

Questions We Must Ask About the Pathankot Attack

There is need on the Indian side for the country to get its defensive act in order.

Army soldiers conduct a search operation in a forest area outside the Pathankot air force base in Pathankot on Sunday. Credit: PTI

Army soldiers conduct a search operation in a forest area outside the Pathankot air force base in Pathankot on Sunday. Credit: PTI

Some things about the attack on the Pathankot IAF base are obvious. First, something is seriously wrong with our border management in the area. Despite the fencing and presumably heavy patrolling, Pakistani militants seem to get through with surprising ease. This is the fifth attack in the area since September 2013, which follows a near identical pattern. A small group of militants, dressed in army fatigues, crosses the international border in Jammu & Kashmir which runs roughly parallel to National Highway 1A in a south-easterly direction from Jammu to Kathua and then loops south at the Ravi river to Pathankot and Gurdaspur. After crossing the border they hike – and in this case, they apparently summoned a taxi and later hijacked an official vehicle – to get to the highway which is some 10-15 kms away and head for a target, usually a police station, an army camp and in Pathankot, the airbase.

This is heavily serrated riverine terrain which is not easy to police, but surely by now India should have gotten its act together. It is not clear whether the Border Security Force has thermal imagers in the area; they do have low light TV surveillance equipment, but it is often unserviceable.

Second, the attack is almost certainly instigated by elements of the deep state, which means the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate of the Pakistan Army. Five or six armed men cannot simply walk through the heavy Pakistani defences in an area which formed part of a major military thrust by India in the 1971 war.

The third issue is the poor quality of the policing in Punjab. Despite the July 2015 attack on the Dinanagar police station, very near to the point where Punjab Police SP Salwinder Singh was abducted, the police response was worse than flat-footed. They took anywhere between 12-14 hours to come to the conclusion that their SP’s account of his abduction meant that a serious national security emergency was on hand.

Whatever scattered accounts of the incident we have been getting indicates that its handling, too, has been flawed, if not downright shoddy.

Government officials themselves admit that they had enough advance information of a possible attack. Punjab police chief Suresh Arora acknowledged that the presence of the militants had been confirmed by Friday And thereafter 168 NSG commandos led by Maj-Gen Dushyant Singh had been flown in from New Delhi.

There were also reports that two columns of the Army, roughly 260 men, had also been sent in along with the Punjab Police SWAT team. Yet, even after 35 hours, at the time of writing, the militants have not been eliminated. It is not enough to say that they have been isolated or contained or whatever, because according to the report, they also had mortars which can easily cause mayhem in a half-kilometre range.

There are many unanswered questions here.

Multiple security lapses

First, why did the terrorists let the SP off, considering he was a senior police officer ?

Second, why were the security forces unable to locate the militants in the 20 hours or so they became aware of their presence?

Third, despite prior intelligence and the presence of the NSG, Air Force commandos, aerial surveillance using thermal imaging, how were the militants able to actually breach the base perimeter defences? Had they already breached the perimeter and were hiding out till they launched their attack on Saturday morning ? Is the perimeter fencing and surveillance upto the mark in the first place. This is an important consideration given the importance of the Pathankot airbase and its proximity to a very active border.

Fourth, why were lower end forces like the Defence Security Corps (DSC), who are mostly retired service personnel, allowed to come in the way of danger when it was clear by Friday evening that highly trained militants were targeting the base which had already received high quality forces like the NSG? According to reports, five of the seven security personnel killed were from the DSC.

Fifth, despite a series of attacks across the international border in this area, why are the security forces unable to effectively seal the border? True, the terrain is a problem, but surely by now, enough technological solutions like motion sensors, thermal imagers and low light TV are available to deal with the problem.

Sixth, did the NSG follow the standard protocol in recovering the body of the militants? I ask this because booby-trapping bodies is standard terrorist tradecraft in such cases and special equipment is supposed to be used to ensure that the body is not wired. Was the NSG sent minus their sophisticated bomb defusing robot ? This may have led to the tragic loss of Lt Col Niranjan.

New strategy?

There are several other issues that will need to be worked out in the coming days. For example, the issue of the number of the militants. If Salwinder Singh’s account is accurate, there were four. Then from where did the two additional militants who were discovered on Sunday come from? Is there another group hanging around somewhere, or was their local connivance?

In sum and substance, the Pathankot incident means that the Pakistan Army is keeping its options open when it comes to the efforts being made by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi to normalise relations between the two countries. This too ought to have been expected. Every time efforts are made for normalisation, there is a push-back by forces opposed to it. In that sense, this is an old story in the India-Pakistan relationship.

