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APRIL 2004 |
IN THIS ISSUE
MAIN FEATURE The E-Waste Hazard : IT’s Dirty Secret By Deepak Goyal COMMENTARY The Empire Backfires : A Year after Iraq By Jonathan Schell INNOVATION Simputers on Sale : IT for the Masses A Siliconeer Report Publisher’s Note • Infotech India • The Politics of Outsourcing Indo-Pak Relations: Peace Extends to Internet • Finance: Flexible Retirement Plans Crime and Punishment: NCM Minorities Poll • ICC’s New Sunnyvale Center Auto Review: 2004 Nissan Pathfinder Armada • Bollywood Tamil Cinema • Recipe: Paneer Korma Malai • Horoscope |
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Publisher's Note
Time and again we have joined in the joyous chorus of India’s information technology revolution. However, we have also cast a wider net in these pages, exploring the implications of technology in a land as sharply riven socially and economically as South Asia. It’s well and good that India’s IT knowledge industry is galloping along, but one must also ask if there are any costs. The U.S., with its older marriage with technology, is a good place to take a look. Upwards of 30 million computers are dumped here, and the toxic pollution risks are considerable. The U.S. is trying to pass the buck to the Third World, India included. Early awareness and proper safeguards can guarantee India the benefits of the IT bonanza without too heavy an environmental price. MAIN FEATURE  The E-Waste Hazard IT’s Dirty Secret - By Deepak Goyal Mountains of e-waste — discarded parts of computers, mobile phones and other consumer electronics equipment — are posing a new, silent environmental hazard in India. Computer “recycling” may be good business, but the health hazards it leaves in its wake are anything but. Deepak Goyal reports. Talk about IT and India and what visions does the mind conjure? It’s probably scenes of hardworking, upwardly mobile knowledge workers, working away in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad, powering India’s phenomenal engine of IT business that is making Western countries sit up and take notice. Or if you are really current on the news, you may think of call centers of Goregaon near the Indian couple New Delhi, where droves of starry-eyed young men and women man call centers fielding customer queries from North America and Britain. But the thought of IT surely doesn’t bring up images of, say, Delhi’s Turkman Gate, where discarded computers are dissected and cathode-ray tubes are broken in dingy workplaces. Or Shastri Park, where computers are dismantled, and CRTs recharged. Unbeknownst to most Indians who are thrilled at the giant strides India has taken, a silent, hazardous menace, though small now, is beginning to grow—the toxic threat from junked electronics goods. The good news is that the problem of waste from dumped computers is relatively minor right now domestically—it’s only 1 percent of the total waste generated in India. The problem is the traffic of junk computers from the West, especially the U.S. However, that may begin to change soon. India now has nearly 8 million PCs, of which 2 million have an Intel 486 or older chip. A good number of them, then, are about to join the scrap heap. According to a report of Delhi-based environmental watchdog group Toxics Link, Delhi-based scrap dealers dismantle around 15,000 computers each year. It’s not just computers. “The rapid proliferation of computers and consumer electronics has resulted in a global mountain of hi-tech trash,” writes Kishore Wankhede in his report for Toxics Link. “This trash consist of lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC), Brominated Flamer Retardants (BFRs) and dozens of other toxic and potentially hazardous compounds. The fruits of our hi-tech revolution are pure poison, if not properly managed at the end of their productive life.” E-waste comes from electronic goods ranging from PCs to household appliances like TVs, refrigerators, cellular phones, etc. The real problem in India is the way e-waste is recycled, the bulk of it imported, often illegally by well-organized business rings, in poorly monitored workplaces with virtually no environmental checks. Computer recycling involves employing people to strip down the computers and extract parts that can be used again in machines to be sold on the high street. The rest is then burned or dumped, both of which are potentially highly hazardous to the environment. “When you burn things like PVC-covered copper wire, you have emissions of very toxic chemicals like dioxins, which get released into the local environment,” Ravi Agraval of Toxics Link told the BBC. The unregulated recycling process is also very harmful to the health of those employed to do it, environmental activists say.. This kind of work involves exposure to a number of toxic chemicals both as part of the recycling process and within the computers themselves.
