Editorial
New police stations – and crime
The prime minister, while inaugurating six new police stations in Dhaka on Monday, asked the police to be tough in dealing with crime. That expression of sentiment is welcome because of the good reason that criminal activities have lately shown little sign of receding. There is little question that despite the activities of such bodies as RAB, there has been something of an intensification of criminal activities, the latest instance of which was the murder of a Jubo Dal leader in the old part of the city on Friday. Indeed, there have been the many instances all across the country of criminals actually feeling confident about coming back to the limelight. A spate of daring robberies in Dhaka itself over the past fortnight has only confirmed the public belief that the police are quite unable to contain crime or, once a crime has been committed, incapable of nabbing the perpetrators
of it.
It is in such a perspective that the prime minister’s exhortation acquires significance. She has cautioned the police that while they go after crime, they should do nothing that will lead to unnecessary harassment of citizens. The truth, despite the prime ministerial word of caution, is that in a very large number of cases, it has been innocent citizens who have been subjected to harassment by the law enforcers. Where such harassment has not been at work, there has been the other aspect of the picture, which is that the police have in a good number of instances not been able to locate the men who have simply ‘disappeared’ after committing a crime. But do these men really disappear? There are people in many crime-prone localities who have regularly reported sightings of criminals in their areas, with the criminals sometimes moving about freely. And yet the police have studiously stayed away from getting hold of these sinister elements. The point that should be made, as we understand it, is that it is not enough to proffer advice to the police on how they should be doing their job. Of bigger importance is the need to monitor the activities of the police themselves in order to be able to know whether they are actually upholding the calling of their profession as servants of the republic. But here arises the very fundamental question of how much of influence is exercised by people in power. It has been a tradition, and a very bad one at that, for law enforcers to be influenced and sometimes intimidated by politicians, particularly those who happen to be wielding state authority at given points in time. So, while the prime minister’s sentiments are understandable, one cannot but feel the necessity of suggesting that had she also come down hard on the political pressure that policemen almost always suffer through, her points would have hit home. It is not enough for politicians to suggest that the police and the people cooperate. More important is the degree of political will that can be brought into the job of making the police force an effective instrument for maintaining law and order.
The opening of the six new police stations, one expects, will go a little more towards a tough handling of crime. But let it be noted that security for citizens is something that an increase in the number of police stations cannot guarantee. What is important is what we have said above. It is nothing more and nothing less than that.
Diana having been Diana...
There are all the stories of John F. Kennedy being involved with a bevy of women. In the last two decades, much of the Kennedy myth, that of the man and his presidency being a fountain of vigour for American society, has come unravelled. At this point in time, any conversation on JFK revolves not so much around the legacy he left behind as on the personal reputation he developed, without his knowing it, for himself. When you remember Marilyn Monroe, you realise you are not talking about her movies or her career but about the fact that she was closely linked, in terms of intimacy, with both President Kennedy and his brother Robert.
You might now shift your gaze to later times, the period when Diana, Princess of Wales, quite took the world’s fancy. Hers was certainly an unhappy marriage to the Prince of Wales, so much so that people around the world truly drew the conclusion that Charles was an insensitive human being who did not deserve the love of his beautiful wife. But note that the very reasons that Diana cited to explain her discomfort with her husband (his romance with Camilla Parker-Bowles, for instance) were what may have pushed Charles away from her. By now it has become clear that even as she stayed married to the Prince of Wales, Diana had affairs with other men. She admitted as much in an interview with Martin Bashir a few years before her tragic death. Ironically, the man in whose company she died, Dodi Fayed, was the one with whom she had been going around after her divorce from Charles. There have been the rumours, never confirmed, that she was about to marry the son of the owner of Harrods. Again, there were the moments when she was strongly drawn to a doctor of Pakistani origin. And do not forget Paul Burrell and his book.
A new chapter just may have come into an examination of Diana’s life through the revelation in a new book that she had a fling with the son of JFK before the young man married Carolyn Bessette. Of course, there is little way, so far, of confirming the story. John Kennedy, Jr. and Bessette died in a plan crash in the late 1990s, not long after Diana herself died in Paris. But one might as well rest assured that the story will surely take a shape in the days ahead. Diana having been Diana, it is only natural.
TALLEYRAND’S WORLD
Iran’s tough new president
It is thus quite possible, given the lessons of recent history, that Iran’s new leader and America’s president could one day bring themselves to face each other across the table. Washington and Tehran may be telling themselves that they do not need each other. The bigger fact is that unless the two countries begin to get along with each other, the world will remain somewhat unsettled
Talleyrand is properly contrite. Like so many people around the world, he predicted last week that the man who would succeed President Mohammad Khatami of Iran would be former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He has been proved wrong, like all those others. It is something like the way things happened at the US presidential elections of 1948. Much of America went to sleep at the end of the voting on Election Day certain that on the following morning it would be Thomas E. Dewey who would be talking to Americans as their president-elect. Indeed, one newspaper even went to the extent of publishing an item under the headline, ‘Dewey defeats Truman’. But, as events were to turn out, it was President Truman, having fought a bitter, tough contest to be in the White House in his own right (he had been elevated to the presidency on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945) who ended up beating Dewey. It was, as we have now learned to use the term, an upset. By all means and calculations, Dewey was on his way to the presidency. But something happened in a dramatic way and Truman found himself the winner. He was to stay in the White till early 1953, when he was succeeded by the newly elected Dwight Eisenhower.