There is a carefully thought through strategy in the attacks on military or police camps in the border areas of J&K and Punjab. After all, the militants could easily hit civilian targets like bazaars, schools, railway and bus stations, but they don’t. The reason is that while these events do create headlines when they occur, they are quickly forgotten, but mass civilian casualties would generate massive world-wide attention and bring pressure on Pakistan. The goal of the attacks is to keep the Jammu & Kashmir pot simmering, without letting it boil over.

The attack suggests that elements in the Pakistan establishment are out to sabotage the latest Modi-Sharif initiative to de-freeze relations. It would be foolish to play into their hands and stop the process of normalisation. On the other hand, sustained engagement is the only way to neutralise them. That said, there is need on the Indian side for the country to get its defensive act in order. The manner in which the Pathankot attack was handled leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the ability of the security forces –  the police, the BSF and the military – to anticipate challenges and react to them swiftly and decisively.

The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi

What China’s Rise Means for India

While the leaders have been careful in public, the terms in which foreign and security policy are discussed in China, India (and Japan) have become much more shrill.

In the last of a three-part article, India’s former National Security Adviser analyses how India should respond to the growing regional assertion of Chinese power

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Xi'an, May 14, 2015. Credit: MEA

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Xi’an, May 14, 2015. Credit: MEA

Without drastic modifications in Chinese or American behaviour – which I consider unlikely – the rise of China means three things. First, an extended period of political and security instability in Asia and the Pacific. Second, that there will be no quick recovery for the world economy and certainly no return to the pre-2008 good times of globalisation and open markets. Third, that security competition between the US and China will remain the principal contradiction, as Mao would have said.

The assertive China that we have seen since 2008 is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Security dilemmas between China and Japan, China and India, China and Vietnam and others will intensify.

In other words, the environment in which India pursues its interests will get more complex. And the very complexity of the situation in the Asia-Pacific gives India a choice of partners and collaborators to work with in the pursuit of its interests.

The Chinese drive to power and status is very different from the inferiority complex that elements of the Indian middle class display. Some recent examples of this complex are Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statements abroad about being ashamed of being Indian; the neuralgic glee with which the Chinese stock market crash in September 2015 occasioned a much-publicised meeting by Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley with Indian business “to see how to take China’s place”; and the Indian media’s reaction to any thing to do with the India-China border.

An assertive China is unlikely to seek an early settlement of the boundary issue no matter how reasonable India may be – even though the technical work has all been done and over 50 years of stability on the border suggests that give and take on the basis of the status quo is the logical way forward. On the other hand, China’s other priorities have made Pakistan even more crucial to China’s purposes – religious extremism and terrorism in Xinjiang, overland access to the Indian Ocean, keeping India in check, a window on western arms technology, the Chinese commitment and presence in POK, etc.

Pakistan’s game is to suck India into confrontation, thus establishing Pakistan’s utility to those who feel concern at India’s rise and acquisition of power and agency — China, the US and others. Today, Russia sells arms to Pakistan, the US is discussing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and Afghanistan’s future with her, and China has committed US$ 46 billion to Pakistan, all representing increased commitments to Pakistan which are an order of magnitude bigger than ever before. In the last year, India has equated itself with Pakistan and is asking the West to refrain from supporting Pakistan. However, the US and its allies follow their interests, not sentiment or logic. So long as Pakistani terrorism is not a threat to them (as when General Musharraf handed over Al Qaeda elements and they went after Osama bin Laden themselves) they will not expend blood or treasure eliminating Pakistan-origin terrorism for India.

Add to this China’s dependence on the Indian Ocean, and her suspicions about India-US defence cooperation and strategic coordination. Taken together, these factors make it likely that China will keep the boundary issue alive as a lever in the relationship with India. Nor is it likely that a CPC leadership that increasingly relies on nationalism for its legitimacy will find it easy to make the compromises necessary for a boundary settlement. This, incidentally, is also true of India. This is one reason why public Chinese rhetoric on the boundary has become stronger in the last few years, even though their posture on the border has not changed.

But there is more to India and China than the boundary. In fact, the overall salience of the boundary in the relationship has diminished considerably over time, now that the Boundary Peace and Tranquility Agreement of 1993 and subsequent CBMs have stabilised the status quo, which neither side has tried to change fundamentally in the last 30 years, while improving their own capabilities and position.

Bilaterally, China is now India’s largest trading partner in goods, while we compete for global markets. Today, over 11,000 Indian students study in China, and we have mechanisms to deal with issues like trans-border rivers, the trade deficit and so on.

And on several global issues in multilateral forums we have worked together, each in pursuit of our own interests — the WTO, climate change negotiations and so on.

Fundamentally we have a relationship with elements of cooperation and competition at the same time. This duality is also true in terms of core national interests. Both countries have an interest in improving on the existing security and economic order. This is why we have been among the founders of the AIIB and NDB. But we compete in the periphery that we share, hence the Indian hesitation on OBOR and our sensitivity about the Chinese military presence in the Indian Ocean littoral. And neither thinks the other has accepted its territorial integrity.