He said a health survey showed recyclers regularly suffered from respiratory diseases and skin rashes. “It’s difficult to say when you’re in that state of poverty what really affects what, but certainly they are people on the edge, and any such exposure can’t be doing them any good.” Computer manufacturers, for obvious business reasons, have preferred to keep a hands-off policy. Yet one way out of this mess could be to change that. That’s exactly what Europe is doing, laying down rules which involve getting the manufacturers involved in the solution. In Europe, manufacturers will have to eliminate harmful substances inside the machines by 2006. Some companies have already been offering to take back and recycle the computers themselves. “Today, consumers are approaching us to take (the computer) in, but in the future with the new legislation, they will be able to dispose of it at the local municipality waste site,” Klaus Hieronymi, from Hewlett Packard’s European Environmental Program, told the BBC. He said that Hewlett Packard was also attempting to reduce the levels of cadmium and mercury in its products in preparation for the legislation, which comes into force on Jan. 1, 2006. “Despite the pace of advancements in consumer electronics, product designers have largely ignored the public health threats and environmental consequences of their products,” says Toxics Link in its Web site. “Even though e-waste is still in an infant state in India. the rapid proliferation of computers and consumer electronics has resulted in a global mountain of hi-tech trash. “It constitutes a small percentage (less than 1 per cent) of the waste generated in India. Recycling, or disposing off, e-waste does, however, represent a problem, as it contains components rich in many hazardous waste substances. “Realizing the hazardous nature of e-waste, some countries have outlawed its trade. Several developed and developing countries have come up with a well organized process to manage their e-waste. The process is methodical and leaves no space for loopholes.” That is really the only way to go if India is to enjoy the fruits of the IT revolution without paying a steep price in terms of public health costs. Interested readers can find more information about Toxics Links at their Web site at www.toxicslink.org.
- Deepak Goyal is a frelance writer. He lives in Kolkata. |TOP| INFOTECH INDIA A day after India’s historic win over Pakistan in the ODI series, cellular phone users across the country were bombarded with messages in Hindi which read, “Khelenge Ab Lambi Baari, Sourav, Sachin Aur Atal Behari” (Skipper Ganguly, Tendulkar and Vajpayee will now play a long innings). In an apparent bid to project the party’s newfound secular face, another message followed soon, which named Mohammad Kaif and Irfan Pathan in place of Tendulkar and Ganguly. However, unlike at the time of India’s first win at Karachi, the party did not directly associate itself with the messages and chose to identify the sender as “We Indians.” While asserting that the party did not intend to draw political mileage out of the victory, BJP spokesman Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi described the win as a “milestone” in the “peace journey” initiated by Vajpayee and said it has “strengthened the feel good factor” further. The Bangalore-based firms have bagged a Rs. 900 million banking solution deal from public sector Vijaya Bank, in which Wipro will work on end-to-end implementation and integration of Infosys’ Finacle banking solution, besides providing telebanking and anti-money laundering solutions. “We compete in the morning and network in the afternoon,” Wipro chairman Azim Premji said of rival Infosys, with whom it has already implemented core banking projects with Union Bank of India and Oriental Bank of Commerce. Vijaya Bank is the third customer for whom the two IT firms are jointly implementing a core banking solution in the country and expect to continue the relationship both at home and abroad. “We are very fierce competitors and do it in a humble way; we do it in an ethical way and we are proud of it,” Infosys chief mentor N R Narayana Murthy said, adding that he used Wipro computers and lighting products at his office. Premji, however, said there are markets like Africa where Infosys operates and where joining hands is difficult and ruled out partnerships in the BPO space between Wipro Spectramind and Progeon, the BPO unit of Infosys. ABL Bio’s founder-director K.O. Isaac told a press meet that both the companies had signed an agreement which envisaged the takeover either by ABL or by another investor nominated by ABL under a structured deal. ABL would be responsible for piloting a restructuring plan to make Shanta Marine turn around, he said, adding that the agreement also envisaged enhancing the product portfolio and bringing additional investors through strategic partnership. Shantha Marine Biotechnologies was a joint venture floated by ABL and Shanta Biotechnics, Hyderabad, for production of betacarotene products and is at present involved in 75 brands for