The Little Magazine,Security

Security

AMARTYA SEN ASHIS NANDY C. UDAY BHASKAR DIPANKAR BHATTACHARYA GADDAR GEORGE FERNANDES GULZAR HAYAT MAHMOOD I.A. REHMAN JAYADEVA UYANGODA JAYA JAITLY JAYANTA MAHAPATRA JOY GOSWAMI KAMALA DAS KANAK MANI DIXIT KEKI N. DARUWALLA K.P.S. GILL K. SATCHIDANANDAN KUMAR VIKAL MALOY KRISHNA DHAR MARTHA NUSSBAUM M.S. SWAMINATHAN PRAKASH SINGH RASHID HAIDER SANJAYA BARU SANKAR SEN SANTOSH RANA SHIBRAM CHAKRABORTY SHRILAL SHUKLA VOLUME VII: ISSUE 3&4 TEMSULA AO VARAVARA RAO V.P. M ALIK Dear Reader

Don’t know what it says about ourselves, but every time we do an issue on security, we put a Madonna with a gun on the cover. The TERROR issue had the yet uncelebrated Banksy’s raffish stencil art, for instance, featuring Mona Lisa in overdrive with an RPG launcher. This issue’s cover is more sobering. The Madonna and child are from a village in Doda, in Kashmir. After too many villagers — including her husband — were killed by terrorists, the village formed a civil militia of its own. She is one of its number, prepared to hold off attacks by trained guerrillas bearing modern military weapons, armed only with a rifle of First World War vintage, and hindered by the small distraction of the child slung at her back.

In conflict zones throughout our region, people caught between the security forces, government and insurgents have to make difficult choices for their own safety. But this is only at the bleeding edge of our security problem. Terrorism and insurgency dominate the headlines, crowding out more endemic human security problems which affect the majority of people in this region. A long history of poverty, aggravated by the caste system, reduces or denies access to education, nutrition, healthcare and democratic freedoms. And now, progress is creating new categories of losers — economic and developmental refugees left behind in the race to privatise and globalise rapidly.

In this issue, we have tried to look at security in all its avatars, from the point of view of practitioners of various disciplines. Our contributors make strange bedfellows, but they speak in eerily similar voices. Don’t be surprised if you find an army general or a police chief saying roughly the same thing as a Naxalite, an international academic, a tribal poet, a global activist, an urban author or a Dalit balladeer. In a period of our history obsessed with security, when people are, paradoxically, increasingly insecure, it is reassuring to see that decision-makers and other arbiters of our future largely agree on what needs to be done. It only remains to find the political will and the consensus to actually do it.

Among the host of friends, advisers, hand-holders and secret agents at large without whom TLM would not be what it is, for this issue we are particularly grateful to Rajendra Yadav, A.S. Panneerselvan, Shahidul Alam, Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr, M.K. Dhar, Abhijit Bose, Kumar Rana, Suhrid Bhaumik and Pailla Sravan

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ESSAYS 58 Insecurity complex Terrorism is a grave and enduring condition in India 6 Poverty, war and peace requiring well-planned solutions, says K.P.S. Gill: The roots of human insecurity and violence emergency responses are miserably inadequate must be sought in an integrated view of social, cultural, historical and economic factors, argues 64 Bird’s eye view Amartya Sen, and not in simplistic theories of Intelligence Bureau veteran Maloy Krishna Dhar civilizational clash or plain inequity provides a ready reckoner of India’s million mutinies and the faultlines in which they took root 17 The Evergreen Revolution M.S. Swaminathan looks forward to a policy shift 70 No peace without war from the food security of South Asia’s aggregate Exasperated with the never-ending Indo-Pak peace population to the nutrition security of the process, Ajai Sahni proposes that the only way to individual solve the Kashmir problem is to contain Pakistan

24 The clash within 76 Sri Lanka’s crisis The ‘clash of civilizations’ is a Gandhian clash With both warring parties disregarding the right to within the self, says Martha Nussbaum, between life, only international intervention can save the the urge to dominate and defile the other and a citizens of Sri Lanka, says Jayadeva Uyangoda willingness to live respectfully 79 Necklace of insecurity 36 Terror, counter-terror, self-destruction Pointing to the success of the India-Nepal border Examining justifications of terror post-9/11, arrangement, Kanak Mani Dixit argues for the Ashis Nandy finds both the killers who struck at opening up of South Asia’s borders New York and the regimes that claim moral superiority over them are in search of a Satan 84 Letter from jail Imprisoned Bangladeshi professor A. Al Mamun 44 Life gets cheaper muses on personal and national insecurities Human rights in Pakistan have been so severely undermined by the courts and legislatures that, 88 A people’s police in its 60th year, the country’s citizens cannot The Indian police force is still a colonial tool of the count on even the right to life, says I.A. Rehman political masters and is bound to create Gujarats and Nandigrams, says Prakash Singh, ex-chief of 48 There’s an elephant in the room the BSF and principal activist for police reforms George Fernandes and Jaya Jaitly deplore the Indian elite’s worrying refusal to acknowledge 92 Legalised anarchy the reality of China’s ambitions in the region The widely hated Armed Forces Special Powers Act has to go before there can be lasting peace in the 53 Crisis manager, not housekeeper Northeast, says Sanjoy Hazarika Using the army for internal security can be harmful, apart from being a poor substitute for 96 The crime of association good governance, the decommunalisation of the The arrest and continued detention of Dr Binayak polity and a revamp of our intelligence system, Sen suggests that it is now a crime against the state writes former Army Chief General V.P. Malik to even know a Maoist, writes Anand Grover

2 the little magazine volume VII issue 3&4 POETRY

JAYANTA MAHAPATRA

Photograph by BIJOY CHOWDHURY

A wound opens somewhere

It is May and the story goes on unfinished with the sun’s merciless heat like a conqueror’s cry

The beggar woman whose sadness still shows through tired bones will soon be gone from my familiar street corner

In this place I call home my shadow is the only part of myself which doesn’t feel the silence

Here in the street when a car door opens a wound also opens somewhere

It is not easy to take one’s grief elsewhere with the tyranny of awareness all around

Like a hunted exile is the story that cannot see where its feet is taking it

The stage is empty but the chains clink wherever the watchers move in the darkness

The woman who simply wants to be left alone will have to harvest the seas in the end

No one knows what the end is but the story pushing each of us into the opening we haven’t found

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