In this situation, the rest of the world can only be a limited enabler in India-China relations, since they will use India-China competition for their own purposes, as we see with our other neighbours, to a lesser or greater degree. Ultimately, this is a critical relationship which will determine our future which we will have to deal with ourselves. Foreign policy is not events, drama, visits or projection. It is hard work guided by a vision of India’s interests, and no relationship is better proof of this than our relationship with China.

As far as I can see, the pattern of competition side by side with cooperation will continue to mark the bilateral relationship in the short term. The one thing that could change this prognosis is the fact that India and China (and Japan too) have seen the rise to power since 2012 of conservative, authoritarian centralisers, conservative by the standards of their own parties and societies, with little experience at the centre, and strong ideological predispositions to nationalist or even chauvinist rhetoric. While the leaders have been careful in public, the terms in which foreign and security policy are discussed in China, India (and Japan) have become much more shrill. Anti-foreign views, jingoistic slogans, intolerant ideas, and downright bad manners are common not just on the internet. These would not matter in normal times but these are times when governments are under stress, and could seek external release from internal difficulties.

The other risk in India-China relations comes from the mutual gap between perception and reality. Quite frankly, the China that I see described in Indian commentary on China bears little relationship to the China that I have worked with, lived in and see on my visits. The same is true of Chinese perceptions of India, though to a lesser degree. The problem has become more acute recently. Narratives of inevitable conflict and clashing interests can be self-fulfilling prophecies. Before 1962, both India and China operated on the basis of an idealised construct of the other which was quite distinct from reality. Besides, throughout the 1950s, the gap between scholarship and policy in both India and China grew wider and wider. The result was conflict.

It is not my point that we are in a similar situation today. Far from it. In fact, I am convinced that we are at a moment of opportunity for India-China relations as a result of the rapid development of both countries in the last 30 years, of what we have achieved bilaterally in this period, and of the evolution of the international situation in the last few years. I would go to the extent of saying that both countries could benefit their core interests if they worked together.

But to realise their potential, it is essential that both countries understand each other and the reality and perceptions that guide their actions. Frankly if we make policy thinking of China as a dragon, a mythical beast, that policy is guaranteed to fail.

Shivshankar Menon was India’s National Security Adviser from January 2010 to May 2014.

Part One: China Has Risen, and It is Time We Got Used to It
Part Two: What China’s Rise Means for the World

Ajit Doval’s First Big Test as NSA Has Arrived

A chopper hovers over the Indian Air Force base that was attacked by militants in Pathankot, Punjab on Saturday. Credit: PTI

A chopper hovers over the Indian Air Force base that was attacked by militants in Pathankot, Punjab on Saturday. Credit: PTI

The Pathankot attack comes not as a surprise but as an affirmation of what many commentators had anticipated after Narendra Modi’s dramatic stop over at Lahore – that Pakistani spoilers of the renewed peace process were likely to test the resolve of the  two prime ministers.

What remained to be seen was whether the challenge would be direct – by the Pakistani military heating things up along the Line of Control, thus revealing their attitude towards the engagement – or indirect, by the India-specific jihadi groups resorting to a dramatic terror attack. The reaction has come in the latter form, replicating the modus operandi of an attack last year in the same region of Punjab.

The question that arises is what impact can it have on Lahore II, Lahore I being the 1999 bus journey undertaken by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Since the Congress, was taunted for years by BJP accusations of being soft on terrorism, Pathankot firstly allows the opposition to land easy blows on the Modi government. Actually, both parties would be guilty of political opportunism as the issue is complex and belies partisan handling.

Secondly, the actual test of whether a terror act can undermine the India-­Pakistan dialogue process requires asking whether it has been aided and abetted by elements of the Pakistani state. If India cannot prove such connivance, then the act must not be allowed to vitiate the atmosphere as that is precisely what the perpetrators want to achieve. In other words, non-state actors opposed to normalisation of bilateral relations cannot be handed a veto on India­-Pakistan relations.

The Indian options, however, get complicated as the actual proof of complicity of Pakistani state actors is never available in clear and provable terms. Any conclusions would likely be based on deductive reasoning, stray intercepts etc indicating that the attack could not have been planned and executed without the help of elements of the Pakistani army. The Pathankot attack falls into this category.

Be that as it may, India needs to quickly collate all intelligence that can be gathered from the nature of the attack, the weaponry used, electronic intercepts etc. Surely such a planned attack by a sizeable group, which could not be entirely indigenous, would have had a launch pad back-­up. Whether Pakistan is now ready to address terror meaningfully needs to be tested by seeking cooperation in apprehending and prosecuting the co­-conspirators in Pakistan, and sharing the results of their investigation with India. As they say, the proof of the biryani, Lahori or otherwise, has to be in the eating.