the Indian market alone. Isaac said Shantha Marine was also in discussions with Samudra Technologies, U.S.,, for introduction of new technologies and also for a strategic partnership. The company would invest around Rs. 1.15 billion for setting up a second development facility in Chennai, R. Chandrasekaran, managing director and executive director of the company, told reporters in Chennai March 29. Other plans on the cards include expansion of the facility in Pune and setting up an office in Bangalore, he said, adding the company plans to hire at least 4,000 new IT professionals this year. He said the company hoped to have an overseas development centre in China by the end of this year. The project was slightly delayed due to some legal issues. Chandrasekaran said the company had a turnover of $380 million in 2003, a 60 percent increase over the previous year. The turnover this year was projected to touch $520 million, he added. The contract, valued at Rs 190 million, is for supply, installation, commissioning and after sales service of 700 sets of SPV water pumping systems for the Punjab Energy Development Agency, a BHEL release said. This is the single largest order for solar photovoltaics won by the BHEL, against stiff competition from leading players in the field, it said. BHEL will supply and install the systems, totaling to 1.26 MW of solar power, during the next few months, the release said. The SPV water pumping system consists of a 1,800 Wp solar photovoltaic array which is directly connected to a 2 HP DC surface pump. During sunshine hours, the PV array converts sunlight to electricity and provides this power to run the pump. The pump will be used for providing drinking water as well as for irrigation purposes by individual farmers, it noted. The indigenously built sophisticated Akash missiles were test-flown from separate mobile launchers at about 3:55 p.m. and 3:57 p.m. respectively. With a range of 25 km, Akash is one of the five missiles currently under various stages of development by the Defense Research and Development Organization. The DRDO is developing medium-range anti-aircraft missile Akash and the Rajendra Radar to build a reliable air defense shield with the help of two weapon system, sources said. The state-of-the-art radar can keep track of 64 aircraft simultaneously with various ranges. The 650 kg missile Akash is capable of carrying 50 kg payload and uses an integrated two-stage ramjet propulsion technology. The test sortie, a year after the first prototype took off to the skies, was flown by Sqn Ldr Sapra and Sqn Ldr Baldev Singh March 26. “The aircraft was successfully flown over the Bangalore skies for more than 30 minutes,” HAL chairman N.R. Mohanty said in Bangalore March 27. The flight assumes significance with the visit of the Chinese Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan to the HAL complex in Bangalore March 27, where the IJT has been designed and developed. The aircraft, scheduled to fly first in January, was put off after the ejection seat was fired accidentally and HAL had to source the seat components from the Russian manufacturer. IJT is a tandem seat sub-sonic trainer, powered by a French Larzac turbo engine with advance avionics to prepare a fighter pilot for stage two flying training. IJT, designed and produced in a record 22 months, had its maiden test flight on March 7 last year and is expected to replace the ageing Kiran basic jet trainers of the Indian Air Force starting from the next two years. The IAF, which needs over 200 such aircraft, has already placed orders for 16 IJTs to form its Surya Kiran aerobatic team that would be ready by 2005-06. Indigenously developed by the Defense Research and Development Organization under the integrated guided missile development program, the short-range missile was test-fired from a mobile launcher at 11.02 a.m., the sources said. The missile was successfully test-fired from the ITR at 2:52 p.m. March 25. The three-meter-long missile having a diameter of 200 cm can fly at supersonic speed and has a sensitive radar altimeter and height lock-loop control on board which helps it to skim over the sea at very low altitude. The solid fuel-propelled missile has a triple battlefield role for the army, air force and navy and has a range of nine km with the capacity to carry a payload of 15 kg, sources said. “This was the largest acquisition by any Indian company in Korea and I look forward to increase Tata group’s presence in the country,” Tata Motors chairman Ratan Tata said. With the formal acquisition, DWCV, Korea’s second-largest truck maker, becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Motors which aims to become one of the major truck manufacturers of the world. Tata also received the newly allotted shares of DWCV, which has 25 percent market share, from official receiver Kwang Ok Chae. DWCV will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Motors with Kwang Ok Chae as president and representative director of the company once the court receivership is terminated. Daewoo’s commercial vehicles’ Gunsan plant