Southasian Briefs

Region

Rating peacefulness
The first-ever Global Peace Index (GPI) was unveiled recently, revealing some unpleasant surprises for Southasia in general, and all-but-shining India in particular. The GPI, which for the first time has attempted to rank 121 countries according to their “absence of violence”, placed India at 109 – shockingly, one spot lower than Burma. Iraq was at the bottom, while Norway was considered the most ‘peaceful’ country. The GPI was developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit in conjunction with an international panel of academics and experts. Researchers utilised a definition of violence that included unrest both within and between countries.

Other Southasian countries did even worse, with Sri Lanka at 111 and Pakistan at 115. Indeed, on the GPI’s global map, the Southasian region is coloured almost completely red, meaning the “state of peace” is “very low”. Bhutan, however, at 19, was placed better than much of the rest of the world, something that will surely make it onto glossy travel brochures in the very near future. China as a whole was placed 60th, and Bangladesh 86th, while Afghanistan, Nepal and the Maldives were mysteriously absent from the rankings altogether – not that their inclusion would have dramatically changed the region’s colour scheme.

On India, one hypothesis for its low ranking could be that, while looking at the country through the prism of a centralised state, it may look ‘stable’. But whether there is ‘peace’ in the units of the Indian Union is another matter – consider the Northeast, Kashmir, Jharkhand, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat!

Pakistan/India

Pakistan panchayat
A group of Indian Panchayati Raj officials, intellectuals and activists are scheduled to visit Pakistan on a mission in July, to discuss India’s experiences of local self-governance – known as Panchayati Raj. India’s Minister for Panchayati Raj, Mani Shankar Aiyar, will head the 50-person mission, which is to last all of three days.

The crossborder exchange will be the result of an agreement made nearly two years ago (as well as a follow-up agreement made last December) between Aiyar and the head of Pakistan’s National Reconstruction Bureau to create an India-Pakistan Joint Forum for Local Governance. Under Pervez Musharraf’s rule, Pakistan took on a new system of local governance in 2001, and interest in India’s Panchayati Raj system has been periodically expressed by Islamabad ever since.

Nepal/India

ULFA to Nepal?
With Bhutan, Burma and, soon, Bangladesh rendered non-options, the claim is that the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) is moving bases to Nepal. This is what two arrested ULFA leaders have told their Indian handlers.

After having successfully strong-armed the governments in Thimphu and Rangoon to carry out missions in their frontier areas to flush out Indian insurgent groups in the past, New Delhi now seems to have convinced Dhaka’s military-backed interim government to send a no-welcome message to any Northeast insurgent group in Bangladeshi territory.

The only remaining crossborder area to go to, evidently, is Nepal. Following their arrest in early June in Assam, senior ULFA leaders Ghanakanta Bora and Tulsi Borgohain (incidentally, a married couple) claimed that the group had already set up a handful of bases in Nepal, and that it was now planning on moving a significant number of militants into them.

Perhaps more inflammatory, Bora and Borgohain also alleged that the Nepal camps were set up with the help of Nepali Maoist cadres, who had also aided ULFA militants in the procurement of weapons. The two ULFA leaders and their son were evidently based in Nepal prior to their arrest. Days after the allegations surfaced, Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) leader Baburam Bhattarai vehemently denied any connection between his party cadre and ULFA militants. “We have no direct or indirect link with them,” Bhattarai asserted. “We have never been in contact with this organisation called ULFA.”

There is one question that still needs to be asked, though. In order to have insurgent bases of the kind that were in southern Bhutan or Burma, one needs jungles. But those in Nepal’s eastern Tarai, proximate to ULFA stomping grounds, have all been decimated. Where would these bases be situated?

Region

Southasian glaciers, fast receding

On the global precipice
On 5 June the world celebrated another World Environment Day, further cementing the global understanding of the earth’s environment as well on the road to doom. The World Bank released a report the same week, warning that crop yields in Southasia could decrease by up to 30 percent over the coming four decades, due to global warming. The report noted that climate change in the region would inevitably significantly hamper attempts to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, including in poverty reduction and communicable disease.

The net impact of many of these ramifications, the Bank’s researchers cautioned, will be a series of “severe” economic shocks, which will radically increase the rate of population movements and create new migration patterns. Populations will particularly move into urban areas and across international boundaries, exacerbating looming resource crunches, stressing poorly planned and inadequate infrastructure, and putting increased pressure on states’ senses of national and resource security.

Separately, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), in Kathmandu, took the opportunity to raise the alarm about another 50-year scenario. Within the coming half-century, an ICIMOD report stated, all Himalayan glaciers could disappear. These glaciers function as sources for nine of the largest rivers in Southasia, from Pakistan to Burma, and the direct impact on the region’s population of 1.4 billion people would be monumental.