Instead, if Pakistan were to revert to bland denials even in the face of reasonably credible evidence, as they did about Ajmal  Kasab, the prime accused in the 26/11, there will be a serious setback to the dialogue process. Going by my experience as the first leader of the India-Pakistan anti­-terror mechanism in 2006 – of which today’s NSA-level grouping is a clone at a higher level – the likelihood of a pro­-active response from Pakistan may be remote.

One inkling of that was the absence of the Pakistani National Security Adviser, Lt Gen Nasir Janjua from the Lahore gathering where the Indian NSA, Ajit Doval was present. The excuse that he did not have adequate notice is not credible because he would have had access to a helicopter. Moreover, it is unimaginable that Nawaz Sharif would not have kept the army in the loop about the imminent arrival of Modi. Perhaps Pakistan, or at least their army, didn’t want Janjua in Lahore as they wanted the focus not on terror but on the resumption of comprehensive bilateral dialogue – which the two foreign secretaries, both of whom were in Lahore, are tasked to do.

With Pathankot, Ajit Doval’s first big test has arrived. News reports of how NSG commandos were deployed in time or that great defence-­civil coordination was achieved will be of little help to him or the government. Doval has to make his channel with Janjua show results. Otherwise it will be back to the cycle of talk­s, terror­, bicker­ing, and talks.

K.C. Singh is a former Indian ambassador

Wahhabi Religious Nationalism Has Moved From Mosque to Military

Wahhabi Islam has inspired many terror groups across the world. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Wahhabi Islam has inspired many terror groups across the world. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

The contemporary wave of terrorism sweeping the world has its ideological roots in the revival of a militarized religious nationalism with Saudi Arabia at its heart. Unbounded by territory, it combines religion and politics to create a “pure” and godly community and brings together fragmented and culturally different people whose only common bond is Islam.

In the Arab world, religious nationalism was invented early in the 20th century in Saudi Arabia, a kingdom whose goal was to unite dispersed people and purify their religious beliefs and practices under the leadership of the Al-Saud. This unification took place as a result of a fringe Islamic revivalist tradition, commonly known as Wahhabiyya, which morphed into a military religious nationalist movement. With time, the project went beyond simple piety: Sharia law and conformity to Islamic teachings were rigorously applied. Under state patronage, this Wahhabiyya was turned into a quasi-nationalist project. Its ideology has proliferated and now inspires Muslims across the globe, fueled by petrodollars and globalization.

Early in the 20th century, an all-encompassing Wahhabi religious nationalism inflamed the imagination of a substantial section of the population of Arabia. It provided the ideological tool to band together to achieve independence from an ailing Ottoman empire that had little control over this peripheral region of its realm. With a political leadership eager to expand throughout Arabia and to assert its control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Al-Saud militarized the fragmented tribal population, united them under an Islamic flag and mobilized them to wage war against all those who refused their homogenizing theology and radical Wahhabi message.

From the heart of Arabia they spread across the rest of the Arabian Peninsula. They created a state that has remained hostage to the Wahhabi agenda, bigoted interpretations of religious texts, and violent strategies whose aim is to control the behaviour of Muslims and non-Muslims in its jurisdictions.

With the consolidation of the state, the various Saudi kings who have ruled since 1932 had to tame the beast they created. They had to convince the vanguards of this militarized religious nationalism to respect borders, not harass pilgrims to the two holy cities under their domination, and allow Al-Saud full control of foreign relations.

In its efforts to institutionalize this unruly Wahhabi religious nationalism, the state was forced to make concessions: It merged the armed vanguards that had unified Arabia in the state’s nascent military institutions, and granted the movement’s ideologues full control of domestic social and religious affairs, especially education and the judiciary.

Detached from local cultures

Wahhabi religious nationalism was essentially detached from local cultures, and as such had little respect for international borders or the idiosyncrasies of local folkloric Islam. It sought to spread its hegemony wherever it could, and to gain spiritual reward for bringing Muslims back to the right path — as defined by their theologians. The Wahhabis thus aspired to eradicate difference, diversity and pluralism not just inside Arabia but beyond its frontiers. The latter project could only take place once they controlled Arabia’s oil wealth.

This religious nationalism was ironically both universal and local. Its universalism was rooted in its quest to spread among the global Muslim ummah (or community). But this universalism was tainted by sectarianism, and thus excluded those Muslims who did not share their theology, both Sunnis and Shiites, not to mention other fringe sects within the vast world of Islam.