was put on the block following the collapse of Daewoo Motors in 2002. BSNL also decided to reduce STD charges between two circles (Inter-circle) by 25 percent for distance beyond 200 km to Rs 3.60 per minute from Rs 4.80 for its fixed line customers. The reduced tariffs across various categories will be effective from April 10, 2004. “For our fixed and mobile subscribers, the ISD rates have been reduced by average 25 percent as we have decided to route our ISD calls through VSNL till we sign agreements with international carriers,” BSNL chairman and managing director V.P. Sinha told reporters here. The ISD rate reduction has been made possible as VSNL has agreed to match the lowest settlement charges of Rs. 1.69 per minute to U.S. and U.K., from Rs. 2.20 quoted earlier. According to the new tariffs, calls to the U.S. and Canada, which earlier cost Rs 9.60 per minute, would now cost Rs 7.20 per minute, translating into a cut of 25 per cent. The focus would be on the Indian PC market as research showed that as the domestic IT market grew, PC sales were expected to touch three million units during the last fiscal, a company release said in New Delhi. The research was conducted by the Manufacturers Association of Information Technology and Indian Market Research Bureau. The facility, weighing 110 metric tons, would make the plant radiation proof and prevent radiation totally. It would smell immediately even a slight leakage and defuse the radiation, he told reporters here.
COMMENTARY
 The Empire Backfires A Year after Iraq - By Jonathan Schell This article was originally published in the March 29, 2004 issue of The Nation. Why did the United States, standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty warehouse of Iraq? Jonathan Schell offers a scathing critique to mark a year since the U.S. attacked Iraq. Instead, 530 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, have died; some $149 billion has been expended; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and water are sometime things; America’s former well-wishers, the Shiites, are impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and Iraq as a whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century. And yet all this is only part of the cost of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. To weigh the full cost, one must look not just at the war itself but away from it, at the progress of the larger policy it served, at things that have been done elsewhere-some far from Iraq or deep in the past-and, perhaps above all, at things that have been left undone. Nuclear Fingerprints. While American troops were dying in Baghdad and Falluja and Samarra, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman, was busy making centrifuge parts in Malaysia and selling them to Libya and Iran and possibly other countries. The centrifuges are used for producing bomb-grade uranium. Tahir’s project was part of a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father” of the Pakistani atomic bomb. This particular father stole most of the makings of his nuclear offspring from companies in Europe, where he worked during the 1980s. In the 1990s, the thief became a middleman — a fence — immensely enriching himself in the process. In fairness to Khan, we should add that almost everyone who has been involved in developing atomic bombs since 1945 has been either a thief or a borrower. Stalin purloined a bomb design from the United States, courtesy of the German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project. China got help from Russia until the Sino-Soviet split put an end to it. Pakistan got secret help from China in the early 1980s. And now it turns out that Khan, among many, many other Pakistanis, almost certainly including the highest members of the government, has been helping Libya, Iran, North Korea and probably others obtain the bomb. That’s apparently how Chinese designs-some still in Chinese-were found in Libya when its quixotic leader, Muammar Qaddafi, recently agreed to surrender his country’s nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The rest of the designs were in English. Were Klaus Fuchs’s fingerprints on them? Only figuratively, because they were “copies of copies of copies,” an official said. But such is the nature of proliferation. It is mainly a transfer of information from one mind to another. Copying is all there is to it. Sometimes, a bit of hardware needs to be transferred, which is where Tahir came in. Indeed, at least seven countries are already known to have been involved in the Pakistani effort, which Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, called a “Wal-Mart” of nuclear technology and an American official called “one-stop shopping” for nuclear weapons. Khan even printed a brochure with his picture on it listing all the components of nuclear weapons that bomb-hungry customers could buy from him. “What Pakistan has done,” the expert on nuclear proliferation George Perkovich, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has rightly said, “is the most threatening activity of nuclear