|
It is universally accepted
that the end of the Cold War has eroded superpower tensions and decreased
inter-State conflicts in the international system. But, it is further accepted
that this erosion of inter-State conflicts is restricted to the developed
world. The absence of the Cold War certitude of a bipolar world has had
a decompression effect and released long-dormant animosities: this has
heightened regional instabilities, which characterises the Third World
configuration of nations. It has also deepened the subsisting crisis of
sub-national identities, which is an offshoot of the decolonization process.
In theory, religion and language are important constituents of the civilizational
inheritance of nations. They serve to bind their populations through a
shared sense of history. But they can also heighten latent antagonisms,
especially if they encapsulate basic aspirations for greater economic and
political power. Today, ethnic resurgence and religious fundamentalism
represent the zeitgeist. In fact: “The ghosts of various forms of
nationalism and tribalism are reawakening and ethnic, national and religious
conflicts are breaking out.”1
That conflicts are more usually motivated now by emerged sub-nationalism,
apart from cultural and religious factors, and that the focus of national
insecurity has shifted from external to internal security is no longer
disputed. Further, the conviction is growing that the study of international
security, premised on the State, realpolitik and capitalism,
is inadequate to explain the growth of injustice and violence in the Post-Cold
War world. Indeed, current threats to nation-states arise, not from tensions
and instabilities between them, but from conflicts inside and within their
confines. Indeed, “the major conflicts since the end of the cold war have
had a domestic character. All the major armed conflicts in 1993 were of
an intra-state nature”.2
In India, intra-state conflicts largely arise from differences stemming
from ethnic and sectarian identities, rather than class struggles envisioned
under the Marxist paradigm. The Telengana and Naxalite movements are obvious
exceptions to this general rule. Their genesis could be traced to the “patterns
of power and domination that arise in rural society and the injustice and
exploitation that are associated with the unequal distribution of land
and other productive assets”.3 One might note further that current threats
to national security in India largely arise from non-military causes like
cross-border movements of populations; ethno-political, socio-economic,
and communal-religious politics; terrorism, with its seminal linkages to
money-laundering operations, and drugs/arms smuggling; environmental degradation,
spawning its related problems of deforestation and desertification; internal
migration; chaotic urbanization; and so on. These non-military threats
embody the newer dimensions of national insecurity. Their roots lie in
the polity and need to be investigated further.
So much is clear. The liberalization and globalization policies currently
being pursued by India unleashed enormous economic and social forces that
have greatly heightened expectations in the people. Their growing impatience
with delays in improving the quality of their lives lends a new urgency
to dealing with these newer sources of insecurity. Otherwise, impatience
would promote frustrations and lead on to violence. “Military tools, for
all their technical sophistication, are exceedingly
crude in relation to many socio- political objectives.
They are well-suited to sweeping tasks like the destruction or disruption
of existing structures, or the control of peoples, but they are much less
useful for the fine-tuning of voluntaristic exchange relations where neither
conquest nor destruction is desired”.4 Consequently, the military instrumentality
is of limited utility to resolve the newer threats to insecurity, although
it might be required to quell its violent manifestations. Hence any solution
premised on ‘exchange relations’ would require the State to ‘fine-tune’
its socio-political transactions by non-military
means.
The question now arises
whether these newer sources of insecurity should be delimited? Otherwise,
their ambit would become so hugely over-extended as to confuse their recognition
and identifying the remedial measures to counter them. Exemplifying this
over-extension of national security threats are beliefs that “global security
must be broadened from its traditional focus on the
security of States to include the security of people and the planet”.5
The
rhetorical question has also been asked: “Security for whom?” to broad
base the definition of security. But over-stretching the definition of
security creates insuperable difficulties in recognizing and countering
these newer security threats with any immediacy or adequacy. Defining them
should be tempered therefore with pragmatic understanding of what can be
remedied by the State and what must remain in the domain of society.
This is also necessary because the power of Third World States to remedy
the multi-faceted challenges to national security is fast diminishing.
It is not axiomatic that democracies are better equipped to “meet the challenge
of pressures for religious/ethnic autonomy since legitimate aspirations
and needs can be accommodated within the constitutional framework of the
State through political processes. Democratic States, especially in the
Third World, are what might be termed ‘soft states’ and are also vulnerable
to centrifugal forces when the latter espouse violent activity and militancy”.6
India qualifies eminently for the status of a ‘soft State’. It has obvious
vulnerabilities in dealing with religious/ethnic
strife arising within its multi-communal and multi-ethnic society. The
weak and indecisive character of its governments in recent years is painfully
apparent. It is also apparent that divisive coalition politics would characterise
Indian polity in the foreseeable future. Its capacity to grapple with these
newer threats to national security would be limited. Compounding these
difficulties is an incontrovertible fact: “The administration was converted
into the instrument of serving partisan political ends. Therefore, civil
strife increased, challenge to the motives of those in authority was legion,
and the machinery of non-official conciliation and harmonization went into
hibernation. The cost was quite heavy in terms of the emotional integrative
processes….”7
These difficulties are compounded by the constraints broadly distinguishing
intra-State conflicts in the Third World. They are aggravated by: “… the
collapse of State institutions, especially the police and judiciary, with
resulting paralysis of governance, a breakdown of law and order, and general
banditry and chaos.”8 The unfolding of scandals revealing massive corruption
within the Indian administration has highlighted the ruthless exploitation
of public office by politicians and senior bureaucrats for selfish political
and personal ends. The chasm between precept and practice has widened over
the years. This has seriously eroded the credibility of the government.