As the glaciers melt, they will affect agriculture, biodiversity and hydroelectricity production, and will lead to massive swings in both flooding and drought. What seems clear is that while we fight each other based on petty nationalisms here in Southasia, all our attitudes and mental foundations will be made irrelevant by the tectonic shifts resulting from global warming. But our sense of alarm seems only to be linked to the period around World Environment Day. So, see you next 5 June – we will worry some more then!

Bangladesh/Bhutan

From Bhutan to Burma
Bangladesh’s attempts to purchase hydroelectric power from Bhutan have evidently come to naught. By mid-May, Energy Adviser Tapan Chowdhury said that there had been no answer from either Thimphu or New Delhi to Dhaka’s repeated queries on the matter since early March. “We cannot expect to buy hydroelectricity from Bhutan at present,” Chowdhury conceded, at a roundtable set up by the Asian Development Bank.

And so the adviser (a minister in the current set-up) announced that Dhaka was planning on sending a delegation to Rangoon in June, to look into the possibility of importing hydroelectricity from Burma. This option was clearly not as enticing as the possibility of importing Bhutani power, which would have been so close by, just across the ‘Duars’ of Assam. Chowdhury warned
that importing Burmese energy would require large capital investments into Burmese hydropower
plants – loans which would be difficult to procure, given the current international sanctions in place against the Rangoon junta.

But money would not be the only issue. While New Delhi has a special relationship with Bhutan and imports the vast majority of the energy the small Himalayan country produces, a similar dynamic has been evolving between Burma and Beijing. How will Bangladesh untie that particular geopolitical knot, to assuage its thirst
for power?

India/Bangladesh

This country or that
In late May, an official Indian delegation for the first time paid visits to a handful of the ‘enclaves’ that dot the Indo-Bangladeshi border. It was joined by a counterpart mission from Dhaka. The team visited three Indian enclaves in Bangladeshi territory and four Bangladeshi enclaves in Indian territory, in an effort to speed up the process of trading the so-called chhitmahals that was initially agreed upon more than thirty years ago.

Although exact numbers vary dramatically from source to source, there are an estimated 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in India and 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh, created due to Partition-era confusion over a 19th-century agreement. Cut off from the protection and munificence of their home countries, the estimated 30,000 residents of the enclaves live without electricity, schools, medical facilities and other infrastructure. The recent visit was to usher in what is forecasted to be a ‘final’ round of talks on the issue in late June in Dhaka. If the news has reached them at all, those 30,000 will certainly be looking forward to an end to their unusual troubles, and to becoming the citizens of one country or the other.

The Maldives

The Male landing strip

Mid-range Maldives
The Maldivian government has announced plans to build five new airports in various parts of the atoll nation. The Maldives’ aviation minister, Mahamood Shaugee, said that the new programme would take the total number of air hubs in the country to seven. He promised that the addition of the new landing strips, on land reclaimed from lagoons in the north and south atolls, would make the Maldives a less exclusive, less expensive holiday destination for tourists.

“The image that we want to portray is that we have products for the mid-market also,” Shougee explained, going on to note that each new airport would be built in conjunction with at least one resort. “We are making an effort to bring mid-range resorts to the Maldives.”

Occupancy of the 89 existing resorts in the Maldives is reportedly at nearly 90 percent. Fifty-one additional resorts are currently under construction, and it is said that charter airlines from Europe have already begun booking flights into the yet-to-be-built airports.

The opening up of alternative airports may also be an attempt to address disgruntlement in the less-developed parts – particularly Addu atoll in the south – towards Male-centric tourism and other development. A World War II-era airport in Addu is said to have been left neglected by Maldivian authorities in order to pamper Male.

Pakistan/India

Bilateral pollution
For the first time, the issue of crossborder pollution has been raised under the auspices of the Indus Water Treaty. On the sidelines of the bi-annual meeting of the Indus Commission in New Delhi in May, Pakistan Indus Water Commissioner Syed Jammat Ali Shah recounted his dismay over the pollution levels he had witnessed in the Jhelum River during a recent visit to Kashmir.

Shah had been in the area to inspect the Uri and Kishanganga hydroelectric projects, and reported finding, for instance, drains from Srinagar emptying directly into the river. (Out of 52 sewage installations in Srinagar alone, 35 are reportedly flowing directly into the Jhelum without treatment.) Shah subsequently decided that the issue of pollution flowing out of Indian territory into Pakistan through rivers is indeed covered under the 1960 treaty.

