The fabric of belonging Had the national flag which the BJP wants to unfurl in Srinagar also been

dipped by them to honour the memory of the hundred young Indians who were shot dead in the valley last year, Kashmir would be a very different place. Jammu and Kashmir is a part of India but the people of Kashmir can be forgiven for believing their country has forsaken them. Throughout the summer of their most recent discontent, when a hundred young men and women lost their lives in police firing, leaders from the ruling and opposition parties acted as if nothing untoward had happened. Six months earlier, the mere threat of violence in Hyderabad led the Union Home Minister to declare the government had agreed to the formation of a separate state for Telangana. In Rajasthan, the blockade of national highways by agitating Gujjars produced an instant offer of dialogue and negotiation. But in Kashmir, the corpses kept piling up while the government, the Opposition (with some honourable exceptions) and civil society in the rest of India reacted with the kind of detachment reserved for death and destruction in faraway lands like Darfur and Iraq. The interlocuters The fact that the public mood in the valley began to soften slightly only after an all-party delegation visited Srinagar and condoled with some of the victims' families underlined something quite unpleasant about ourselves. That the indifference of mainland India to the suffering of the ordinary Kashmiri is as much a factor in the alienation of the State as the politics of separatism and the violence of extremist groups operating with the tacit and sometimes overt backing of the Pakistani military. With characteristic indecisiveness, however, the Manmohan Singh government failed swiftly to capitalise on that initiative. When a group of interlocutors was finally appointed with a fairly openended mandate to listen, talk and report back, the mood in Kashmir had once again begun to harden. The fact that Dileep Padgaonkar, Radha Kumar and M.M. Ansari have still managed to make some headway in their interactions is more a result of their own personal commitment to changing the terms of New Delhi's engagement with the valley than with the attitude of the Centre and of Political India, which continue to send mixed signals. One day, the Union Home Secretary tells reporters the government is prepared to pare down the presence of the security forces in Kashmir, the next day this statement is bluntly contradicted by the Defence Minister. The Prime Minister and Union Home Minister speak of amending the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act while the Army Chief announces publicly that he will never accept this. In the Machchil fake encounter case, the same general declares that his soldiers who are accused of kidnapping and killing three young Kashmiri men can never get justice in Kashmir, as if the State is not a part of India. Only the Army, he said, will be allowed to investigate the matter. Of course, in the Pathribal fake encounter of 2000 where the Army has taken the Central Bureau of Investigation all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent its officers from standing trial for murder the Army has not seen fit to even proceed against them under its own authority. Surely such a cavalier attitude to justice ought not to be tolerated in an integral part of India? The Government of India rightly protested when Beijing began treating Kashmir -born or Kashmirdomiciled Indians differently from the rest while issuing visas for travel to China. But the same government does not mind treating Kashmiri Indians differently when it comes to issuing passports for them to travel. A Srinagar-born colleague of mine whose family left Kashmir to live in Delhi as part of the forced migration of Pandits from the valley in the 1990s was recently told by the Passport Office that she had to provide additional documentation that other Indians are not required to do in order to obtain a passport. As for Kashmiris applying for Indian passports in Srinagar, a recent documentary film by Ashvin Kumar, Inshallah Football, documents the heartbreaking experience they have to endure before the country which so emotionally claims them as its own will allow them to travel abroad. Hoisting the flag

As the Centre's three interlocutors plough a lonely furrow through the infertile and even hostile soil of distrust and alienation, patiently listening to and cataloguing popular grievances, the Bharatiya Janata Party wants to rekindle a sense of estrangement by staging a provocative and high profile yatra to Srinagar in order to hoist the Indian flag at Lal Chowk in the heart of the city's commercial centre on January 26. There is nothing patriotic or noble about the BJP's plans and intentions. Instead of a reassuring voyage of solidarity and empathy aimed at reassuring the people of the State that the party will fight for the sacred values of truth, justice and inclusiveness which the flag embodies, the party is planning an expedition based on the flawed belief that meaningless symbolism is all that is required to win hearts and minds and cement Kashmir's status as a part of India. If a sense of national belonging can be instilled and solidified by the mere hoisting of a flag, 60 years of official ceremonies in Srinagar ought to have ended the sense of alienation that is writ large over the valley. Even if the BJP goes ahead with their mindless yatra, it will not alter the realities on the ground one bit and would actually make the situation worse. Whatever we may say or do or wish, surely Kashmir will be an integral part of India in a meaningful sense only when the residents of Srinagar themselves throng to Lal Chowk and hoist the tri-colour themselves. The challenge for the Indian polity is to create the conditions for that to happen one day, however difficult that may seem today. But the BJP's proposed flaghoisting is not just an exercise in naivette or cynicism. It is the product of a mindset that considers Kashmir to be terra nullius, an empty landscape to be coveted and possessed rather than a land with a people and soul who acceded to India in 1947 on the basis of a covenant which must be respected in full measure and who have as much right to a life with dignity as those elsewhere in the country do. A politician can drape himself in the national flag but it is the texture of his politics which will determine whether he truly cares for the nation and its peoples or not. Today, the Congress politician and businessman Naveen Jindal is known not for fighting a landmark case over the right of ordinary citizens to fly the flag but for his endorsement of the obscurantist tradition of kha panchayats. p Ministers and officials will preside over flag hoisting ceremonies on Republic Day throughout India even as their policies and actions in the preceding year have bled the hallowed earth on which they stand dry. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and the people of India know this only too well. If the BJP really wants to do something for the country, let them take their yatra to Karnataka. There is a large plot of land in that State which the party's chief minister signed over to his relatives. Let the process of safeguarding this country from those who are undermining its foundations begin by planting the national flag there.