The first wave of the militarized religious nationalism — dubbed as jihad against unbelievers during the first three decades of the 20th century — consolidated within the boundaries of Saudi Arabia. This was supposed to make jihad turn inward, to launch local religious purification programs to eradicate blasphemy, heterodoxy and other social and religious behaviour that deviated from their norms.

But vigorous proselytizing in the local context was not enough to please the Wahhabist vanguard. They sought a global role, which was granted to them by the Saudi leadership as it struggled to establish its legitimacy both inside the country and abroad.

They had to pledge to correct Muslim beliefs and practices everywhere, using their newly acquired petrodollars to globalize their movement. Religious education, mosques, and religious centres had to be established around the world to ensure Muslims would be brought back to “authentic” Islam. From the 1960s onward, Wahhabi religious nationalism went global.

US unleashed Wahhabi nationalism

With the Cold War, Western governments, especially the United States, mistakenly considered the Wahhabis an antidote to leftists and secular nationalist revolutionary movements. Together with its Saudi ally, the U.S. unleashed Wahhabi religious nationalism on the world, especially in the hotspots of Afghanistan and beyond.

Preaching was not enough: The vanguards had to carry arms, mixing their proselytizing with an armed struggle to defend Muslims from occupiers and transgressors. These short-sighted policies resulted in a global jihadi movement, intellectually associated with the original Saudi-Wahhabi nationalism of a bygone era.

Today, the discourse, symbols, strategies and iconography of this old Wahhabi ideology are inspiring pious and not-so-pious Muslims across the globe. The message is known for its zeal and promise of empowerment, both of which are associated with the fraternity of a recently acquired religious identity, separate from local culture or tradition. The originators of this wave watch and applaud the spread of their teachings from their comfort zone in Riyadh.

This religious group believes in the eradication of cultural and religious difference, in sectarianism, gender discrimination, and the destruction of archaeological and cultural artefacts. It preaches hatred against a whole range of groups.

Their reading of religious texts is literal and ahistorical. They imagine the past as a glorious episode to which all Muslims should return. In their relations with non-Muslims, they focus on historical atrocities committed against Muslims and seek revenge. For many Saudis, the recent attacks in Paris prompted a process of remembrance of historical atrocities committed by the French in Algeria. Images of Algerian martyrs were widely shared on social media — as if this attack could be considered a response to the horrors of the Algerian war of independence. The attack on the Russian civilian plane in October was also labelled as an act of revenge, retaliation for Russian atrocities committed against Muslims in Afghanistan, Chechnya and, more recently, Syria.

Those who have experienced the ugly side of globalization — permanent exile, uprootedness, anomie, and disempowerment — are most susceptible to the identity that religious nationalism promises. You can be rich or poor, educated or ignorant, settled or immigrant. It doesn’t matter.

This is an ideology based on a false sense of history, victimhood and revenge. Its quasi-universalism, clear lines between good and evil, insiders and outsiders, and fixed gender roles are appealing in a world where fluid identities are celebrated. With no real alternative, and given the world’s increasing connectedness, it is likely to keep attracting zealous followers.

Ugly zeal

The zeal of religious nationalism turns ugly when it moves from the mosque to the military. And even uglier when it becomes the religion of the state. Whether in Saudi Arabia or in the nascent so-called Islamic State, where religious nationalism holds people together by the power of the sword, it is difficult to imagine an alternative way of being Muslim.

In Saudi Arabia, the airstrikes on Yemen launched in March proved a shrewd move for the government: They sparked the imagination of many Saudis who saw them through the prism of their old Wahhabi tradition as countering the hegemony of a rival Shiite power, namely Iran and its alleged Zaydi Houthi clients. The Saudi leadership could not simply watch a rival power such as the Islamic State take all the credit for eradicating heretics. Both Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State came into being as a result of the same type of ideology. Their interests may clash but they share a common goal.

Unless religious nationalism is replaced by new identities about being citizens in a bounded nation in which people enjoy equality and rights, we will continue to see a repeat of the terrorist atrocities committed in the name of Islam.

This article was originally published in Politico.eu

Dr Madawi Al-Rasheed is a visiting professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has written extensively about the Arabian Peninsula, Arab migration, globalisation, religious trans-nationalism and gender. She is a columnist for Al-Monitor. Her latest book, Muted Modernists: The Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia, was published by Hurst in October 2015. 

 

The Onus is on Pakistan to Prove it is Serious About Fighting Terrorism

This in turn depends on whether Islamabad will change course or continue to back those who attack the Afghan parliament and Indian military and civilian installations.

This in turn depends on whether Pakistan will change course or continue to back those who attack the Afghan parliament and Indian military and civilian installations.