proliferation in history. It’s impossible to overstate how damaging this is.” Another word for this process of copying would be globalization. Proliferation is merely globalization of weapons of mass destruction. The kinship of the two is illustrated by other details of Tahir’s story. The Sri Lankan first wanted to build his centrifuges in Turkey, but then decided that Malaysia had certain advantages. It had recently been seeking to make itself into a convenient place for Muslims from all over the world to do high-tech business. Controls were lax, as befits an export platform. “It’s easy, quick, efficient. Do your business and disappear fast, in and out,” Karim Raslan, a Malaysian columnist and social commentator, recently told Alan Sipress of the Washington Post. Probably that was why extreme Islamist organizations, including Al Qaeda operatives, had often chosen to meet there. Global terrorism is a kind of globalization, too. The linkup of such terrorism and the world market for nuclear weapons is a specter that haunts the world of the twenty-first century. The War and Its Aims. But aren’t we supposed to be talking about the Iraq war on this anniversary of its launch? We are, but wars have aims, and the declared aim of this one was to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, the president articulated the threat he would soon carry out in Iraq: “The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Later, he said we didn’t want the next warning to be “a mushroom cloud.” Indeed, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly ruled out every other justification for the war. Asked about the other reasons, he said, “The president has not linked authority to go to war to any of those elements.” When Senator John Kerry explained his vote for the resolution authorizing the war he cited the Powell testimony. Thus not only Bush but also the man likely to be his Democratic challenger in this year’s election justified war solely in the name of nonproliferation. Proliferation, however, is not, as the president seemed to think, just a rogue state or two seeking weapons of mass destruction; it is the entire half-century-long process of globalization that stretches from Klaus Fuchs’s espionage to Tahir’s nuclear arms bazaar and beyond. The war was a failure in its own terms because weapons of mass destruction were absent in Iraq; the war-policy failed because they were present and spreading in Pakistan. For Bush’s warning of a mushroom cloud over an American city, though false with respect to Iraq, was indisputably well-founded in regard to Pakistan’s nuclear one-stop-shopping: The next warning stemming from this kind of failure could indeed be a mushroom cloud. The questions that now cry out to be answered are why did the United States, standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride (supplied, we now know, to Libya) and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty warehouse of Iraq? What sort of nonproliferation policy could lead to actions like these? How did the Bush Administration, in the name of protecting the country from nuclear danger, wind up leaving the country wide open to nuclear danger? In answering these questions, it would be reassuring, in a way, to report that the basic facts were discovered only after the war, but the truth is otherwise. In the case of Iraq, it’s now abundantly clear that some combination of deception, self-deception and outright fraud (the exact proportions of each are still under investigation) led to the manufacture of a gross and avoidable falsehood. In the months before the war, most of the governments of the world strenuously urged the United States not to go to war on the basis of the flimsy and unconvincing evidence it was offering. In the case of Pakistan, the question of how much the administration knew before the war has scarcely been asked, yet we know that the most serious breach-the proliferation to North Korea-was reported and publicized before the war. It’s important to recall the chronology of the Korean aspect of Pakistan’s proliferation. In January 2003 Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that Pakistan had given North Korea extensive help with its nuclear program, including its launch of a uranium enrichment process. In return, North Korea was sending guided missiles to Pakistan. In June 2002, Hersh revealed, the CIA had sent the White House a report on these developments. On October 3, 2002, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs James Kelly confronted the North Koreans with the CIA information, and, according to Kelly, North Korea’s First Vice Foreign Minister, Kang Suk Ju, startled him by responding, “Of course we have a nuclear program.” (Since then, the North Koreans have unconvincingly denied the existence of the uranium enrichment program.) Bush of course had already named the Pyongyang government as a member of the “axis of evil.” It had long been the policy of the United States that nuclearization of North Korea was intolerable. However, the administration said nothing of the North Korean events to