A VERY CONFUSED INTERNET STRATEGIST

An article counseling India to join with the BRICS countries to “develop an alternative” to American “Internet hegemony” (The Hindu, 6 June, page 9), displays such a comprehensive misunderstanding of global realities that it is difficult to know where to begin a critique.

The author, Parminder Jeet Singh of the Bengaluru-based NGO IT for Change, argues that because the Internet ‘has become like a global neural system running through and transforming all social sectors,” whoever controls that network “begins to wield unprecedented power.”

And who might that be?

Anyone who controls the “connectivity architecture” and “Big Data.”

The connectivity architecture of the Internet is, for historical reasons, in the United States, where it has evolved from its military roots into a public utility governed by anti-monopoly regulations and a vociferously defended equal access philosophy.

What is Big Data?

It is “the continuous bits of information generated by each and every microactivity of our increasingly digitized existence.”

But does anyone control Big Data?

Singh is a shameless fear monger on this topic.

Monsanto is an example of an entity controlling Big Data, he says; it “holds almost field-wise micro information on climate, soil type, neighborhood agri-patterns, and so on. Such data will form the backbone of even its traditional agri-offerings.”

Instead of telling us how Monsanto will use that information in ways detrimental to India in the face of a strong global movement towards organic farming, he merely asserts that it “is easy to understand how data control-based lock-ins are going to be even more powerful and monopolistic than the traditional dependencies in this sector.”

Perhaps to paper over that gap he then notes that John Deere, the world’s largest agricultural machinery company told the US Copyright Office that “farmers don’t own” the computer code that runs their tractors, they only have an “implied license.”

That sounds like a huge power grab, until you consider that it is no different from buying a book and not owning the author’s copyright. Or a computer, and not owning its operating system.

But Singh wants us to feel threatened.

“Similar developments are occurring in every other sector. Policy-making and governance are becoming dangerously dependent on Big Data, even as the public sector is all but giving up its traditional responsibilities for public statistics. The State is increasingly dependent on data collected and controlled by a few global corporations.”

Google, which people “think right now is a mere support” is entering many substantive fields like medicine where networks carry patient information; it is “threatening the traditional players” in various sectors, and “may become the primary agent in the relationship.”

He holds out the prospect that data providers in the education sector who sell “personalized offerings for every student and every context” will “add to the power of the monopolistic networks at the expense of their peripheral users. As their power consolidates, so do the terms of engagements mutate in the favor of the network controllers.”

This is a classic Chicken Little “sky is falling” scare.

It pays no attention to the fact that the logic of global connectivity is not just anti-monopoly but anti-mega corporation.

The mega corporation is increasingly a dinosaur because its essential strengths are based on top-down/center-periphery communications systems that allow small groups to amass, hoard and manipulate information to their advantage.

In the age of the Internet and Worldwide Web, such control is impossible. Power lies in networks that are flat and do not permit top-down control; any power grab by corporations like Google, Facebook or Twitter will spell their instant doom.

As for Big Data, Singh misses the revolutionary potential of the smart phone and the geospatial organization of information.

We are facing a future when Big Data will be collected automatically by billions of individuals and organized geospatially on the publicly owned cloud, beyond the power of any corporation or government to corner or manipulate.

The only way small elite groups will be able to continue enjoying their privileges will be through brutal control of the Internet as in China.

In democratic countries, elite groups have generated fear of terrorism to legitimize their own efforts at fascist control of networks, and in that context, Singh’s advice that India ally with China against the United States is madness.

The only course for democratic forces in India and the United States – not to mention in the other BRICS countries – is to ally against their own power-grabbing elites and internationally, against China, which is now the ugly face of global fascism.

In that international face-off, the key issue is not who will govern the Internet but how we perceive international terrorism: it is not “Islamic” but British, camouflage for its massively profitable post-colonial business of laundering the proceeds of organized crime.

Only if we lay the bogey of terrorism can we move beyond the surveillance/police State and realize the rich democratic potential of a connected world.

Misleading Mid-East Punditry

The edit page of The Hindu is a far cry from the shouters of Times Now but there too punditry can be misleading noise.

The latest case in point is Suhasini Haidar’s analysis of “The West and its flawed anti-IS strategy” published appropriately enough on 1 April.

Here are some of its errors:

1. Throughout the piece there are references to “the West,” as if it is still a global political entity. The “West” of the Cold War has been gone for over a quarter century and in those years the United States and the countries of Western Europe have gone their separate ways.

2. It is true, the British and their military-industrial friends in Washington tried to extend the shelf-life of “the West” with the rigged election of Bush Jr. followed immediately by the Saudi-managed 9/11 attacks. But despite enormously profitable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the “special relationship” has become increasingly irritable and now is little more than a joint enterprise to wiretap everything that moves.

3. Meanwhile, the Americans have retreated to their historical default position of being leery of most things European except their wine, cheese and women. Britain, France and Germany awakened to that reality when a fit of post-Cold War hubris led them to implode Yugoslavia; they created an unmanageable mess and had to call for Yankee help.

4. The British have been especially hard hit in recent years by the end of transatlantic bonhomie. United States regulators have gone after the largest British banks with a hatchet for such things as money laundering, manipulating global gold prices and fixing interest rates. Under American pressure the Bank of England even had to accept a Canadian Governor. All this has made it difficult for the British elite to continue as usual with their profitable business managing the proceeds of global organized crime. In fact, they have been forced to pay off their multi-ethnic mafia/terrorist clientele with high-end British real estate. To prevent London becoming home to the world’s worst hoodlums the British parliament made it illegal for anyone with a criminal record to enter the country. And to ensure that the long-suffering people of Britain will not turn on their betters for selling off the country to criminals another law has completely delegitimized public protest: a 12-year old can now be arrested for standing on a street corner and cursing the government loudly.(The punishment will probably include non-stop viewing of Downton Abbey.)