Security forces personnel during their operation against the militants who attacked the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot on Saturday. Credit: PTI

Security forces personnel during their operation against the militants who attacked the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot on Saturday. Credit: PTI

For the people of Pakistan’s restive Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa province, the year 2015 ended just like the past one had: on a bloody note. On December 29, a bomb explosion targeting a government office killed 26 in Mardan some 40 miles northwest of the provincial capital Peshawar. The breakaway Jamat-ul-Ahrar faction of the jihadist terror group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility for the attack. Separately, the TTP bragged about the attacks it carried out in 2015 in a year-end report, along with charts and info-graphics, posted to its website. Regardless of which faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed what attacks, it is clear that for Pakistan’s Pashtun heartland the war against jihadist terror is not over by any means. Pakistan army’s Zarb-e-Azb operations, now into its 19th month, does seem to have disrupted the TTP’s command and control structure and its ability to launch cohesive attacks inside Pakistan at large though.

The TTP and its splinter groups might not have been able to hit a high-profile government or military target throughout the past year but they certainly focused on the soft civilian targets, especially the beleaguered Shia sect, indicating that its cadres remain intact and lethal.

Along with the bombing campaign, the low intensity but systemic targeted killings of the Shias and those belonging to secular political outfits such as the Awami National Party (ANP), continued relentlessly. The Pakistan army has boasted of eliminating 3400 terrorists – a curiously precise number – during its Zarb-e-Azb campaign. There is no independent confirmation of these figures, however, as the media is not allowed into the area of the operation, raising a flag about not just the bloated numbers of the terrorists eliminated but the whereabouts of those who might have escaped before and during the military operation. One is hard-pressed to find a single eye-witness account, even from the journalists who were taken on military-escorted tours of areas such as North Waziristan, where the thrust of the operation has been, confirming the rather tall claims by the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).

No let up in terror

The upsurge in the violence in Afghanistan and the transient fall of a provincial capital, Kunduz, just as the TTP activities ebbed in Pakistan raises a concern that some, if not most, of these jihadists have been off-loaded onto the east of the Durand Line as Afghan president Ashraf Ghani said at the Heart of Asia Conference (HAC) on Afghanistan’s future, which he jointly hosted with Pakistan, in Islamabad last month.

Contrary to the Pakistani leadership framing the Wilayat Khorasan wing of the Islamic State as an exclusively Afghan phenomenon, there have been clear reports that many TTP leaders and cadres from Pakistan have joined this IS affiliate, which is now operating in the region straddling the Durand Line. The rebranding of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban as IS indicates that while this jihadist franchise is of Middle Eastern origin, it is recruiting locally and allows considerable operational autonomy to such affiliates. More importantly, the jihadist milieu in which such recruitment takes place still seems preserved, the operations a la Zarb-e-Azb notwithstanding.

The anti-Soviet Mujahideen of the 1980s morphing into Taliban and al-Qaeda in the 1990s and now mutating into the virulent IS becomes possible when there is a continued demand for their lethal product. Pakistan’s consistent use of jihadism as a tool of statecraft and foreign policy over the past four decades has created a jihadist ecosystem which would require much more than tactical measures like the military operations it has undertaken so far. It remains to be seen whether Pakistan is willing to divest itself of its Afghan Taliban protégés and, if so, to what extent.

Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed at the Heart of Asia summit to resume the peace process leading to negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. While the US and Chinese representatives were also present at the last round of talks with the Taliban, when the news of Mullah Omar’s death disrupted the exercise, the process is being formally dubbed ‘quadrilateral’ this time around.

International guarantors like the US and China do add a layer of accountability and transparency but it is neither unprecedented in the Pak-Afghan relations nor foolproof, unless the two world powers opt to make their presence felt meaningfully. The US and the erstwhile Soviet Union were the formal guarantors of the 1988 Geneva Accords between Pakistan and Afghanistan but were neither able nor willing to enforce the non-interference obligation enshrined in Article II of that agreement. Going into the peace talks, Pakistan continues to provide sanctuary to the current emir (leader) of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, as it did to his predecessor Mullah Omar and the Mujahideen leadership before him. Mansoor was reportedly injured in a gunfight with a rival last month in the Kuchlak suburb of the Pakistani city Quetta, suggesting that despite all the fanfare to the contrary, Pakistan still harbours the most vicious of the Taliban elements.

