It's high time we saw past the nationalist gobbledygook and knee-jerk anti-West diffidence that our External Affairs Ministry feeds us, because what in effect it has done is to give the leT and the JeM a free ticket to the next attack, a la Mumbai
Nationalism can be a great thing when it brings together a nation to act with a purpose. It can also, when abused, become a shield behind which rot and corruption hide. The latter, it seems, is exactly what happened with India’s negotiation on the Arms Trade Treaty.
According to media reports, India’s opposition to this treaty was principled and based on two pillars: The illicit supply of weapons to non-state actors, and the skewing of obligations in favour of exporters and against importers. Curiously, however, the Press reports are not only at complete variance with the actual statements India’s diplomats made at the conference but also at times completely contradictory to Indian law.
What Indian newspapers reported was that India objected to the weakening of the clause on supply of weapons to non-state actors. This was largely attributed to Western powers wanting to maintain their artificial rebellions in Syria and the ability to pull off another libya. Yet, in the seven interventions that India made, at no point were these specific objections raised. What India asked for consistently was greater clarity of language, since clarity, according to India, meant greater enforceability. Critically, though, India rejected the criminalisation of such trade. One wonders why would India seek greater clarity if it did not wish to dole out punishment for such transgressions in the first place. What this means is that even if Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence gets caught red-handed transferring arms to Jolly Jihadis, under international law it would not be prone to criminal prosecution. An extension of this would be that, if Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar did in fact transfer arms to and provide support for the Mumbai attackers, as per India’s diplomatic position, they should not be criminalised for their actions. Effectively India, then, was condoning Pakistan’s lack of action against the duo. The question is: WhyIJ
India’s second major objection ostensibly revolved around the skewing of obligations in favour of the seller to invoke force majeure on the grounds of human rights violations or genocide. Yet, even in the opening remark, India accepted this as a core principle that should allow the cancellation of a deal. What India’s objections focussed on — 70 per cent by word count of the seven speeches combined — was the avoidance of reporting. The treaty required member states to report what they purchased and keep detailed inventories of the same. How this translates into a skewing of the balance, is anybody’s guess. The excuse used incredulously was that it led to too much paperwork and the creation of unnecessary bureaucracies. That is a particularly galling excuse for a bureaucracy prone to expanding itself and creating copious quantities of useless paperwork in arcane 19th century English. Take, for example, the special Kuwait cell, created in the wake of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. This cell continues to exist in South Block even though Saddam Hussein and his sons have long since gone.
At the same time, India, for this particular section, insisted that language be kept to a minimum — in cases of illicit weapons transfer to terrorists being verbose connotes effectiveness, but in cases of reporting and verifying of end user agreements, verbosity is a nuisance! If ever a country was plagued by foot-in-the-mouth disease, then this was it.
At no point was causality demonstrated — that is to say, despite lengthy speeches, how exactly the reporting and the verification clauses actually skewed the balance in favour of the exporter, was not explained.
Perhaps the most disturbing part, quite possibly illegal intervention on India’s part, was its resistance to common laws on the registry of arms dealers, their conduct and criminalisation. India has very clear laws governing this, and equally clearly these laws have been ineffective given that every second person entering South Block is quite possibly an arms middleman. Yet, we maintain the façade that this law works. We now have a golden opportunity that would have either made this process transparent or would have unformed its criminalisation across the world. Yet, India chooses to reject it. By extension, this would have meant that extraditing Ottavio Quattrocchi or any Bofors or AgustaWestland dealers would have been automatic, guided by similar laws and virtually impossible to get out of. India, however, does not want this.
New Delhi, in fact, had several cogent reasons to oppose what it claimed the treaty looked like. Yet the treaty looks like nothing that the Union Ministry of External Affairs claimed it did. In fact, given India’s human rights situation, a force majeure could have been invoked against it — but then the Indian representative welcomes the tying of deals to human rights and genocide. Given the shambolic farce the Defence Research and Development Organisation is, and the non-existent indigenisation — India would have protested specific clauses that skewed the arms transfer clauses — it protested reporting and verification of arms post-transfer, not any clauses in the transfer itself.
Also, given its problems with terrorism, India should have insisted on a harsh criminalisation of transfers to terrorists, when detected. Yet it did not. Since India is beset with the problem of middlemen, it should have enthusiastically welcomed common cause. But it did not.
So, who exactly is the Ministry of External Affairs defending hereIJ Has it too been turned into an extension of the cover-up and personal vendetta operations that the Central Bureau of Investigation has becomeIJ Does the External Affairs Ministry view Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar as criminals or does it notIJ Is the Union Ministry of Defence committed to keeping middlemen out and, if not, at least bring them to justiceIJ
The answers probably lie elsewhere. Reporting and verification bring transparency to the arms acquisition process, which means all those juicy bribes go out of the window. A common code on middlemen would mean that the channel for these bribes would dry up. Verification would mean that India’s abysmal record of operational security would become public — even though it remains a running joke in private. Take a simple example: India refuses to ratify the communications agreement with the United States, claiming it compromises national security. Yet, in its acquisition of the VIP configured B-737s for the Prime Minister, it capitulated completely, ceding that the entire communications and self-defence systems would not be accessed by Indians. This is a plane that would most probably be used by the Prime Minister to launch a nuclear strike when he is airborne.
It’s high time we saw past the nationalist gobbledygook and knee-jerk anti-West diffidence that our External Affairs Ministry feeds us, because what in effect it did was to give lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammed a free ticket to the next attack a la Mumbai. What we saw in Geneva was the corrupt defending corruption and wrapping it in the Indian flag.