The point, therefore, is that there is often a good deal of drama in electoral politics. It was this drama that was being played out in Iran last Friday, a day we all thought would belong to Rafsanjani. Who, after all, would vote for a hardliner like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad? But it turns out that a very big majority of Iranians, 62 per cent to be exact, did think that Ahmedinejad was the man most likely to give good, strong leadership to the country. That feeling may have stemmed from the idea that Ahmedinejad had been espousing some very tough policies about Iran’s priorities, particularly in relation to its nuclear programme. At the same time, he has demonstrated a clear attitude of indifference to the Americans. Even at the post-election news conference on Sunday, Iran’s president-elect was clearly dismissive of what Iran meant to do about relations with the United States. It is these sentiments that clearly played a pivotal role in Rafsanjani’s defeat and Ahmedinejad’s victory. As Talleyrand is now ready to admit, politics, while being a largely predictable affair, is at some unexpected moments a question of drama. One could think of the last presidential elections in France, where the clear understanding among people was that Jacques Chirac and the socialist Lionel Jospin would end up confronting each other at the second round of the polls. That did not happen. Jospin came in third, which was a huge shock, and the man who actually took on Chirac was the right-wing, anti-immigrant Jean-Marie Le Pen. When that happened, people closed ranks around Chirac, for they felt it was important to keep Le Pen out of a job he did not deserve. And Chirac, for all his flaws, for all the charges of corruption going back to his years as mayor of Paris, was elected to a second term as president of France.
But a similar thing has not happened in Iran, despite the clear expectation among a lot of people that voters in Iran would gather around Rafsanjani, an experienced and relatively moderate politician, to keep Ahmedinejad out of power. The people of Iran, unlike the people of France, have opted to elect a radical and dump a softer man. But, of course, that is their own considered decision. It really matters little that Americans are angry about the whole thing and have even spoken of fraud marking the voting process in Tehran. The irony is that for the first time in many years (an earlier time was in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and Ayatollah Khomeini were around), both Iran and America have arch conservatives at the helm. As the leader in yesterday’s issue of this newspaper noted, both George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad happen to be leading packs of arch-conservatives in their countries. Is that a problem? If you remember something of modern history, history that we have all gone through, you might remember too the fact that it has often been tough men, hardened adversaries, who have often dealt with each other. Observed in such terms, it could only be a man like Richard Nixon who could deal with a figure like Mao Zedong. In the Middle East, a battle-hardened Anwar Sadat was the man who finally made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1977 to meet a very right-wing Menachem Begin. In later times, the warrior Yasser Arafat shook hands with another warrior, Yitzhak Rabin, in the peaceful environs of Washington in 1993. There is something of a logical explanation here. Tough men respect each other, in however grudging a manner. And that is why all too often the results arrived at during their deliberations are those that have a powerful bearing on the future course of history. It is not something that men like Karzai and Jaafari, both installed in office through American might and patronage, can ever hope to look forward to.
It is thus quite possible, given the lessons of recent history, that Iran’s new leader and America’s president could one day bring themselves to face each other across the table. Washington and Tehran may be telling themselves that they do not need each other. The bigger fact is that unless the two countries begin to get along with each other, the world will remain somewhat unsettled. There is a precedent that the two countries can follow here: Vietnam and America, having fought each other strenuously and brutally, now enjoy proper diplomatic and economic relations. The prime minister of Vietnam was in Washington last week, thirty years after the last Americans left Saigon even as communist tanks rolled towards the palace that had been home to Nguyen Van Thieu for years.
Media obsessions in India, Pakistan
Journalists in India and Pakistan, every time they have a chance to meet, keep talking about the issues their leaders have traditionally focused on. Matters like Kashmir, Kargil, the Line of Control, Muslim fanaticism in Pakistan and Hindutva in India, et cetera, have been subjects that media people in the two countries have regularly concentrated on. One would think that the world outside India and Pakistan does not exist. When Pervez Musharraf goes to India or Vajpayee travels to Pakistan, newspapers in the two countries keep talking about the event as if it were an earth-shaking affair. The way in which a group of Kashmiri politicians has been treated recently on their trip to Pakistan (and they were given the best of everything) is proof of just how Delhi and Islamabad remain confined to the past. Kashmir became an issue for the two countries back in January 1948. It is still there.
When you add to that the articles written, the opinions propounded, on the visit that Lal Krishna Advani made to Pakistan recently, you have the feeling once more that the world, for the Indo-Pakistani media, is simply receding into the distance. There are so many columnists writing on what Advani said about Jinnah that you begin to wonder how such a huge pack could write on the same issue, without variation of any sort, over and over again. Similarly in India, journalists have literally tripped over one another trying to rip Advani apart or go into a psychoanalytical study of his persona. The newest issue of India Today has its cover story on Jinnah, with a lot of prominent people (and they include India’s Mani Shankar Aiyer and Mushirul Hasan and Pakistan’s Mushahid Hussain) contributing write-ups to it. The focus, you have guessed it, is once more on the kind of politics that led to the division of the country along clearly communal lines in 1947. Stanley Wolpert, who has written on Nehru, Jinnah and Bhutto (at one point some people in Bangladesh wanted him to write on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as well) has a piece too. He defends Jinnah, and the defence rests on weak ground. He commits some errors as well. By his account, India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir. The actual number is two. The third one related to Bangladesh’s war of liberation, a point which has quite escaped Wolpert’s notice.
Be that as it may, the truth is that for many more years to come, the media in India and Pakistan will have to deal with Kashmir and everything else that has been of importance for their two countries. Let us not miss the point: Kashmir will always be there as an issue — and India and Pakistan are not likely, in the foreseeable future, to enjoy the kind of relations other adversary nations across the world have managed to develop for themselves.
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