It is no surprise, then, that the Pakistan army chief, General Raheel Sharif was not only acting virtually as the foreign minister of the Afghan Taliban but was rightly seen as their emissary by many Afghan political leaders when he arrived in Kabul last week to thrash out the details of starting the negotiations. On the other hand, a senior Afghan government official told me that they are optimistic about resuming the peace process and that Pakistan for the first time has “recognised the centrality of the Afghan elected government and constitution” and to “differentiate between the reconcilable and irreconcilable ones (Taliban)” and to act against those against peace by “all available means”. And therein lies the rub: scaling back from harbouring the Taliban leadership near a provincial capital to actually acting against the ones unwilling to come to the negotiating table would require a considerably larger Pakistani effort than meets the eye currently. The general Afghan expectation is that there has to be a pronouncement of ceasefire by the Taliban and no new assaults come Nowruz, the Afghan New Year, which has marked the start of the Taliban offensives for the past decade and a half. The Afghan redline, and deadline, thus is an end to Taliban hostilities before March 21st.

Ashraf Ghani’s government has bet on Pakistan two years in a row now; it would have almost no political wiggle room at home if Pakistan reneges on its pledges yet again. The ex-spokesperson for the former Afghan president Hamid Karzai, Aimal Faizi told me that “the problem is certainly not with engaging Pakistan. As two neighbours, Kabul and Islamabad should be engaged in inter-states relations and affairs. But the problem is the lack of clarity in President Ghani’s stance towards Pakistan and the confusing signals he is giving to the people of Afghanistan. For a decade, the core problem in relations between Afghanistan and the US was Washington’s lack of clarity towards Pakistan. Now the president has seemingly joined the US in this regard.” The lack of clarity in the US stance that the former Afghan official is alluding to is that the US has not done enough to prevent Pakistan from continuing to harbour the Taliban and Haqqani network, which attacks and kills not just Afghans but US and Nato troops as well.

US and Chinese stakes

The US certainly has a bigger role to play in the upcoming quadrilateral talks than it is willing to acknowledge. It can continue to look the other way while the assorted jihadists infiltrate from Pakistan into Afghanistan or it can put its foot down and curtail if not end a hostile neighbour continuing to fuel the pyres in Afghanistan.

China has economic stakes in Afghanistan but much bigger ones in Pakistan – not to speak of a security alignment with that country. With Pakistan having obliged China by consistently acting against the China-oriented Uighur terrorist groups, the security question is not necessarily part of the equation for China, leaving the heavy lifting to the US in the quadrilateral talks. Is the US willing to undertake the responsibility for holding Pakistan’s feet to a diplomatic and, in worst case scenario, a sanctions fire? The answer is, at present, no. In an election year, the US is unlikely to change tack and President Barrack Obama will quite likely bequeath the Afghan imbroglio to his successor. What Obama could do is to remove the caps on troops strength as his top commander in Afghanistan General John Campbell is expected to request.

More importantly, the US has to stop pointing to a calendar for its withdrawal dates. The Taliban and their backers love nothing more than waiting the US and its allies out in Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani and his team, however, have the responsibility of making their case in Washington, D.C. Let’s face it, the Afghans have no military or militant leverage over Pakistan and even if they did, it would be a patently horrible idea to exercise it. With the specter of the IS rising, the last thing a US president would want to do is replicate in Afghanistan the mistakes committed in Iraq.

The Afghan leadership should not feel coy about having allies like India that are willing to build the parliament in Kabul and support the democratic process. Pakistan is unlikely to change its negative perception of the Indian support to Afghanistan no matter what Kabul does to assuage its feelings, as those anxieties are anchored in Islamabad’s perennial desire to seek parity with India. Pakistan’s army may have been willing to let the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visit his counterpart in Lahore last week but has remained stubbornly averse to dismantling the India-oriented Pakistani jihadists, whom it seems to consider as force-multiplying assets against the larger eastern neighbour.

Pathankot and after

The terrorist assault on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot on Saturday indicates that the jihadist groups still retain both the will and capability to hit India without hindrance from the Pakistani state.

It may be too early to say who authorised the Pathankot attack but it clearly benefits those who risk going out of business if the peace process between India and Pakistan – jumpstarted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Nawaz Sharif’s ranch – goes through. Pakistan is the only country that the anti-India terrorist groups have historically operated out of and it would be hard for the Indians not to point a finger of blame in that direction. Keeping the attack focused and its intensity rather low, unlike the 2008 Mumbai massacre, serves two purposes: it throws a spanner in the peace process and does not provoke India into a retaliatory strike, which it had pledged, and perhaps prepared for, since the Mumbai attack.

The Indian media and analysts are blaming the Pakistan-based jihadist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), while the Pakistanis are responding by saying that the actions of individuals or even non-state groups do not amount to state-sponsored terrorism. The problem is that groups like JeM and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) have remained under the Pakistan army’s wing for so long that the plausible deniability being invoked in that country seems abysmally farcical. The JeM leader Masood Azhar has been operating out of Bahawalpur, Pakistan and as far as Muzafarrabad in Pakistan-held Kashmir, without any fear of prosecution or arrest throughout General Raheel Sharif’s stint despite the latter’s declaration that he’d vanquish terrorism in the year 2016. Chances are slim-to-none that Pakistan’s powerful military will allow normalisation of relations with India for it perceives such normalisation as a recipe for forgetting the Kashmir problem, which to it is the core issue and “the unfinished agenda of Partition”. Whether or not Kashmir is a core issue to Pakistanis at large, it certainly is the army’s trope to justify its existence and appropriation of the lion’s share of the country’s resources.