The resulting disillusionment and alienation of the people with the State,
and its moral authority has eroded its ability to resolve civil strife
and undertake the systemic reforms needed to grapple with these new threats
to Indian Security.
Further, this alienation of the people from the State has obvious implications
for the stability and cohesion of India. Violent dissent against the State
can be triggered on the slightest pretext, but public cooperation for
implementing remedial policies is difficult to obtain. There is some concern
that the on-going economic reforms would lead to a further marginalization
of the poor, and “give rise to social unrest and conflicts when identities
such as caste, community will be the most powerful rallying points for
the people”.9 Apropos, the IMF has adopted a new strategy to promote good
governance on the premise that public corruption vitiates programme implementation,
project execution, dissuades foreign direct investment and, in general,
dilutes the development effort. It, therefore, seeks the commitment of
States to wholesome principles like adhering to the rule of law, improving
the efficiency and accountability of their public sector and
addressing the menace of public corruption. In effect the IMF has made
good governance a non-financial conditionally for providing financial
assistance in future.
Newer Sources Of Insecurity:
An Overview
The newer sources of insecurity
in India can be identified now. We shall ignore the external threats emanating
from Pakistan and China in their conventional and nuclear dimensions. But
transnational factors aggravating internal threats would be noticed. Limitations
of space would only permit the causes underlying these security threats
to be briefly touched upon.
Decay of Political
Parties
This phenomenon has been
linked with the unraveling of the monolithic Congress Party. It had dominated
the Indian political scene after Independence. It was in the forefront
of the freedom struggle, and included its tallest political leaders. Its
ascendancy under Nehru’s leadership was inevitable and it remained virtually
unassailable for the first fifteen years after Independence. India’s
traumatic defeat in the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 shattered the illusion
of Nehru’s Congress’s indestructibility. But the event, which truly destroyed
its historic image, was imposition of the Emergency by Indira Gandhi in
1975, transparently to perpetuate her continuance in office after the Allahabad
High Court found her guilty of electoral malpractice. The spirit of the
Indian Constitution, if not its precise letter, was subverted in this process.
The wave of repression which followed has etched an indelible
furrow in the Indian psyche.
It took another two decades for the Congress party to reach its present
state of disarray. But the roots of its denouement are traceable to the
Emergency. It also established certain practices and traditions that have
undermined the Indian political system. These are the
notions that political leaders are above the law; that elections within
parties could be ‘managed’ to sustain the leadership in office; and that
the party’s basic ambition was the attainment of power, untrammeled by
“any other social activity or reforming ideology”.10 These developments
within the Congress party are of extraordinary importance to Indian polity
because other political parties have defined their position within the
political spectrum in relation to the Congress. Several rival political
parties are splinters of the dominant Congress party. Others have differentiated
their position by stressing casteist, religious, linguistic and regional
particularities. Indeed, some part of the struggle in the Indian political
system is for seizing the centrist space vacated by the Congress party
“over the last two decades as it went from a mass party to a centrally-controlled
organization under Indira Gandhi to a collection of warlords under Narasimha
Rao”.11 That situation continues at present.
Ironically the empirical evidence reveals that non-Congress governments
have also centralized power in the same manner as the Congress on achieving
office. Power has been utilized by them also for no higher purpose than
the acquisition of privilege, patronage and self-aggrandizement. This has
heightened the disillusionment of the people with and their alienation
from, all political parties. An apocalyptic judgement holds that: “politics
in India has become an instrument to exercise power and use public resources
for class, group and personal advancement. The road to political legitimacy
is through ballot. After winning the elections, the capitalist classes,
landlords and rich peasants, politico-bureaucratic decision-makers use
their political power or political linkages for cornering public resources
for their advancement”.12 In this process, the historical pluralism inherent
in Indian society, deriving from its all-inclusive synthesis of caste,
community and religion has steadily diminished over the years. This augurs
ill for the continued unity and stability of India.
Moreover, the Indian federal structure has been exploited by political
parties to serve their parochial interest by carving out smaller administrative
units-states, Union Territories, Autonomous Hill Districts and so on. This
has largely been pursued to serve personal ambition, and not on the basis
of administrative principles. The economic and political viability of these
new units was never considered; hence they are helplessly dependent on
Central largesse for survival. The empirical evidence reveals that demands
for such administrative units are conceded after an intervening phase of
State violence and bloodshed. The manner in which Uttarakhand was recently
conceded is instructive, because it could be the precursor of more such
demands. This entire spectacle only delineates the decay of India’s political
parties and their inabili |