5. Haidar’s assumption that the United States and Britain are on the same Mid-East page has never been true. Transatlantic differences have been a major factor in regional politics ever since FDR’s famous deal with Ibn Saud stuck a large American thumb in Churchill’s strategic eye. Things have got much worse of late. The Arab Spring” began when Washington withdrew support from long-established clients in the Middle East, and its failure is not the result of any “misreading” as much as it is of European support for favoured (read profitable) tyrants. That explains the seesaw process of democracy one day and mob/military rule the next. The Benghazi mob attack that killed the American Ambassador was clearly an MI 6 operation in revenge for the loss of Britain’s lucrative interests in Libya and the revelation of its long support for Gaddafi.

6. The Islamic State is essentially a British attempt to squelch the democratic potential of the Arab Spring and not, as Haidar seems to think, an ideological vehicle attractive to young Muslims. The streams of teenagers going to join IS from Western countries and the Russian Federation are drawn more by talk of parties, booze and sex than any desire for jihad. “Jihadi John,” the British face of televised IS murder, is reported to be an MI 6 operative ensconced in 5 star luxury. It is a mystery who the non-foreign IS fighters are; they could all be mercenaries.

7. To conclude, Haidar seems unaware that the whole fight against international terrorism is sham. There is incontrovertible evidence that Britain is the birth mother of modern international terrorism and that major NATO members are its godparents.

Schizophrenia at The Hindu

The front page of The Hindu today gives top billing to a story headlined “Britain’s MI6 helps India home in on Mehdi.” It tells of the arrest of Bengaluru-based ISIS supporter Mehdi Masroor Biswas after he was interviewed on Britain’s Channel 4 television.

Another story on page 8 directly contradicts the page one narrative; it headlines the claim by Indian intelligence agencies that “Mehdi was under surveillance for long.” They were waiting to see if he would link up with more active jihadis.

I think the reason for this odd and serious dissonance is a kind of editorial schizophrenia induced by pressure from MI6. It probably pits the pro-British former Editor-in-Chief of the paper, N. Ram (now chairing the corporate board), against his younger relatives who control the editorial side.

But why would MI6 want public credit for helping India?

To divert attention from the real reason for outing Mehdi, the need to forestall any of its jihadi agents in the country from falling into the Indian intelligence net.

To make sense of this scenario we have to look at a broader back story involving the ongoing reinvention of British imperialism amidst a global power shift.

That power shift involves four factors:

1. Strong pressure from the United States to check money laundering, Britain’s primary business since the decline of Empire;

2. Pakistan’s growing pressure on the terrorists who control the drug trade out of Afghanistan (the most important source of illicit funds flowing through the British money laundering system);

3. The threat of American shale oil production to the oil economy of the Mid-East where Britain has a dominant role as wealth manager cum security guarantor; and

4. The potential of the emerging India-United States strategic understanding to undermine British influence in the entire region.

The most overt British move to adjust to new realities is the agreement with Bahrain to open a permanent military base there, the first one East of Suez since Britain withdrew all forces from Asia four decades ago.

Perhaps more important is the under-the-radar initiative to have al Qaeda – which Britain has controlled since the Mujaheddin days in Afghanistan – open a new chapter in India. The need to out Mehdi probably became urgent because he would undoubtedly have been a magnet for new recruits in India.

Why open an al Qaeda chapter in India?

Because the country is shaping up as a major new market for opium and heroin, one in which British proxies will find it far easier to launder drug money than in Europe or North America.

As Prime Minister Modi noted in his radio address today, the drug trade is linked to the financing of terrorists.

That is not all.

Everywhere drug traffickers operate -- from African countries trapped in endless conflict to Latin American States plagued with endemic violence -- they undermine civil government and create social havoc.

Unless New Delhi moves to address this situation strategically we could all be in serious trouble.  

A Grand Strategy for India

A recent book review in The Hindu of “India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases” presented such a muddle of views on the topic that I did some research and made the frightening discovery that our leading lights in the field don’t know what they are talking about.

India's best and brightest seem to think that “Grand Strategy” is some form of intellectual soup into which they can toss anything they fancy.

Some of the scholars even seem unable to distinguish the strategic from the tactical: one is the pursuit of lasting interests and long term goals, the other of the short-term and the immediate.

 A Grand Strategy takes stock of history, makes an assessment of national experience, encapsulates all vital interests, and looks to the future. It reflects national character, defines the nature of the State, and is accepted as a common frame by all shades of political opinion in the country.

 Indian civilization is the result of a Grand Strategy established by the Saptarishis and pursued over millennia by the country’s intellectual elite.

It began with the Saptarishis assembling the sacred lore of all the tribes in the Vedas, which thus became a unifying object of common veneration. Intense discussion of the hidden meanings of the Vedas yielded the worldview of the Upanishads.

The consensus that emerged was that an immortal and changeless essence underlies the endless mutations of the Universe, holding it in order with the force of Truth (Satyam/Ritam/Dharmam).

As that essence exists in living things, our ancient Grand Strategists postulated that death is but a door to another life; they envisaged the individual soul, of the same substance as the Universal Soul (Paramatma), passing in a series of lives to the end of Creation. In that scheme of things tribal differences shrank into insignificance and allowed different groups to settle into interdependent castes.

 The Ramayana, authored by the low caste Valmiki and setting forth the ideal of a just King, Ramrajya, marked the next step in India’s ancient Grand Strategy. It promoted the evolution of caste federations into unitary kingdoms.

 The schema of the rishis foresaw society passing through cycles of corruption and virtue, and many millennia later, when the ideal of Ramrajya was trampled down in struggles for imperial power, the Mahabharata laid down the rules for the survival of the virtuous in a time of predominant evil.