The onus is on Pakistan to prove that it is part of the solution in Afghanistan and not the cause of the problem there and not a constant pain in the Indian side.

Mohammad Taqi is a former columnist for the Daily Times, Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @mazdaki

Susanne Rudolph, Scholar Who Revolutionised US Political Studies on India

Susanne Rudoplh1930-2015

Susanne Rudoplh
1930-2015

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (1930-2015) was an icon for an entire generation of women academics. SHR had crafted for herself a life demonstrating that women could be simultaneously homemakers and good mothers (in her case of three children) and also first rate scholars. Susanne, apart from being a dedicated teacher, was also president of the Asian Studies Association, the International Political Science Association and steered NETSAPPE, a global network of political scientists working on South Asian politics and political economy.

As Susanne’s letters published recently in Destination India inform us, she and her husband, Lloyd, drove in a Land Rover some 7000 km through Europe and Afghanistan to arrive in India in 1956. This launched for the two young assistant professors – some 25 years old – a career spanning over half a century as social theorists, political scientists and friends of India. Theirs was a unique partnership in which they co-authored a large number of books, a remarkable jugalbandi in which one does not know where one voice ends and the other takes over.

Trained in Harvard, they moved to the University of Chicago where they mentored many generations of South Asianists and political scientists sharing their knowledge, home and hearth – Susanne’s famous soup a sign of Rudolph hospitality.

Their three-volume study, Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty Year Perspective, 1956-2006, comprises their reflection on Indian democracy and federalism, suggesting how “India’s pluralist state and federal system may be a better way to deal with a multi-cultural society than a French-style nation state.”

In Pursuit of Laxmi demonstrates an attentiveness to indigenous cultural frames to understand India’s political economy. Along with the perceptive scholars Rajni Kothari and D.L. Sheth, the Rudolphs commented on the democratisation and transformation of caste manifest in the emergence of a new political class as a consequence of land reforms and new agrarian technologies whom they described as “bullock capitalists”!

Chicago was known for its concern with theory and the Rudolphs brought to it their strengths in historical sociology, formulating a critique of the unilinear model of modernisation/development and writing about divergent models of state formation in Asia arising from the experience of polities in Southeast and South Asia – including Asoka’s subcontinental empire.

They were deeply into Gandhi much before he became globally fashionable with social movements; in one of the few essays singly authored by SHR, she reflects on the Gandhian ashram as a Habermasian public space.

I first came to know the Rudolphs when I was in high school. They were good friends of my parents, Francine and Daya Krishna. My father once recalled to me his first encounter with Susanne, slim, sprightly and razor-sharp, at an event organised by the political science department of Rajasthan University. This was typical Rudolph style, contributing regularly to local scholarly activity. As pioneers of Rajasthan studies they helped establish a global network. Their “discovery” of the mammoth volumes of the diary of Amar Singh occasioned its editing and publication in Reversing the Gaze, an account of a colonial subject caught between the two worlds of imperial and kshatriya India.

When I got a Fulbright scholarship and was all set to go to Princeton, SHR insisted that I come to Chicago instead. Lloyd Rudolph was my faculty advisor. Both during one-to-one discussions and in class, he demonstrated an intellectual imagination and a range of interests that travelled from subject to subject, taking one on a roller coaster ride. He and Ari Zolberg introduced me to state formation and sovereignty, which would remain abiding interests for me. Of the two, he was the romantic with a deep interest in literature that he shared with my mother. He also had an impressive filing system; any researcher could avail the benefit of boxes containing a treasure of articles.

Susanne was the classicist, both formal and disciplined. And it was ‘time out’, with which she managed her many roles – “time to get back to work after lunch” or “Lloyd, now its time for dinner.”  It was their contrastive personalities in which the romantic and the classicist complemented each other, which produced the lifelong partnership.

For all her enormous accomplishments, it’s the little things that stick – her mentoring and concern about the career path of her students over the years, the memorable reading course on the Mughal Empire and stewardship of the Institute of Culture and Consciousness at UC, which was a later home, those wonderful ideas of shared and negotiated sovereignty, of the connection between the subcontinental empire and Indian federalism, of the centrist impetus of Indian politics and the modernity of caste. She led the flag of revolt in American political science. Long may that flag keep flying.

Shail Mayaram is author of Israel as the gift of the Arabs: Letters from Tel Aviv