the Congress or the public. North Korea, which now had openly embarked on nuclear armament, and was even threatening to use nuclear weapons, was more dangerous than Saddam’s Iraq. Why tackle the lesser problem in Iraq, the members of Congress would have had to ask themselves, while ignoring the greater in North Korea? On October 10, a week after the Kelly visit, the House of Representatives passed the Iraq resolution, and the next day the Senate followed suit. Only five days later, on October 16, did Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, reveal what was happening in North Korea. In short, from June 2002, when the CIA delivered its report to the White House, until October 16-the period in which the nation’s decision to go to war in Iraq was made-the administration knowingly withheld the news about Korea and its Pakistan connection from the public. Even after the vote, Secretary of State Colin Powell strangely insisted that the North Korean situation was “not a crisis” but only “a difficulty.” Nevertheless, he extracted a pledge from Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, that the nuclear technology shipments to North Korea would stop. (They did not.) In March, information was circulating that both Pakistan and North Korea were helping Iran to develop atomic weapons. (The North Korean and Iranian crises are of course still brewing.) In sum, the glaring contradiction between the policy of “regime change” for already-disarmed Iraq and regime-support for proliferating Pakistan was not a postwar discovery; it was fully visible before the war. The Nation enjoys no access to intelligence files, yet in an article arguing the case against the war, this author was able to comment that an “objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of menace” would put “Pakistan first,” North Korea second, Iran third, and Iraq only fourth-and to note the curiosity that “the Bush administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse order, placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it befriends and coddles, nowhere on the list.” Was nonproliferation, then, as irrelevant to the administration’s aims in Iraq as catching terrorists? Or was protecting the nation and the world against weapons of mass destruction merely deployed as a smokescreen to conceal other purposes? And if so, what were they? A New Leviathan. The answers seem to lie in the larger architecture of the Bush foreign policy, or Bush Doctrine. Its aim, which many have properly called imperial, is to establish lasting American hegemony over the entire globe, and its ultimate means is to overthrow regimes of which the United States disapproves, pre-emptively if necessary. The Bush Doctrine indeed represents more than a revolution in American policy; if successful, it would amount to an overturn of the existing international order. In the new, imperial order, the United States would be first among nations, and force would be first among its means of domination. Other, weaker nations would be invited to take their place in shifting coalitions to support goals of America’s choosing. The United States would be so strong, the president has suggested, that other countries would simply drop out of the business of military competition, “thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” Much as, in the early modern period, when nation-states were being born, absolutist kings, the masters of overwhelming military force within their countries, in effect said, “There is now a new thing called a nation; a nation must be orderly; we kings, we sovereigns, will assert a monopoly over the use of force, and thus supply that order,” so now the United States seemed to be saying, “There now is a thing called globalization; the global sphere must be orderly; we, the sole superpower, will monopolize force throughout the globe, and thus supply international order.” And so, even as the Bush Administration proclaimed US military superiority, it pulled the country out of the world’s major peaceful initiatives to deal with global problems-withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol to check global warming and from the International Criminal Court, and sabotaging a protocol that would have given teeth to the biological weapons convention. When the Security Council would not agree to American decisions on war and peace, it became “irrelevant”; when NATO allies balked, they became “old Europe.” Admittedly, these existing international treaties and institutions were not a full-fledged cooperative system; rather, they were promising foundations for such a system. In any case, the administration wanted none of it. Richard Perle, who until recently served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, seemed to speak for the administration in an article he wrote for the London Guardian the day after the Iraq war was launched. He wrote, “The chatterbox on the Hudson [sic] will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.” In this larger plan to establish American hegemony, the Iraq war had an indispensable role. If the world