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Whom shall we blame it on?

N J Nanporia

A curious feature of the Koran-toilet affair is that there is and continues to be a confusion of targets. For the Bush administration the target is Newsweek, for outraged Muslims globally it is the US government, for the tightly knit core of neo-conservatives it is the much despised “liberal” media, and for media professionals it is a perceived decline in journalistic standards. All of which has tended to obscure a point of telling significance. It is that neither the two authors of the retracted article nor the Pentagon anticipated the virulence of the backlash from the Muslim world.

Allied to this staggering psychological ignorance was the equally staggering assumption that “mishandling” the Koran or releasing pictures of Saddam in his underpants would “deal a body blow to the resistance” and have the immediate effect of demoralising the detainees. It never dawned on the American interrogators or their backroom psychological “experts” or the Bush administration that what they were inviting, without realising it, was an explosion of anger and resentment. This in turn explains why the “senior defence department official” to whom the offending article was referred suggested minor changes but “said nothing about the details concerning the Koran”. Newsweek can hardly be blamed for interpreting this as a no objection signal, and others for concluding that desecration of the Koran had the unofficial approval of the Pentagon.

As for the magazine’s professionalism what more could it have done to obtain “positive corroboration” of the story other than the silent clearance it managed to get? Then there is the even more fundamental point that in both the Saddam-in-underpants story and the Koran one, the source was an “unnamed senior Bush administration official”. What prompted this official to do what he did? One more-than-probable answer is that he believed, as many others in the administration obviously did, that a public display of contempt for Saddam and the Koran is a key weapon in the psychological war against the Islamic resistance.

However, the weapon yielded the wrong results. Instantly, the administration took refuge in the irresponsible journalism mode, targeted Newsweek with what one report described as “unusual anger”, and deployed on it all the pressure it could command. As a demonstration of what the administration can do to bend the media into submission, it could hardly be bettered. It spoke, almost tearfully, of the “damage” its “image” abroad had suffered as though this image, after Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo and much else besides, had survived untainted.

Anonymity on which the American media so often depends can work in two ways. One positively as a source of inside information. The other negatively as a source of stories deliberately planted by the administration.

The manner of Newsweek’s retraction implies a belated understanding that it had been victimised. It began with the declaration that “we’re not retracting anything, we don’t know what the facts are” and ended with a retraction and an apology. That testifies to what pressure means in the American context. An official investigation has been ordered but meanwhile we are assured that there is “no credible evidence” of the Koran being flushed down the toilet. This denial takes advantage, in the clever, clever way of the neo-conservatives, of the distinction between Koran desecration by toilet flushing and desecration by other means.

Evidence obtained and reported by the American Civil Liberties Union speaks of the Koran “kicked and thrown to the floor and withheld as a punishment” and of “guards dancing round the detainees during prayers to distract them”. True, that evidence is not decisive. Nor is the official denial. But as between the yes and the no, it is the first that gets the credibility award.

Choosing allies wisely

When Washington consecretated Uzbekistan’s Karimov as an important ally in the war against terrorism it knew him as a Soviet style, iron-fisted ruler, with rather basic ideas about how to deal with the Opposition. So it is both hypocritical and belated to state a wringing of hands in apparent disapproval of what he allegedly did in Andijan. If his forces did slaughter unarmed civilians that was only to be expected of someone of his background; and no doubt he was not discouraged from doing so by an American military presence that was legitimised by a duly negotiated alliance.

Moreover, America has acknowledged that the facts about the Andijan affair have yet to be sorted out. Pending that, the facts that have been established are that the demonstrators “stormed a prison, seized weapons, freed prisoners, occupied government offices, burned buildings and triggered uprisings” elsewhere. Whatever the nature of the Karimov administration that is surely provocation enough for official retaliation. Did Bush expect Karimov to display forbearance and restraint? And does he now have second thoughts about how to choose his allies”?

Transparent testimonials

Nearly all political parties comfort themselves by sometimes striking a self-congratulatory note. Some more often than others. But this seems to be an indulgence to which the Congress is unusually prone. Consider the following two quotes, one by the Prime Minister and the other by Sonia Gandhi. “I express the views of the entire alliance and of the people of our country as a whole when I say that we have all been truly inspired by her (Sonia Gandhi’s) courage, wisdom, forbearance and personal example of selflessness in leading the UPA. Generations to come will marvel at Soniaji’s renunciation of the seat of power, an act which is in the great traditions of sages and saints of this ancient land.” To which Sonia almost routinely responded: “Let us congratulate the Prime Minister for his leadership, his dignified and effective leadership” which, though less hyperbolic, is effusive enough.

No doubt the point about this publicised exchange is to assure party members and everyone else that there is no “mismatch” between the PM and the party leader, and that the PMO and the National Advisory Council are agreeably in tune with each other. If that was the intention it hasn’t worked, if only because Sonia’s credentials for praising the PM are dubious and the PM’s motives for dishing out lavish compliments are much too transparent. What they are saying to each other is an elaborate thank you for an expedient arrangement of some doubtful value to the cause of good governance.

Running a government is part policy-making and management and part political. But the fiction that the one can be separated from the other is exactly that, and not the less relevant because the BJP has said so. “Nomination culture” and “high command” are indeed the defining phrases of the Congress today.

As for the exchange of lavish testimonials most people would find it shy-making. But clearly it is a part of the party’s tradition which nothing can uproot.

Putin versus Khorodkovsky

Not always but often enough a significant happening on the global stage can be interpreted in two distinctively different ways, the predictable Western one and the other one that sees things from outside the Western box. On the Khorodkovsky affair in Russia, for example, an American columnist writes: “Both men (Khorodkovsky and Putin) are products of their Soviet past and here, by a twist of destiny, confronting each other in a duel much bigger than themselves. This is a struggle between old and new Russia; between the autocratic values of the past and Western modernity with its democracy, freedom and market-driven economy”.

The equation between old Russia and “autocratic values” and between Khorodkovsky and Western modernity is so easily and glibly made. Not long ago democracy and freedom were equated with the Boris Yeltsin era which heralded the eclipse of Gorbachev and the introduction of rampant untutored capitalism of which the likes of Khorodkovsky took immediate advantage.

Khorodkovsky’s capitalism didn’t matter too much. What did matter for Putin was that it was politically motivated. His trial has been described in the Western media as “politically charged”. Indeed it was because the trial had only a nominal link to fraud and tax evasion.