Modern history covers the final phase of that age of predominant evil, with Mahatma Gandhi marking the turning of the tide with his opposition of racism in South Africa and colonial rule in India. With those he initiated the modern human rights revolution and the movement for national self-determination that transformed the world in the second half of the 20th Century.

 A Grand Strategy for India now must take up where Gandhi left off but our latter-day claimants to the role of rishis seem oblivious of the need for that continuity.

For instance, the Introduction to Grand Strategy for India: 2020 and Beyond, a book published in 2012 by the New Delhi based Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, makes no mention of Gandhi as it notes that India after independence had a role in world affairs disproportionate to its power. In fact, none of the 25 essayists in the book gives any indication of being aware of the traditional Grand Strategy that forged Indian civilization.

 The book reviewed in The Hindu does consider Gandhi, but wierdly. To quote the reviewer (Suranjan Das): “Siddharth Mallavarapu uncovers the Gandhian notion of grand strategy that proposes substitution of Western values with principles of truth, nonviolence and a decentralized polity that should convince other societies that India does not pose a threat.”

The broader background of Indian civilization is missing entirely from the IDSA book and makes a hunchbacked limping appearance in the other one (published by Rutledge). If the reviewer accurately reflects the views of the essayist (Swarna Rajagopalan), on the history of Indian Grand Strategy she relates our contemporary lack of a coherent world view to the “ancient Indian maxim that rulers were required to be driven by principles which were ‘context dependent’ and ‘not absolute in application’.”

Another essayist who looks to the past (Jayashree Vivekanandan) is equally whacky: she believes the Indian State’s “accommodative strategies” in meeting external and internal threats traces back to the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s policy as he expanded his domain.

The gaping omission in the IDSA book and the ludicrous theories in the other volume indicate a failure to make even the skimpiest historical connections, and it is scary that this disconnect extends to contemporary affairs.

 The IDSA book is, in fact, actively and massively misleading. In its Introduction, the editors (Krishnaappa Venkatshamy and Princy George) write that Europe’s role in our strategic thinking “has diminished in recent years … despite India’s strong relations with individual European countries such as Britain, France and Germany.”

The essayist on that matter (Dhruva Jaishankar), is described as urging “India’s strategic planners to recognise Europe’s potential as … a political partner with shared values, and leverage for building India’s relations with other countries, particularly China, Russia and the United States. Europe can also be a significant target for India’s multi-polar engagement strategy—one that does not bring with it the complications associated with India’s other bilateral relations, such as with the United States and China.”

 It is mind-boggling that anyone can think Indian relations with Europe are uncomplicated when we can look back on several nasty colonial encounters, more than a century of oppressive British rule, two European world wars, the cynical British manipulations that brought on Partition, decades of British-proxy Pakistan’s terrorist war on India and the European Union’s arrogant critiques of Indian policies on a whole range of issues!

None of the other writers in the book achieves quite that level of idiocy, but some come close, among them Manu Bhagavan who is noted in the Introduction as suggesting that the reform of the United Nations could lie in a return to Jawaharlal Nehru’s plan for “a global government to which all the world’s States would cede some of their sovereignty.”

 Many essays, especially those on Left Wing extremism and terrorism, civil-military affairs, and relations with neighboring countries, are not about strategy at all but tactics. Even the late lamented K. Subramanyan makes that confusion in noting that India in the first phase of independence had a Grand Strategy in Nonalignment and centrally planned development!

 These are not abstruse academic criticisms. If the best thinkers in the country on a whole range of critically important issues cannot tell the difference between strategy and tactics, it is small wonder that India is in such a discombobulated mess.

So, what should an Indian Grand Strategy involve?

 The groundwork has been laid in the Indian constitution; it is left to bring the directive principles to life and envisage a new role for India in world affairs. There must be four essential elements to that effort.

The first is to clear the cobwebs from our minds about industrialization. It is not progress. It is a deadly combination of false values, destructive policies and wasteful practices that is killing the planet’s life systems. Those eager to have India follow China as “workshop to the world” need to consider the pollution it will bring to land, air and water, and the consequent spiking of all degenerative diseases, especially cancer.

 Secondly, we need to be clear about the nature of international relations today. The world order has been intensely criminalized over the last seven decades because imperial European Powers have not given up their exploitative and oppressive policies but have merely taken to pretending that they no longer exist. Britain, primarily, has been responsible for building a global money laundering system and promoting every form of organized crime, including drug trafficking, terrorism and the illicit trade in arms.

 Thirdly, we have to be prepared for a wave of change over the next generation that will transform the world more radically than it was by the industrial revolution. The Internet, Worldwide Web and mobile telephone connectivity are only the thin end of the wedge: other new technologies will require us to reimagine manufacturing and trade. The age of carbon-based energy is over, and with it, the era of giant tankers, transcontinental pipelines and manufacturing for mass markets. The future belongs to off-grid renewable energy. With the capacity of small scale manufacturers to reach niche markets cost-effectively, the artisan can take on the factory and win; as 3 D printing matures a village craftsman can produce the same quality of product as the largest corporation.

Fourthly, the power structures of the industrial era are beginning to crumble. The old power elites cannot control the new information technologies without killing the creative power of their own societies and falling behind their democratic peers. Nor can they continue controlling the world through conflict if there is an effective effort to inform a global audience of their machinations. An Indian Grand Strategy must involve such an information effort, not through government propaganda but by seeking to promote a world order based on community-based networks. The goal must be peaceful transition to a prosperous world order protective of individual freedom and creativity.

The overall goal of ancient Indian Grand Strategy was unity in diversity.

Modern India must look not only for such a global dispensation but to the deeper unity captured by the term “global brain.”

System scientists say that the evolution of a supra consciousness is inevitable once global connectivity passes a certain as yet undetermined threshold of activity; it must be the overall aim of an Indian Grand Strategy to have it governed by our broadest ideals of Nara Narayana.