was to be orderly, then proliferation must be stopped; if force was the solution to proliferation, then pre-emption was necessary (to avoid that mushroom cloud); if pre-emption was necessary, then regime change was necessary (so the offending government could never build the banned weapons again); and if all this was necessary, then Iraq was the one country in the world where it all could be demonstrated. Neither North Korea nor Iran offered an opportunity to teach these lessons-the first because it was capable of responding with a major war, even nuclear war, and the second because even the administration could see that US invasion would be met with fierce popular resistance. It’s thus no accident that the peril of weapons of mass destruction was the sole justification in the two legal documents by which the administration sought to legitimize the war-HJR 114 and Security Council Resolution 1441. Nor is it an accident that the proliferation threat played the same role in the domestic political campaign for the war —by forging the supposed link between the “war on terror” and nuclear danger. In short, absent the new idea that proliferation was best stopped by pre-emptive use of force, the new American empire would have been unsalable, to the American people or to Congress. Iraq was the foundation stone of the bid for global empire. The reliance on force over cooperation that was writ large in the imperial plan was also writ small in the occupation of Iraq. How else to understand the astonishing failure to make any preparation for the political, military, policing and even technical challenges that would face American forces? If a problem, large or small, had no military solution, this Administration seemed incapable of even seeing it. The United States was as blind to the politics of Iraq as it was to the politics of the world. Thus we don’t have to suppose that the Bush officials were indifferent to the spectacular dangers that Khan’s network posed to the safety of the United States and the world or that the Iraqi resistance would pose to American forces. We only have to suppose that they were simply unable to recognize facts they had failed to acknowledge in their overarching vision of a new imperial order. In both cases, ideology trumped reality. The same pattern is manifest on an even larger scale. Just now, the peoples of the world are embarked, some willingly and some not, on an arduous, wrenching, perilous, mind-exhaustingly complicated process of learning how to live as one indivisibly connected species on our one small, endangered planet. Seen in a certain light, the administration’s imperial bid, if successful, would amount to a kind of planetary coup d’état, in which the world’s dominant power takes charge of this process by virtue of its almost freakishly superior military strength. Seen in another, less dramatic light, the American imperial solution has interposed a huge, unnecessary roadblock between the world and the Himalayan mountain range of urgent tasks that it must accomplish no matter who is in charge: saving the planet from overheating; inventing a humane, just, orderly, democratic, accountable global economy; redressing mounting global inequality and poverty; responding to human rights emergencies, including genocide; and, of course, stopping proliferation as well as rolling back the existing arsenals of nuclear arms. None of these exigencies can be met as long as the world and its greatest power are engaged in a wrestling match over how to proceed. Does the world want to indict and prosecute crimes against humanity? First, it must decide whether the International Criminal Court will do the job or entrust it to unprosecutable American forces. Do we want to reverse global warming, and head off the extinction of the one-third of the world’s species that, according to a report published in Nature magazine, are at risk in the next fifty years? First, the world’s largest polluter has to be drawn into the global talks. Do we want to save the world from weapons of mass destruction? First, we have to decide whether we want to do it together peacefully or permit the world’s only superpower to attempt it by force of arms. No wonder, then, that the administration, as reported by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in The Nation, has mounted an assault on the scientific findings that confirm these dangers to the world [see “The Junk Science of George W. Bush,” March 8, The Nation]. The United States’ destructive hyperactivity in Iraq cannot be disentangled from its neglect of global warming. Here, too, ideology is the enemy of fact, and empire is the nemesis of progress. If the engine of a train suddenly goes off the rails, a wreck ensues. Such is the war in Iraq, now one year old. At the same time, the train’s journey forward is canceled. Such is the current paralysis of the international community. Only when the engine is back on the tracks and starts in the right direction can either disaster be overcome. Only then will everyone be able to even begin the return to the world’s unfinished business.