Although Shah was evidently unimpressed with explanations given to him of attempts to mitigate the pollution flows from Jammu & Kashmir, experts in Srinagar have long complained of a lack of necessary funding to deal with the issue. Indeed, for the past several years, water-quality experts have failed even to set up monitoring stations beyond the Srinagar area. Meanwhile, medical experts have warned of unacceptably high levels of both water-borne diseases and industrial pollutants throughout the Valley.

The issue of crossborder pollution of watercourses, finally raised on the Jhelum, should perhaps be a cue to environmentalists in Bihar, for an environmental appraisal of pollution on the Bagmati, which carries down untreated sewage from the Kathmandu Valley.

The Maldives/Bangladesh

Yasir

Low-country solidarity
Following the recent mass flooding in the Maldives, the first country to respond to Male’s pleas for international aid was none other than cash-strapped, crisis-engulfed Bangladesh. When the interim government in Dhaka announced a contribution of USD 1 million to ameliorate the effects of the country’s worst flooding since the 2004 tsunami (a preliminary report suggested that nearly 1650 people had been made homeless), officials in Male were perhaps the most surprised of all.

Thus it was that the Southasian country with the lowest GDP was the first to step forward to help the Maldives, which has one of the highest – indeed, Bangladesh’s GDP is around a quarter of the Maldives’. And not only is USD 1 million the largest contribution that Dhaka has ever made to another government, but it far eclipses the Maldives’ largest single international aid contribution – USD 50,000, made to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh following past natural disasters. The amount also far outstrips other promises of assistance made to the Maldives to date, including by India and the US.

In explanation of this largesse, Bangladesh’s ambassador to the Maldives pointed to the similarities between the two countries, noting that they are both “low-lying states, vulnerable to flooding and the effects of global warming”. He also stated that while the aid came with no strings attached, he hoped that the Maldives would in the future help Bangladesh to create an international organisation to help with emergency disaster response.

Bhutan/India

The Mechi battleground
After years of stagnation, the circumstances surrounding the Bhutani refugees in southeastern Nepal have suddenly turned dramatically violent. After thousands of Bhutani refugees attempted to cross the Mechi River border bridge into Indian territory on 28 May en route to their homeland, one of them was killed and dozens wounded when Indian security forces opened fire. Indian officials reported that at least six of their own personnel were also injured when refugees started throwing rocks.

The previous week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, had visited the refugee camps in southeastern Nepal, before going on to Thimphu, where he had urged the royal government of Bhutan to repatriate the estimated 107,000 refugees currently in the UNHCR-overseen camps.

The confrontation on the border also followed directly on the heels of days of dramatically ramped up violence in the refugee camps themselves, with anxiety mounting surrounding refugee activists opposed to recent moves towards third-country resettlement. Preparations are currently underway to begin resettling refugees to the US and other countries, with the process to begin by the end of the year.

Two refugees were killed by Nepali police in the camps during attempts to quell the violence, and one prominent refugee leader was severely injured when attacked by goons. A two-week strike subsequently called by the refugees was suspended, however, on promises of a meeting between refugee leaders and Nepali, Indian and Bhutani officials.

On 10 June, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee electrified the refugees’ mood when he conceded in Calcutta, after meeting with the West Bengal chief minister, that the Lhotshampa refugee issue was indeed an “international problem”. This was a major departure for a country that has denied not only any international flavour to the refugee issue, but even its own interest in what it has called a purely bilateral issue between Thimphu and Kathmandu.

It now remains to be seen how the refugees and their leadership are able to capitalise on this sudden surge of interest in their condition.

India/Burma

Fibre optic to Southeast Asia
Just weeks after a new fibre-optic connection between India and Pakistan through Wagah was slated to become operational, New Delhi agreed to lay a similar cable to the east, across the Manipur border into Burma. The project will be sponsored on the Indian side by the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). The proposed connection will stretch from Imphal to Moreh, and from Tamu to Mandalay, about 500 km into Burma.

While vastly improving India’s telecommunications link with its eastern neighbour, the cable will also be the first step towards connecting the Subcontinent directly to Southeast Asia, in a network that will eventually end in Singapore, through Kuala Lumpur. Construction on the first phase of the project has already begun, and is expected to be complete by the end of the year. In addition, BSNL is said to be planning to build an underwater telecommunications connection directly to Singapore, across the Bay of Bengal.

Pakistan/India

The sari fights back
The power of entertainment has long been proven unmatched in rendering irrelevant intellectualised hang-ups. This has been visible in recent times in Pakistan, where the popularity of Indian television dramas among Pakistani women has led to a spike in sari sales. Pundits have dubbed the reappearance of the sari there as a “new fashion trend”.