The Grim End of Creepy Crawly

I reproduce below a shocking story headlined "From stenography to journalism—Ashish Khetan" by an unnamed "Special Correspondent in The Hindu of 23 May. 

"While the rest of the crime reporters were busy taking down what the police or Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) was putting out in Mumbai, journalist Ashish Khetan formerly with Tehelka, says he struck out on his own to go beyond the official versions of “terrorists”and terror cases. His year-long investigation into three major cases of bomb blasts has exposed horrific truths about the way in which the ATS, the Maharashtra police and police from other states have functioned with impunity and virtually condemned and tortured 21 young men because they were Muslims.

"Khetan’s investigative journalism portal aptly named Gulail (or slingshot in English) has “ unearthed internal documents from more than half a dozen anti-terror agencies that show that the State has been knowingly prosecuting innocent Muslims for terror cases and keeping the evidence of their innocence from the courts.”

"At a press conference on Wednesday to present his investigation and screen a film with candid interviews of accused Muslim men, Mr Khetan also said he had sent a letter petition to the Bombay high court with nearly 400 pages of evidence in the form of official investigation and interrogation reports of the accused men and other documents which clearly indicate huge discrepancies. The petition said that his research into the July 11, 2006, train blasts, the Malegaon 2006 blasts and the Pune German Bakery blasts of February 2010 show that the ATS has deliberately created bogus evidence, extracted false confessions by the most inhuman torture, planted explosives in the houses of the young men and implicated innocent youth. In the name of internal security, the ATS and other agencies were misleading the courts, Khetan said.

"Senior police officials have been named by the young men in their interviews, where they speak of torture and abuse and pressure to turn approver for large sums of money. A senior police officer even expressed his helplessness and said it was important for them to find some accused since they were unable to crack the case. There are different versions of the same case notably Malegaon 2006 where the NIA has just filed a chargesheet. Seven of the nine men arrested earlier were released on bail in 2011.

"Khetan said he wasn’t out to prove anyone’s guilt but expose the farcical criminal investigation which also reflected deepset anti Muslim prejudice. What is serious is that one of these men Himayat Baig has been given the death sentence for the Pune German Bakery blasts when clearly police had found evidence of another man’s involvement. The case of Qateel Sheikh who died in a high security Pune prison just before he was to testify in a Delhi court is no longer a mystery going by what Khetan’s documents show. The ATS arrested Himayat Baig from Udgir and claimed he had carried out the German Bakery blast. However, a year later the Delhi police arrested Qatil Siddiqui and Interrogation Reports obtained by Khetan show he is linked to the Pune blast. These reports were not produced in the court which finally gave Baig the death sentence. Police then tweaked reports to show Sheikh’s involvement in another case.

"Presenting all the facts, Khetan has asked the high court to order an independent commission of inquiry into the conduct of the investigating officers, action against officers guilty of violations and relief for the victims of such operations."

My Own Creepy Crawly Update

As for my own experience of official overreach, my grievance filed with the Home Ministry in Delhi got a quick closure and I was instructed in an email to follow-up with the Chief Secretary, Goa. I sent an email to the Chief Secretary asking what I should do about the matter and nearly two months on, have yet to receive a reply.

However, my inquiry has energized the goon squad which seems, judging from its intrusions into my personal space, to be curious about my sexual inclinations. It's too creepy to go into the details, but in case they have any doubts after four years of surveillance and the latest experiments, I am straight and not a pedophile.

The need to clarify these matters probably arose because someone noticed I am celibate (my own experiment with Truth), and that I bought some elementary alphabet books for my ex-cleaning lady's illiterate 10-year old daughter. (My offer to get her a tutor was declined).

As for the fiasco of my cancelled trip to the World Social Forum in Tunis, Thomas Cook continues to be superbly inefficient and uncaring: they're still holding on to the refund for the travel. 

Of Diplomats and Journalists

Diplomats and journalists are tribes of professional communicators that have little in common.

Diplomats at their best seek to be influential while revealing as little as possible. Their statements are nuanced, often to the point of obscurity, their motivations secret, their intentions cloaked. They measure success by how little they reveal about the reality of the situations confronting them.

The best journalists seek influence by revealing as much as they can. Clarity of statement, transparency of motive, and openness of purpose are ideals worn on their sleeves. They measure success by the level of understanding they generate about any situation.  

I became aware of these stark differences as a journalist working for the United Nations, an organization run by diplomats. My bosses would murmur appreciatively as they read my drafts (of articles, reports, film scripts, speeches et al), compliment me on their clarity and elegance, and then edit them into near incomprehensible UNese.

The situation was fraught with tension, and eventually it led me to trade in the plush security of a career contract at the top rung of the UN's Professional cadre and take to the insecure life of a freelancer.

Not to waste the expertise I had as a UN insider, I moved down to the Press floor in the UN building and began issuing a weekly newsletter with the sizzling title International Documents Review. (It was in homage to I.F. Stone, the legendary journalist who ran a solo shop in Washington and consistently scooped the mainstream media during the Vietnam War era. When he came to speak at Columbia Journalism School I asked him how he did it, and his memorable reply was "I read the documents. A democratic government cannot function without writing things down. Everything you want to know is in public documents.)

All this is background to explain how it was that in November 1990, as Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait pushed the United Nations into its first post-Cold War crisis, I was at the Security Council stakeout, asking the Indian Ambassador why he had made such a strong statement against the American resolution pushing for war and then voted for it.

His reply was pure diplomatic silk. "The statement and the vote are two different things" he said, noting a nuance that I would not have perceived on my own.

The Ambassador was Chinmaya Gharekhan, and he has unreeled some more of that fine silk in a piece in The Hindu on Nonalignment 2.0.

In a piece that I would hazard to guess was requisitioned by The Hindu's new Editor, Siddharth Varadarajan (who happens to be one of the authors of Nonalignment 2.0), Ambassador Gharekhan seems at first glance to be strongly supportive of the study. 