|TOP| COMMENTARY
The Politics of Outsourcing – By Chander Mehra In an election year, outsourcing has become a political hot potato in the U.S. However, there is no magic bullet, writes Chandra Mehra. The outsourcing flap has now moved to the political centre stage in the United States and will not go away any time soon, at least not till the November election. If anything, it is getting louder and shriller, because as the election campaign heats up, there isn’t a more explosive or exploitable word than “jobs.” And unfortunately for the developing world, particularly India, it has become the catch-all caricature for a giant vacuum that is sucking jobs out of the United States. Of course, no one is really paying attention to the fact that high-end service jobs in the United States constitute just a fraction of the country’s 138 million payroll jobs. Or that India has gotten just a fraction of that fraction — less than 500,000 jobs so far. The figure for Africa is much lower. Helped by some needless self-flagellation by the Indian media, which chronicled and glorified the shift of every 100-200 jobs as if manna had descended on the country, Indians have quickly arrived at a scenario where gullible Americans are ready to stick pins and needles into little brown voodoo dolls. Indian officials who once moaned about how negative the U.S. media was about India are suddenly wincing at all the rah-rah stories about a booming market, surging middle-class, and the plenitude of jobs. It has taken Infosys’ Narayana Murthy to remind rapturous India that with less than 2 percent share of the global IT market, India is still a toddler, not a superpower; that potential should not be mistaken for performance. Too late. India is set to reap the harvest of its bragging. The knives are already out here. The number of states weighing laws to stop government outsourcing has gone up from five to a dozen. This isn’t such a big deal given how little India gets out of US government outsourcing. But more worrying is the fact that major political players are taking a broader stand against outsourcing in the heat of electoral battle. Some voters are bound to hold them to their promise later on. And this goes for even John Kerry, the Democratic frontrunner who till recently was a votary of free trade. In fact, I have a wonderful example to show how complex and many-layered this outsourcing issue is. A good Indian-American friend who is in the outsourcing business and is based in the US, joined the Kerry bandwagon some time back. At a fund-raiser he asked Kerry for his views on outsourcing, expressing his own fears that at the rate at which the US was losing jobs (not just service jobs and necessarily just to India as in being projected), his (my friend’s) US-born children might face a difficult future. It’s true; many Americans of Indian origin are worried about outsourcing because they too are losing jobs in America. At a congressional hearing on the subject in February one of the victims the anti-outsourcing brigade produced was a tech worker of Indian origin. Anyway, Kerry’s response at that time was outsourcing in a globalizing world was inevitable. Since then, he has joined the anti-outsourcing brigade. He has moved legislation that requires mandatory identification of outsourced locations. (The move has invited sniggers and spoofs asking what else the Kerry law might force call centers to disclose. “Hello! I’m Pappoo Yadav, son of Mangal Yadav, age 24, BA pass, single, no halitosis. How can I help you?”). Now Kerry gone one step ahead and called companies and CEOs supporting outsourcing “Benedict Arnolds,’ a reference to a traitor during the American War of Independence. The whole issue has become embroiled in electoral politics. Not to be outdone by the Kerry campaign, Mary Edwards, wife of Democratic nominee John Edwards, has been going around talking about how when she called a helpline to have her cable television hooked up, she found she was talking to someone in India. A Dean supporter popped up in Michigan to recount his story about how when he called to fix some hardware problem on his computer, the call landed in India. So it’s an open season on India. And don’t expect it to end soon. Yet if only fuming Americans would stop to reflect, they would realize that there are no easy answers to the understandable anguish and concern at the loss of well-paying jobs. They only need to look at their manufacturing industry. A few weeks back, Levi’s closed its last manufacturing unit in the United States. If it had kept the plant going paying its American workers $ 15 an hour and benefits, it would be selling its jeans at $80 a pair. Would Mr Average Joe buy it? Nope. He will head for Wal-Mart to pick up his $12-a-pair jeans, Made in Anywhere-but-USA, where they pay the locals (Chinese, Indians or Thai) what seems like slave wages to Americans but puts food on the table. Service jobs too work pretty much like that, my friend suggested, including mid-level and high-end jobs. The trouble with Mr Average Joe was that he came out of college and made $100,000-plus on his first programming job when he was in his 20s, when a more realistic annual salary for the job was $50,000. America can keep its jobs, but will Americans pay the price if the work is all done in the US? Would a “Everything Made in America” store survive against a Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club or Costco? But you can’t go around saying that to the Average Joe who has just lost his $100,000 job and is behind on the mortgage for his over-priced house and over-sized car. Especially not when politicians are fanning the flames. So for now, my friend has a suggestion: Lie low. This too shall pass. - Chander Mehra is a veteran Indian journalist and author of several books. |TOP| REPORT
Peace Extends to Internet By Siddharth Srivastava The thaw in Indo-Pak ties has extended to the Internet, writes Siddharth Srivastava, who looks back at the recent, bitter virtual warfare on cyberspace. For many in India, Internet is one abiding indicator of the way India and Pakistan relations are progressing. For most part of the history of interactions between the two neighbors, the virtual forces (since they came into existence in the late nineties) in the two countries have been ranged at opposite ends. They take th |