Not only has the popularity of such shows as “Kahiin To Hoga”, “Kumkum” (see photo) and “Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii” led to a brisk black market in saris smuggled in from India, it has also resulted in a dramatic upsurge in the small local sari-manufacturing industry in Pakistan. One shopkeeper recently estimated that a sari-wallah may have sold 20 saris a week in past years, but could now have a weekly turnover of up to 100.

As could be imagined, the most in-demand saris are those that resemble the ones worn by actresses on the tele-dramas. As such, local manufacturers have come out with lines named after the television characters themselves – for instance, the Kumkum or Kashish sari. After decades of relentless loss of cultural space to the salwar kameez, it has taken the Hindi serials to revive the fortunes of the regal sari. Television can bring some justice after all!

India/Pakistan

Pugwashed
An international conference on Kashmir, to be held in Bombay in early June, was postponed due to New Delhi’s decision not to allow visas for Pakistani participants. The conference was to be part of the international organisation Pugwash’s series ‘Conferences on Science and World Affairs’.

Ironically enough, Pugwash, which is based in Europe and the US, is currently headed by an Indian, eminent scientist and Rajya Sabha member M S Swaminathan (see pic). Prominent personalities had been slated to attend the conference, including Jammu & Kashmir leaders Omar Abdullah and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. Several Pakistani diplomats, scholars, government officials and leaders from Azad Kashmir were also expecting to take part in the conference, including Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan and Chaudhary Latif Akbar. That was when the visa problem came up.

The New Delhi government gave no explanation for the denial, although similar Pugwash conferences on Kashmir have successfully taken place in Kathmandu in 2004, and in Islamabad
last year.

Region

Politicised waters
Beijing recently concluded a wide-ranging study on how the waters from five major Himalayan river systems are currently being used, reigniting fears in India and Bangladesh over China’s longstanding plans to build a dam on the Brahmaputra’s Tibetan headwaters. Although an official in Lhasa couched the enquiry in terms of China’s currently stepped up environmental initiatives, he also noted that the study, conducted over the course of a month from 8 May to 3 June, would be the “longest and most wide-ranging examination of the region’s use of water resources”.
Researchers ostensibly focused on drinking water, sanitation and small-scale hydropower, but this did little to quell jitters in New Delhi and Dhaka. Despite past diplomatic discussions, Beijing is believed to be moving forward with its old plan to dam the Brahmaputra, eventually diverting nearly 200 billion cubic metres of water per year into the Yellow River, for use in China’s increasingly parched northern regions.

It seems appropriate for India’s Northeast and all of Bangladesh to collaborate on this issue, with an eye to heading off the Chinese plans. And the going could still be tough, given Beijing’s proclivity to run roughshod over naysayers in matters of water sharing and dam building.

India/Tibet

MP ‘already’ Chinese
A consular decision by China’s embassy in New Delhi in late May has added to irritation over Beijing’s continuing claim to around 90,000 square kilometres of land in Arunachal Pradesh. During the course of preparations for a visit by 107 Indian bureaucrats to Beijing and Shanghai, Chinese officials in the Indian capital agreed to issue 106 visas – but said that the 107th, meant for an official from Arunachal, was unnecessary because, as far as Beijing was concerned, the man was already a Chinese citizen.

New Delhi immediately cancelled the entire visit, and the city has been full of rancour over the incident ever since. Although Manmohan Singh and Wen Jiabao signed an agreement two years ago to resolve their countries’ border disputes through “friendly consultations”, rhetoric over Arunachal has been heating up in recent months. New Delhi recently sent a probe to the state to explore reports that Chinese troops are illegally occupying parts of Indian territory.

Possibly this type of diplomatic incident has not occurred in the past because there have been too few Arunachalis applying for Chinese visas. But what will happen when applications increase?

Bangladesh

Rapporteur worries
The purge being carried out by Dhaka’s military-backed interim administration now also targets UN officials. Sigma Huda (see photo), the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Trafficking, was supposed to appear in Geneva before the Human Rights Council on 11 June, to give a report on her findings in Bangladesh. The week before, however, the interim administration forbade her from leaving Bangladesh, claiming that she was a “security threat”, and charging her under anti-corruption legislation. Huda’s husband, Bangladesh Nationalist Party politician Nazmul Huda, has also been charged. Huda was previously refused exit from Bangladesh in mid-May.

The assumption is that Dhaka officials were worried that Huda would be making some damning accusations in her report, including highlighting allegations that the military-backed government has detained and tortured more than 95,000 Bangladeshis in recent months. She responded to the latest contravention of international law by questioning whether she herself was really the security threat, “or whether the government itself is the threat?”