"Rediscovery of non-alignment" reads the large headline, followed in smaller type by: "Nonalignment 2.0 is not without its flaws but on the whole, the document offers a comprehensive view of foreign policy, makes sensible suggestions and is lucid, readable and deserving of wide debate."

On closer examination, Ambassador Gharekhan's enthusiasm for the study turns into pointillist criticism, the equivalent of limpid sunlight in a Monet landscape that turns into thousands of little discrete blobs as the viewer draws near.

"Why did they have to choose 'nonalignment' as the title for their document?" he asks. "It is not as if Nonalignment 1.0 was a golden era for Indian diplomacy. Some of us are unlikely to forget that we did not receive support from a single fellow nonaligned country when China attacked us in 1962."

That is a diplomatic kick in the crotch for the basic argument of Nonalignment 2.0, that we need to keep strategic autonomy from both China and the United States. 

Of course, Ambassador Gharekhan would not put it that way. But then, he is not a journalist.

   

The Hindu, N. Ram and Wikileaks

NDTV Chairman Prannoy Roy’s patty-cake chat with Wikileaks honcho Julius Assange on 21 March was a weird and disconcerting experience. Assange, appearing via a satellite hook-up from Britain was his usual sepulchral film-negative self. Roy too appeared to be from another dimension, remote from Indian loyalties and concerns.
The 50-minute programme began on a strongly anti-American note: a videoclip from a tape produced by Wikileaks in June 2010, showing a United States helicopter gunship in Iraq attacking a band of men on a city street. NDTV edited out the chatter in the gunship preceding the attack that indicated confusion about the identity of the men, several of them armed with Ak-47s, and one carrying what looked like an RPG. (The people killed in the attack were all identified as insurgents except for two Reuters journalists, one of them carrying a camera with a telephoto lens that was mistaken for the RPG.)

Immediately after the clip, Roy observed that Assange was “under global attack.” The United States, which usually killed its enemies, considered him one; his native Australia had accused him of treason; Sweden had charged him with rape. Was he “shocked by the ferocity and the illegalities” of these attacks by “the West” which prided itself on the rule of law? Assange allowed that he was “disappointed” the United States was not living up to the “great traditions of Franklin and Madison,” but that was “not shocking.” There was “a burgeoning security state” centered on Washington and spreading “into all the Western countries, and there is a Western alliance that responds very aggressively.” The strong spin at the beginning continued throughout the interview in Roy’s presumption that Assange’s motives and operations were honourable and worthy, and thus opposition to him dishonourable and unworthy.
Roy reinforced Assange’s claim to be a “journalist” without so much as a hint about charges that he is an Intelligence operative. Wired (UK) reported in September 2009 that “in January 2007, John Young, a member of the Wikileaks advisory board” had quit. “accusing the group of being a CIA conduit. After the split, he published over 150 pages of emails sent by members of Wikileaks on cryptome.org.” The story also quoted another Wikileaks operative with the assumed name of Schmidt, who claimed that the group had “fed the speculation that it is CIA-funded” because there's “nothing better than half of the world thinking we are CIA. … As long as the right half believe this. It might encourage some people to submit material.” Assange personally is the recipient of the Sam Adams Award, presented annually by a group of retired CIA officials to an “intelligence professional who has taken a stand for integrity and ethics.” These are significant bits of information, necessary for an informed interpretation of the leaked American diplomatic cables.

Another critically important bit of information about Wikileaks appeared in a June 2010 story in The New Yorker. It recalled the time when Assange had designed the web site for his project and was looking for support to put it up. “Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. [The Tor nework is a system strucured to hide the origin and activities of Internet users, It is used by people who want high security for their operations.] Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

The importance of that paragraph lies in the revelation that Wikileaks might not be a global “whistleblowers” site as it is touted to be, but a showcase for hackers displaying stolen information. It raises huge questions about what exactly Assange is doing and why he is doing it.

Part 2

To understand what Assange is all about it is necessary to look at him as an individual and as a political phenomenon. His personal trajectory has been truly nightmarish. His mother left his father for another man when he was little, and then, after having borne the second man a son, took off with a third, her two sons in tow. To keep ahead of the family courts and law officers they moved constantly – 37 times by the time Assange was 16. By 18, he had a child of his own with a girl friend with whom he stayed in a squatter’s camp. Shortly after having his child, she went off with another man. The stress of the custody battle for his son is blamed for draining Assange’s brown hair of all colour. Given such conditions, it is not surprising that Assenge developed into an anti-establishment computer nerd. (Anyone who saw Angelina Jolie’s godawful teen movie Hackers will recognize him as a type.)

He first came onto law enforcement scanners in Australia by hacking into the mainframe of the Canadian telecom company Nortel. Although prosecuted for doing substantial damage, the judge let him go with a pat on the wrist, sure sign of a behind the scenes deal. He worked with the Australian Police after that, reportedly trying to capture on-line child pornographers. In college, from which he dropped out, he developed into a cryptographer, expert at unwrapping the elaborate cocoons of secret communications. It is possible he was recruited into adult Intelligence activities during this period, for his college did a lot of research for DARPA. Which national agency recruited him it is hard to say. It is also hard to say whether his later breakout into freelance Intelligence work reflects a real break with officialdom or is merely cover.

In 2006, when he was seeking support for Wikileaks, Assange wrote that his “primary targets” would be the “highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia,” but also expected “to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.” Evidently imbued with a romantic belief in a “social movement” to expose secrets, he hoped to “bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality, including the US administration.” Since then, his targets have expanded to Scientology and Sarah Palin (whose private Yahoo account was wikileaked).