Way forward in India-Pakistan relation manishankar aiyer Seven steps towards achieving an uninterrupted and uninterruptible' dialogue. Fifteen years ago, in a book called Pakistan Papers, largely comprising a long despatch I wrote in my last days as Consul-General of India in Karachi, which I was surprisingly permitted by the government to publish as repr esenting my personal views, I had first suggested a process of uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue as the only way forward for our two countries. My suggestion had no takers then. It has no takers now. Yet, I see no alternative to structuring su ch a dialogue if we really are to effect a systemic transformation of the relationship. There is also the other argument, growing stronger in India by the day, and possibly among the younger generation in Pakistan, that we have lived in simmering hostility for the last six decades and can do so indefinitely, best to let matters simmer while we get on with other things instead of engaging in fruitless exchange. I belong to that minority that thinks there are three compelling reasons why India should pro-actively engage with Pakistan. First, for the domestic reason that a tension -free relationship with Pakistan would help us consolidate our nationhood, the bonding adhesive of which is secularism. Second, for the regional reason that regional terrorism can be effectively tackled only in cooperation with Pakistan and not in confrontation with it. Third, for the international reason that India will not be able to play its due role in international affairs so long as it is dragged down by its quarrels with Pakistan . Equally, I believe it is in Pakistan's interest to seek accommodation with India for three counterpart reasons. First, the Indian bogey has harmed rather than helped consolidate the nationhood of Pakistan. Second, Pakistan is unable to become a full -fledged democracy and a sustained fast-growing economy owing to the disproportionate role assigned to alleged Indian hostility in the national affairs of the country. And, third, on the international stage, Pakistan is one of the biggest countries in the world and instead of being the front-line in someone else's war perhaps deserves to come into its own as the frontline state in the pursuit of its own interests. So, what is the way forward from today's impasse? I do not think the impact on the Indian mind of 26/11 is fully comprehended in Pakistan, even as I do not think Indians are sufficiently aware of the extent to which Pakistanis are concerned about terrorism generated from their soil, whoever the target might be, India, the West or Pakistan itself. Should the Pakistan government assist the Indian government in this manner to return to the negotiating table, then the first task would be to consolidate the gains of the 13 year old Composite Dialogue. Irrespective of whether progress on the back-channel is acknowledged or not, the official position of the two governments has grown so much closer to each other's than ever before that even by returning to the front table and taking up each component of the Composite Dialogue, including, above all, issues related to Jammu & Kashmir, we could dramatically alter the atmosphere in which to pursue the outstanding matters. In such a changed atmosphere, it would be essential to immediately move to the next phase of what I hope and pray will be an uninterrupted and unin terruptible dialogue. Let me place before you, in outline, what I envisage as the essential elements to be structured into an uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue:

One, the venue must be such that neither India nor Pakistan can forestall the dialogue from taking place. Following the example of the supervision of the armistice in Korea at Panmunjom for more than half a century, such a venue might best be the Wagah-Attari border, where the table is laid across the border, so that the Pakistan delegation does not have to leave Pakistan to attend the dialogue and the Indians do not have to leave India to attend. Two, as in the case of the talks at the Hotel Majestic in Paris which brought the U.S.Vietnam war to an end, there must be a fixed periodicity at which the two sides shall necessarily meet. In the Hotel Majestic case, the two sides met every Thursday, whether or not they had anything to say to each other. Indeed, even through the worst of what were called the Christmas bombings when more bombs were rained on Vietnam than by both sides in the Second World War the Thursday meetings were not disrupted. In a similar manner, we need to inure the India -Pakistan dialogue from disruption of any kind in this manner. Third, the dialogue must not be f ractionated, as the Composite Dialogue has been, between different sets of interlocutors. As in the case of Hotel Majestic, where the U.S. side was led by Kissinger and the Vietnamese by Le Duc Tho (both won the Nobel prize), Ministerial-level statesmen should lead the two sides with their advisers perhaps changing, depending on the subject under discussion, but the two principal interlocutors remaining the same so that cross-segmental agreements can be reached enabling each side to gain on the swings what it feels it might have lost on the roundabouts. Thus, the holistic and integral nature of the dialogue will be preserved. Fourth, instead of an agenda agreed in advance, which only leads to endless bickering over procedure, each side should be free to bring any two subjects of its choice on the table by giving due notice at the previous meeting and, perhaps, one mutually agreed subject could thereafter be addressed by both sides. Fifth, half an hour should be set aside for each side to bring its topical con cerns to the attention of the side. This will persuade the general public in both countries that the dialogue is not an exercise in appeasement. Sixth, there should be no timeline for the conclusion of the Dialogue. This will enable both sides to come to considered, and therefore, durable conclusions without either feeling they have been rushed to a conclusion against their better judgment. Seventh, and finally, as diplomacy requires confidentiality, there will, of course, have to be some opaqueness in the talks; at the same time, we cannot afford to swing the other way and bring in total transparency; so, what I would suggest is a translucent process where spokespersons of the two sides regularly brief the media but without getting into public spats with each other. Dignity and good will must be preserved to bridge the trust deficit. I commend this seven-point programme for your consideration. I cannot guarantee that such a dialogue will lead to success, but I do guarantee that not talking will lead us nowhere.

