October 10, 2003
US Media’s Soft Spot for Indi
“A press kit supplied to journalists accompanying Vajpayee contained clippings from the US media that presented India in favorable light while trashing Pakistan. Since then, the US media has added more grist to the Indian mill. Both The New York Times and TIME magazine have portrayed Pakistan as an unreliable ally that still has ties with terrorists and an interview with Musharraf by ABC’s Peter Jennings was headlined: Friend or Foe?” So claims a Times of India report reproduced in the September 26 issue of India West.
The report points to a disconcerting trend - the US media’s continuing bias against Pakistan and its failure to objectively review issues that are a source of tension in the South Asian subcontinent. The trend warrants a reiteration of what we have stated in these columns earlier.
A screaming headline “Indian Firm Aided Iraq” splashed over the front page of the January 19, 2002 issue of the Los Angeles Times should have created quite a stir in the United States, particularly at a time when the country was abuzz with war preparations against Iraq.
The charge against India was well substantiated. Said a paragraph preceding the news story’s explosive text: “In defiance of UN resolutions, a company used deceit to export material that could be used in weapons, Indian court records show.”
Replete with evidence, the exhaustive story filed by Times Staff Writer Bob Drogin in New Delhi, made revealing disclosures: “An obscure Indian trading company has provided the first clear evidence that Iraq obtained materials over the last four years to produce or deliver weapons of mass destruction. The company, NEC Engineering Private Ltd., used phony customs declarations and other false documents, as well as front companies in three countries, to export 10 consignments of raw materials and equipment that Saddam Hussein’s regime could use to produce chemical weapons and propellants for long-range missiles, according to Indian court sources….”
Yet the news hardly created so much as a mild stir in the American press. Bob Drogin was quick to furnish an explanation for this muffled response: “US officials have not publicized the NEC case, in part to avoid embarrassing the Indian government about the lapse in its export controls….”
The media appeared equally seized of the sensitivities of the issue and maintained a studied indifference. But while India’s complicity in Saddam’s sinister weapon-manufacturing designs was conveniently ignored, there was no letup in the media’s zeal to censure Iraq or to malign the peaceful face of Islam.
The attitude is consistent with the media’s policy to ignore Delhi for its misdoings and to chastise Pakistan instead! This is also true of US diplomats. Pakistan - the most sanctioned ally of the US - is censured off and on, wantonly and wittingly by the media. Thus, while the then Ambassador Blackwell gleefully won accolades in Delhi for his outburst against Islamabad vis-à-vis the Kashmir conflict, Ambassador Powell did not hesitate to cause all-round embarrassment in Pakistan by accusing Islamabad of cross-border terrorism.
Is there a method in this unbecoming display of levity? Perhaps yes. Barely a couple of weeks back, India’s test-firing of the nuclear-capable surface-to-air Akash missile and its attendant threat to Pakistan went largely uncommented in the western media. Western diplomats and capitols demonstrated equal indifference. Yet the ramifications of the Akash test-firing were manifold and worrisome.
What did the test signify? And, more importantly, what did the clandestine sale of propellants for long-range missiles to Iraq demonstrate? The two were vivid indicators of India’s missile production capability and the threat it posed to Pakistan. The magnitude and scope of the threat is of a colossal nature.
The Indian missile build-up has been a sustained effort. Its first success came in May 1989 with the test-firing of an Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) Agni. The test, according to the then Defense Minister K.C. Pant, signified India’s “potential to carry lethal warheads over long distances and deliver them with great accuracy.” Lethal is the parlance of IRBMs and ICBMs signifies nuclear payload capability.
Described as the ultimate weapon, the Indian IRBM poses a threat not only to Pakistan but targets as distant as sixteen to two thousand five hundred kilometers away. Agni has the reach to strike at Saudia Arabia, Iran, the Gulf States, China , Russia, Diego Garcia, and possibly the seventh fleet on an adventurous enterprise.
Thus while Agni launched India into a new orbit - one which she triumphantly shared with the US, the-then USSR, France, China and Israel - and imparted her the trappings of a mini superpower in terms at least of a military clout, if not the economic well-being of the country’s teeming millions, it occasioned criticism, both at home and abroad, for its colossal destructive potential.