The site also published details of technology used by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan to detect the deadly explosive devices used by opposition forces. As it became apparent that the mere revelation of secrets would not bring down his targets, Assange tried various other approaches, including auctioning the leaked (or stolen) material to pique public interest and raise money. The current modus operandi is to make exclusive deals with national organizations, filtering all material through a mainstream media sensibility. Thus, readers have been given only carefully edited versions of the 256,000 diplomatic cables sent to Wikileaks by Pfc. Bradley Manning of the United States Army. No one has yet studied how the originals differ from what has been reported. In the case of The Guardian in Britain, a blogger has noted that it has edited out details relating to MI-6 operatives and the British investments of billionaire oligarchs. There is a PhD to be had in piecing together an overall pattern in what has been published around the world.

Predictably, Assange at 38 is deep in the rabbit hole. According to published reports, Wikileaks is not so much an organization as a nebulous network, ostensibly with only eight paid editors and no support staff. It has no real centre of operations except for Assange himself. It is “based in Sweden” only because national law there protects Internet anonymity, and Assange makes phone calls from Belgium because monitoring them is illegal there. Key members of his core group are unknown to each other, and even in encrypted emails one presents himself only as “M” (the traditional cover letter used by the head of Britain’s MI-6). That hint of an official connection might actually be significant, for not only did Assange seek refuge in Britain when he came under pressure from other governments, he found it at the 600-acre Norfolk estate of Vaughan Smith, described by The Guardian as “a former army officer, journalist adventurer and rightwing libertarian.” A former Grenadier Guard (like his father before him), Smith reportedly “impersonated” a British Army officer to “bluff” an American military unit into letting him ride along and videotape frontline action during the 1991 war.

Part 3

Information about Assange’s shadowy credentials constitutes essential context if Indian readers are to know what to make of the leaked American cables. However, in all the voluminous coverage The Hindu has given to the cables, there has not been one word of caution about Assange, no consideration of his motivation or the worth of his activities. Prannoy Roy in his NDTV promotion of Assange also steered clear of anything that could show him in a negative light. In closing out their conversation, Roy asked Assange if he had any “heroes.” After noting Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, Assange modestly admitted: “Many people call me, for example, a hero, but I am a man and a human being, just like all of us.” In an excess of unctuous goodwill Roy responded: “You are a hero to many of us.” (Interestingly, The Hindu omitted that exchange from its “transcript” and substituted a bit of text about how Assange’s “Mom” was a “fighter.” Also erased from the The Hindu’s record was Assange’s call for the American Ambassador to resign if the cable about vote buying proved to be inaccurate. (Ambassador Mulford, a Bush appointee, has long gone from New Delhi.) The Hindu further determined that it was not necessary to reflect in its “transcript” Roy’s naïve question to Assange if it was “normal” for the Indian government and Opposition to have such diametrically opposed views of the cables. These image-saving efforts on behalf of Assange and Roy did not extend to Manmohan Singh; The Hindu headlined Assange’s unfair and inaccurate on-air allegation that the Prime Minister had been less than honest in responding to the cable about a Congress Party slush fund for vote-buying.


In the NDTV interview the theme of Assange as victim was unremitting. “Now, with so many countries hunting you down, where can Julian Assange live safely?” Roy asked. “Right now, it is not clear if there is any country that is safe,” Assange replied, but added that Egypt and Tunisia “because of the revolution” might be safe havens. India too, might be big enough to withstand Western pressure and provide safety. The Hindu, for some inscrutable reason, deleted the reference to India from its “transcript.”

All this raises questions about these major Indian media organizations that go well beyond the Wikileaks phenomenon. Consider, for instance, The Hindu’s sense of priorities. On 15 March, the day a front-page banner headline – REVEALED: THE INDIA CABLES FROM WIKILEAKS – announced its coup in gaining exclusive access to the stolen American diplomatic communications, only a single other matter merited mention on page one. It was a below-the-fold single column story headlined “Meltdown threat after hydrogen blast at Japanese nuclear plant.” The editorial and op-ed pages (10-11) were filled with Wikileaked items, as was most of page 17. This was not because of a dearth of important news. Matters relegated to the inside pages (14 to 17) included:

1. After the detection of 22 cases of radiation poisoning the Japanese authorities had ordered people “within a 12-mile evacuation zone” in Fukushima to stay indoors.

2. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had ordered a safety review of Indian nuclear plants.

3. The Supreme Court had set a four-week deadline for clarification of the misuse of NREGA funds meant to help the poorest Indians.

4. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee had announced the detection of tax evasion to the tune of Rs. One lakh crore.

5. The Indian Navy had captured 61 Somali pirates.

6. Maoists in Dantewada had killed three security personnel.

7. An Indian student had been raped and murdered in Australia.

8. Saudi troops had landed in Bahrain to suppress pro-democracy demonstrators.

9. Al Qaeda had issued a statement in Cairo calling for the removal of Qadhafi.

10. Libya had urged Chinese and Indian firms to take over oil production in the country from Western companies.

The news “revealed” by Wikileaks The Hindu considered more important than those stories (based on placement and space devoted to them) were the following:

1. In 2009 National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan told new American Ambassador Timothy Roemer that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a “great believer” in dialogue with Pakistan while others in the government were not (page one, top).

2. An account of the “stand-alone arrangement” The Hindu made with Wikileaks (page one, top, continued on edit page).

3. India was suspicious of Pakistan and wanted to restrict the information on 26/11 it provided to Islamabad (below fold, page one). A longer version of the same story appeared as the top op-ed item (page 11).

4. In 2005 India voted reluctantly against Iran at the IAEA to please the US (edit page top).

5. The World Bank representative in Nepal and the leader of the Maoists in the country had become ‘lunch pals’,” (page 11, mid-section). A longer story on the same page was headlined “In Nepal, ‘India’s Frankenstein monster’.” It dealt with cables going back to 2003 noting the differences of the US and Indian positions in Nepal.

6. The January 2006 cabinet reshuffle that saw Mani Shankar Aiyar give way to Murli Deora as the Petroleum Minister was a “pro-US tilt.”