Wake-up call for Sibal Defending the indefensible may be part of the lawyer's trade but this doesn't extend to a flagrant distortion of easily verifiable facts. Union Communications Minister Kapil Sibal, who shocked everyone with his claim of zer o-loss to the exchequer in 2G spectrum allocation, was rapped on the knuckles by the Supreme Court which asked him to behave with some sense of responsibility. Mr. Sibal, in an egregious overflow of enthusiasm to defend his predecessor, A. Raja, and th e United Progressive Alliance government, sought to debunk the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General on the spectrum controversy. Just as the Central Bureau of Investigation seemed to be getting serious about its investigation into the 2G spectrum allocation scandal, and a one-man committee was starting to look into the procedures and policies of the Department of Telecommunications in granting 2G licences since 2001, Mr. Sibal presented himself as an omniscient authority on the subject and prejudge d the case. The Supreme Court registered its concern over the impact the Minister's statement might have on the CBI's investigation. Mr. Sibal, a distinguished lawyer, will hopefully realise the full import of the Supreme Court's observations against him. The court's larger concern of course is to ensure independent investigation, without fear or favour, by the premier criminal investigation agency. With the highest court in the land now monitoring the investigation into the 2G spectrum scandal, the CBI should have the nerve to get on with the investigation without allowing any intervention or improper inputs from its political masters. But this is easier said than done. Clearly, there is no systemic protection for India's investigating agencies. In several criminal cases that have the potential to hurt those in power at the centre, the CBI has handled the investigation in a way that achieves the end-result of aborted or failed prosecution. The Bofors case, which is synonymous with political corruption, is a notorious case of investigators acting in the service of their political bosses. If the UPA government has any intention of getting to the truth in the telecom scam, Mr. Sibal should publicly retract his irresponsible, over -the-top comments made at a sensitive juncture. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh owes it to the nation to dissociate his government from his Minister's act of egregious folly, and to provide credible assurances that there will be no further political obstruction of efforts to get to the trut h. If he fails to do this, the perception is bound to grow that yet another cover-up of big league corruption is afoot.

Reforming microfinance The T.H. Malegam committee on microfinance institutions has made valuable suggestions that are contextually significant. Barely four months ago, the MFI sector seemed to be riding a crest. Though comparatively new to organised finance, it was growing rapidly, particularly in the southern States, with Andhra Pradesh in the lead. With an estimated Rs.22,500 crore lent to nearly 2.7 crore borrowers, it seemed to have become a mainstream financial activity. Yet in a matter of months, the fortunes of the industry changed drasti cally. In Andhra Pradesh especially, there were complaints of usurious lending, coercive recovery procedures, and exploitation of the poor. It did not help the whole body of MFIs that a few of them suffered a serious image problem . Having converted themselves into for profit organisations, these institutions adopted a corporate model, declared huge dividends, and paid handsome salaries to their promoters and employees. The State government, through an ordinance, required all the MFIs to register with the district authorities and avoid coercive and multiple lending practices.

In one of its key recommendations, the Committee calls for the creation of a separate category of non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) covering the microfinance sector, to be designated NBFC-MFI. The MFIs, which will be accorded priority lending status, should provide financial services predominantly to low income borrowers, making available small loans for short-terms and on an unsecured basis, mainly for income generating activities. The repayment schedules will be more frequent than those offered by banks. Obviously, regulation of what has been largely an unregulated financial activity will succeed only if it is accompanied by clear guidelines that are easy to comply with. It is here that some critics find fault with the Committee report. For instance, the recommendation for a cap on interest rates for individual loans at 24 per cent, they say, is impractical and fails to take account of the ground realities of the business. Besides, a large part of the MFI loans have been for consumption purposes and therefore to ask these institutions to henceforth lend primarily for productive purposes might be unrealistic. The suggestion for imputing greater transparency in the regime of lending charges is unexceptionable. Overall, there is no doubt that a vast majority of the MFIs would acquire greater credibility and benefit from the new regulations, very much like the deposit-taking NBFCs, which came under the purview of the RBI more than a decade ago.