Biju Patnaik, Orissa’s Janta Dal chief, was quick to protest to the then Indian Prime Minister, “I sincerely hope that our defense experts are aware that attempts at mass destruction by nuclear strike are also a direct invitation to mass suicide at home.” In another communication he remonstrated, “Must India also participate in the ultimate crime of destroying life on this planet?”
Patnaik’s plain talking at that time was shared by many academics. Said Professor Dhirendra Sharma of New Delhi’s Jawahurlal Nehru University, “India’s entry into the super-power club is meaningless without first providing its citizens with basic necessities…. Evidently there are no strategic parameters which necessitate the spending of our meager resources on non-productive and obsolete weapons systems.”
The hawks in India seemed to share a different perception. Indra Nil Banerjie, for instance, exhorted the Indian government to go the whole hog lest the labor of innumerable scientists, huge investment “and most of all a historic opportunity to assert itself in global politics” was lost by India.
Not surprisingly, the post-Agni developments witnessed a growing diplomatic aggressiveness on the part of New Delhi and the mood spelled out by an external affairs bureaucrat seemed to mirror Banerjie’s thinking, “SAARC is important to us. But we have got to break out of our regional strait jacket and assert ourselves. Our area of concern extends from Afghanistan (which mythologically Hindus claim as part of India) to the Indian Ocean.”
Stemming from such noble intents, Indian efforts to produce missiles received a major boost in July 1983 when the Integrated Guided Missile Development Program (IGMBP) was launched with an initial funding of rupees 380 crores. More than 53 independent institutions from the public and private sectors, including 19 defense research laboratories, seven universities, eleven ordnance factories, the Indian Space Research Organization, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, joined hands to pool technical know-how and production skills to attempt self-sufficiency in missile production in the 1990s. The Defense Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), the apex body to coordinate the effort, buzzed with feverish activity under the leadership of Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam as the program gained momentum.
Dr. Kalam had a humble background - his father used to pick seashells to make a living - but his ambitions were hardly modestly tailored. He did not believe in ‘catching up’ with the advanced countries but strove to develop front-line technologies on the drawing board. “Our aim is to be the first in at least a few key areas of missile technology,” he declared, adding, “The country which has indigenous design capabilities is the winner…. If you only got second-hand technology, you can never hope to catch up with or have access to the state-of the-art equipment. You will always be behind.”
With this insight and Dr. Kalam’s resolve - “technology respects technology and strength respects strength”- results were not slow to come. In a short span of six years, India developed three missiles: Trishul, Prithvi, and Agni. The DRDL scientists later succeeded in the development of a few more missiles including Akash and the anti-tank Nag. The effort continues with renewed momentum every passing day. The Los Angeles Times revelation of the export of propellants for long-range missiles to Iraq testified to the awesome advances made by India in this field.
In his Agni baptismal speech, the late Mr. Rajiv Gandhi is reported to have personally added a line to the prepared text: “We must remember that technological backwardness also leads to subjugation.” Ironically, these words carried a cryptic and deeper note for countries consistently subjected to Indian muscle flexing.
Today, there is no shortage of religious firebrands in India who share Rajiv Gandhi’s view. The country’s involvement in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction - at home and abroad - continues unhindered and unabated. And as New Delhi vainly tries to maintain its charade of secularism, the seething hatred of Hindu fundamentalists against Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities mounts at a staggering pace. A New York Times report makes the incisive point: “Not much is known about the RSS in the West. After Sept. 11, the Hindu nationalists have presented themselves as reliable allies in the fight against Muslim fundamentalists. But in India their resemblance to the European Fascist movements of the 1930’s has never been less than clear. In his manifesto ‘We, or Our Nationhood Defined’ (1939), Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, supreme director of the RSS from 1940 to 1973, said that Hindus could ‘profit’ from the example of the Nazis, who had manifested ‘race pride at its highest’ by purging Germany of the Jews.
According to him, India was Hindustan, a land of Hindus where Jews and Parsis were ‘guests’ and Muslims and Christians ‘invaders.’ ‘’ (“The Other Face of Fanaticism” by Pankaj Mishra, New York Times, February 15, 2003).
The implications of such principled observations should not be lost on the media. Given the testimony of Bob Drog and Pankaj Mishra who should it chastise: India or Pakistan? - afaruqui@pakistanlink.com