7. After a radar system installed by India failed to detect LTTE aircraft before they attacked an airport in 2007, Sri Lanka asked the United States for technical assistance, which was given after a green light from New Delhi. (Page 17 top, 4-column headline)

8. India’s Iran policy was “designed for domestic consumption” and its “West Asia policy” was “hostage” to the “Muslim Vote;” in 2006 Ambassador Mulford described India’s policy towards Israel as “gutless” (Page 17, top and middle).

None of this is much of a revelation; in fact, most of the wikileaked information is passé. With two exceptions, none of the stories published since 15 March has offered anything sensational. The first exception was the allegation that a nonexistent aide to a close Gandhi family confidante had shown a nameless American Embassy staffer “two chests” of money for bribing Opposition Members of Parliament to support the government in the 2008 no-confidence motion (see item of March 17 below). The second item that rocked New Delhi was the revelation that BJP leader Arun Jaitley had told an American Embassy staffer that “Hindu nationalism” was merely an opportunistic ploy for his party. Both allegations were vehemently denied, but for a few days the political atmosphere in Delhi was poisonous with distrust. It will be a long time before Indian officialdom will feel at ease speaking frankly to American diplomats again.

Other than that, there is precious little noteworthy in the wikileaked material. So far, what The Hindu has downplayed is more interesting than its headlined themes. For instance, in N. Ram’s 15 March disquisition on the wide range of the Wikileaks revelations he mentioned a string of countries but not China, a topic that Assange in his NDTV appearance a week later flagged as potentially explosive in the Indian context. N. Ram is famously sympathetic to China, and it remains to be seen how his paper will play the matter.

Also significant was reporter P. Sainath's decision to bury in his story on Nepal (item 5 above), the reference to British policy. In a September 2006 cable sent by American Ambassador James Moriarty, he noted that the “Brits … seem convinced the Maoists will soon be coming into power and are trying to convince themselves that might not be so bad.” Reporting that he was “trying to push back here on some of this,” he wrote, “it would help if the [State] Department could have a serious, high-level discussion with the Brits on Nepal.” The US-UK policy gap is not confined to Maoists in Nepal, and it holds the key to interpreting the Wikileaks phenomenon.

Part 4

Julian Assange told NDTV’s Prannoy Roy during their 21st March chat that the “most serious issue in the cables” was “yet to be revealed.” He added, “That doesn't mean The Hindu is necessarily holding back what it thinks to be most important for Indians to the last ... the material from Pakistan, from China. It is likely to be of interest to the Indian population.” As of 3 April, there has been so sign of such “serious” revelations; The Hindu has carried no items at all on China, and there has been a strangely anodyne quality about its items on Pakistan.

In fact, some stories on Pakistan have downplayed newsworthy material. For instance, the issue of 19 March carried at the bottom of the Op-Ed page the quizzical headline “Pakistan backed militants to avoid being targeted?” The story, by P. Sainath, was about a 2008 Intelligence briefing for NATO representatives by an American analyst. He told them that despite impending economic disaster, “Pakistan is producing nuclear weapons at a faster rate than any other country in the world,” and that the government in Islamabad continued to provide “Intelligence and financial support” to the Taliban and al-Qaeda “to conduct attacks in Afghanistan against Afghan government, ISAF [the NATO-led force] and Indian targets.”

Sainath noted that the analyst “described FATA as ‘the command and control centre for al-Qaeda worldwide’,” but that despite “al-Qaeda’s presence in the FATA … it plays a surprisingly insignificant role in Afghanistan, where the numbers of foreign fighters remain relatively low.” Sainath did not explain that the acronym FATA stands for Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. He also left out a great deal of relevant detail about the situation in Afghanistan. To quote from the original cable, Lavoy “said a few hundred senior and mid-level trainers, planners, and operators reside there” [in the FATA], and although al-Qaida was “more disrupted than at any time since October 2001 … the organization is damaged, not broken.” He said “the international community cannot afford to let pressure off al-Qaida, because it has demonstrated an ability to reconstitute itself in the past, and could easily reverse-migrate back to Afghanistan if the Taliban were to regain control. Lavoy emphasized that the consequences of failing in Afghanistan and permitting al-Qaida to shift its center of gravity to Afghanistan would pose a threat to all nations inside their own borders.”

Lavoy “underlined that there are more significant factors than al-Qaida that contribute to the bleak security situation.” Given the ineffectiveness of the Karzai government , the Taliban were manipulating “the grievances of disgruntled, disenfranchised tribes to win over anti-government recruits.” He urged the international community to address several “inter-dependent regional challenges.” They included defeating al-Qaida in FATA, improving the security situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, Baluchistan, and the FATA; stabilizing Pakistan's tattered economy; and improving the India-Pakistan relationship. A key problem was that the Taliban had “become more militarily effective” and was “demonstrating more sophisticated infantry, communications, and command and control techniques.” Their marksmanship was “more precise, and their explosives more lethal than in previous years.” For those reasons, he noted, “violent attacks initiated by insurgents rose 40 percent over the past year” (ie 2008-2009). Asked about “the source of expertise and financing” that allowed “the Taliban to become militarily proficient, especially if the number of al-Qaida senior and mid-level personnel is low,” Lavoy seems to have been evasive. He only noted “that the opium economy is the number one domestic funding source for Pakistan-oriented and Afghan Taliban organizations” and that the insurgents had “proven themselves highly adaptable, and many fighters' veteran status contributed to opposing forces' improved abilities.” Also a problem was that ISAF resources for training the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP) were seriously deficient. Even if those were remedied, “efforts would be insufficient if Pakistan remains a safe haven for insurgents.”

Lavoy “commented on two causes of instability in western Pakistan that could cause Pakistan to completely lose control of its Pashtun territories over the next few years. Traditional Pashtun tribal authority has broken down since the anti-Soviet jihad period,” and was “no longer capable of resolving social harmony at the community level.” Pakistan had “promulgated a policy of neglect of Pashtun areas” and still lacked “a strategy to deal holistically with social problems of illiteracy, unemployment, and disaffected youth.” That situation played to the advantage of insurgent and extremist groups. Although Pakistan now identified “both al-Qaida and the Taliban as existential threats,” government institutions still supported the Taliban in two key ways. They permitted the “Quetta Taliban Shura (the Taliban leadership council) to operate unfettered in Baluchistan province” and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) provided “intelligence and financial support to insurgent groups - especially the Jalaluddin Haqqani network out of Miram Shah, North Waziristan.”

Questioned about “the rationality of Pakistan's support for the Taliban,” Lavoy explained it in terms of three Pakistani perceptions. First, that “the Taliban will prevail in the long term, at least in the Pashtun belt most proximate to the Pakistani border.” Second, that India was “its number one threat” and finally, that “if militant groups were not attacking in Afghanistan, they would seek out Pakistani targets.” Lavoy said that after the storming of Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in July 2007, the Pakistani government had “tried to sever ties with insurgent groups that its government institutions had cultivated over three decades. When militants sought al-Qaida support and launched a wave of attacks against Pakistani government and security personnel,” the government “realized it had lost control of these insurgent groups.” It then “rapidly approached the various militant groups to reach domestic non-aggression deals. He claimed that the Pakistani Army's ill-conceived operations in the FATA's Bajaur Agency were “directed exclusively against insurgent groups that refused to cooperate; the Haqqani network remained “untouched” and continued “a policy of cross-border attacks.” The Pakistani Army had no counter-insurgency strategy in Bajaur. It required “the population to flee,” attacked the remaining insurgents and then used “air power to raze all structures associated with militants (tunnels, homes, infrastructure, etc.).”

Another story about Pakistan  had the headline “MEA added to confusion over 2008 hoax call to Zardari.” Written by Nirupama Subramaniam, it appeared at the bottom of the Op-Ed page on 23 March. It dealt with a seemingly bizarre episode during the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, when President Zardari of Pakistan took a call from a person he thought was Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee. The caller threatened military action. When the American Embassy in Delhi contacted the Ministry of External Affairs to ask about the call, an official who had prepared speaking points for use by Mukherjee as a contingency measure, jumped to the conclusion that they had been used. The confusion was soon set right and had no impact on the course of events. What is intriguing about The Hindu  headline is that it did not capture the main point of interest in the story that followed. The hoax caller clearly intended to provoke an India-Pakistan war. In fact, Pakistan ordered aircraft into the air as a precautionary measure. A year later, DAWN, the Pakistani newspaper, revealed that the caller was none other than Omar Saeed Shaikh, the man released from an Indian prison in 2004 in exchange for the hostages on an Indian Airlines flight hijacked from Nepal; he went on to murder Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. DAWN said he made the call on a mobile phone from his Karachi prison cell. All this is in the story but the headline chose to focus on a bit of inconsequential confusion in the MEA.

Is there a method in The Hindu's crazy coverage of the wikileaked cables? That will be the topic of the next and final section of this long comment.

Part 5

This final section of the commentary on how two major Indian media organizations – The Hindu and NDTV –dealt with Wikileaks sums up and puts into meaningful political context the previous sections and the post of 17 March.

Wikileaks is a shadowy operation that presents itself as a “whistleblower” website. It claims to have published some 1.2 million secret documents since going on-line in 2006. (That is over 600 documents per day, which Assange asserts are authentic -- a patently untenable claim.) The published material has ranged from the correspondence of the Scientology Church and Sarah Palin’s email, to hundreds of thousands of stolen American diplomatic cables. The cables supposedly came from a disaffected American soldier posted in Iraq who had access to a computer containing the US State Department’s archives. They have been released since the fall of 2010, initially through several Western newspapers, each of which edited out what they thought their readers did not need to know; since 15 March 2011, The Hindu has done that with some 5000 cables pertaining to India. As previous parts of this blog have pointed out, the matters it has sensationalized and those it has downplayed or omitted to mention at all, are incomprehensible from an Indian political perspective.

So far, the cables have not revealed anything of earthshaking importance. However, they have been a major embarrassment to the United States, for they are the daily dross of reporting from diplomatic posts around the world, and mention the names of numerous foreign sources. Those sources too have been embarrassed. Coverage of the cables in Indian media generally, and especially on NDTV and The Hindu has been emphatically anti-American. This skewed presentation has turned embarrassment to national injury.

 By showing Indian officials kowtowing to the United States, it has made it difficult, if not impossible for the Manmohan Singh government to pursue the strategic relationship between the two countries. The rejection of the American fighter aircraft on offer for the Indian Air Force on technical grounds can be seen as a symptomatic of this situation; the broader political and strategic benefits of buying American had to be foregone because no Indian official wanted to be accused of bending to pressure from Washington.

The major beneficiaries of this outcome are China and Europe, the former because India is weakened by not having a strong military relationship with the US, and the latter, because its companies will now be the beneficiaries of the $10 billion Indian contract.

Within Europe, the major strategic beneficiary will be Britain, which had the most to lose from a strengthening Delhi-Washington connection. That is because Britain created Pakistan in 1947 to be a proxy against India; a strong partnership between India and the US would make that arrangement untenable. The China-Britain nexus is also behind Wikileaks. As noted in an earlier section of this blog, the site got its initial supply of secret documents from material stolen by Chinese hackers using the Tor high-security network, and Assange’s career as an Intelligence operative suggests a close connection with MI-6.

In assessing The Hindu’s presentation of the stolen American cables purveyed by Wikileaks that background is important. It throws into high relief the deeply antinational nature of the coverage and raises serious questions about  N. Ram, the Editor in Chief of the newspaper.