WORDFALL

Kashmir: the only unfinished business of partition

2004-06-10T19:04:00.000+05:45

By Kaleem Omar

Pakistan has urged the new Congress-led coalition government in New Delhi to stick to the January 6, 2004, joint statement of President Pervez Musharraf and then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee about the “resolution of all issues between them, including Jammuu and Kashmir, to the satisfaction of both sides” and the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
India, meanwhile, has urged Pakistan to “avoid controversy” ahead of a meeting of their foreign secretaries later this month. It has also denied that its new government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was stressing the Simla Agreement of 1972 as the basis of future talks between the two sides, to the exclusion of other subsequent agreements with Islamabad.
Meanwhile, the very low voter turnout in Indian-occupied Kashmir in India’s April/May national election has once again given the lie to New Delhi’s oft-repeated claim that the Muslims of occupied Kashmir – who comprise the overwhelming majority of the state’s population – want to be “a part of India.” Nothing could be further from the truth, as even New Delhi knows only too well. Hence, its persistent refusal to agree to hold a plebiscite in occupied Kashmir.
New Delhi knows that if a free and fair plebiscite were held under UN auspices, the majority of the Muslim population of the state would vote to join Pakistan. The so-called “third option” – an independent Jammu and Kashmir – is not really a practical option at all. It is more of a tactical device that the Indian government itself began secretly promoting in the 1970s in an effort to divert attention from New Delhi reneging on its solemn pledge to hold a plebiscite in the state.
Not that India has ever had any intention of actually giving occupied Kashmir its independence even if that turned out be the option Kashmiris voted for. From India’s standpoint, however, talk of a “third option” made for a useful red herring that could help sow doubts among Pakistanis about what the people of Kashmir really wanted, and that Islamabad might, as a result, be more amenable to letting the status quo in occupied Kashmir continue indefinitely.
Kashmir remains the only unfinished business of partition. The bottom line in the partition formula was that all the Hindu majority provinces of British India would become part of independent India and all the Muslim majority provinces would become part of the new state of Pakistan.
The only exceptions to this formula were the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, which had clearly defined Hindu and Muslim majority areas (and also a large Sikh population in Punjab’s case) and which, it was, therefore, agreed, would be partitioned, with East Punjab and West Bengal going to India, and West Punjab and East Pakistan becoming part of Pakistan.
The fact that the Radcliffe Boundary Commission Award gave some Muslim-majority areas of Punjab, in particular the key Gurdaspur District, to India instead of Pakistan, is another story. That story has less to do with the validity of India’s dubious claim to Gurdaspur and more to do with the fact that Lord Mounbatten, the last viceroy of British India, connived with Jawaharlal Nehru to influence Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the head of the Boundary Commission, to change the Boundary Award at the last minute in India’s favour by altering the Zera line and giving the Gurdaspur District to India, thus providing it with a land route to Kashmir.
This collusion was confirmed by no less a person than Christopher Beaumont, secretary to the Boundary Commission, who, in a lengthy interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph in 1992, said that Mountbatten had invited Radcliffe to lunch at the Viceroy’s Lodge two days before the Award was due to be announced and had persuaded him to change the Zera line in India’s favour. Beaumont said Radcliffe had come back to his residential quarters after the lunch looking “very disturbed” and that the same night the Zera line on the Boundary Award map had been changed.
Under the partition formula, the 550 or so princely states of British India, including Jammu and Kashmir, were theoretically free to join India or Pakistan or opt for independence. But the “independence option” wasn’t so much a practical alternative as it was a legalistic device conceived by the British to get around the fact that Britain had treaties with the princely states, and that, with the departure of the British, “sovereignty” would revert to these states, which would then be free to decide their own future.
This device notwithstanding, it was expected – including by the British themselves – that all the princely states would in fact chose to join either India or Pakistan, depending on whether they were Hindu-majority or Muslim-majority states.
Maharajah Hari Singh, the Hindu Dogra ruler of the overwhelmingly Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, however, had other ideas.
As Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah noted in a telegraphic message to the Maharajah on October 26, 1947: “The course which your government is pursuing in suppressing Musalmans in every way, the atrocities which are being committed by your troops and which are driving Muslims out of the state…and the threat to enlist outside assistance show clearly that the real aim of your Government’s policy is to seek an opportunity to join the Indian Dominion as a coup d’etat by securing the intervention and assistance of that Dominion.”
As subsequent events showed, Mr Jinnah was absolutely right in his assessment of the Maharaja’s intentions. Soon after that telegraphic message was sent, the Maharajah invoked India’s intervention to counter the uprising against his rule and Indian troops began landing at Srinagar airport.
The Indian government claimed that the Maharajah had signed an “instrument of accession” on October 26, 1947 ceding the state to India, and that India, therefore, had the “right” to send in troops. But as the well-known British historian Alistair Lamb has conclusively proved in his book “Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy 1846-1990”, the “instrument of accession” was a fake that was backdated to a date prior to the landing of Indian troops.
The Indians, however, claim that the instrument of accession was signed by Maharajah Hari Singh on October 26, 1947, in which the Maharajah agreed to accede to India in return for military assistance to put down the popular rebellion against him, seen at that time as “an invasion” by tribesmen from Pakistan.
The details of the accession were worked out between the Jammu and Kashmir prime minister, M. C. Mahajan, and an Indian official, V. P. Menon, in Delhi. However, there are serious doubts about the signing of the document. As Lamb points out, the instrument of accession could not have been signed by the Maharajah in Srinagar on October 26, 1947 as on that date he was travelling by road to Jammu (a distance of over 350 kms).
In fact, it was on October 27, 1947 that the Maharajah was informed by his prime minister, M. C. Mahajan, and V. P. Menon (who had flown into Srinagar), that the instrument of accession had already been negotiated in Delhi. Thus, the Maharajah could not have signed the instrument of accession, if at all, until October 27, 1947.
This casts serious doubts on the actions of the Indian government. Some Indian troops had already arrived and secured Srinagar airfield during the middle of October 1947, some two weeks BEFORE the so-called instrument of accession was signed. On October 26, 1947, a further massive airlift brought thousands of Indian troops to Kashmir – again BEFORE the signing of the instrument of accession. Therefore, this situation begs the question: would the Maharajah have signed the instrument of accession had the Indian troops not already been on Kashmiri soil? In other words, was the instrument of accession signed under coercion?
No satisfactory original of the instrument of accession has ever been produced in an international forum; a printed copy has always been shown. Further, the document was not presented to Pakistan or the UN. In the summer of 1995, the Indian authorities reported that the original document had been lost or stolen. This casts further doubt on whether the Maharajah actually signed the instrument of accession at all.

Concerning the Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project controversy

2004-06-02T19:36:00.000+05:45

By Kaleem Omar

A delegation of Pakistani officials, led by the head of the Pakistan Commission for Indus Waters, was in New Delhi last month for talks with their Indian counterparts. On their return to Islamabad on May 29, a member of the delegation told reporters that India has agreed to suspend all construction work on the Kishan Ganga Hydropower Dam for six months and address Pakistan’s reservations about the scheme before recommencing work on it.

Pakistan objects to the construction of the dam, saying that India is trying to divert the waters of the Neelum River (known as Kishan Ganga in India) into the Wullar Barrage on the Jhelum River, which, under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, it cannot do. The Neelum originates in the Himalayas, runs along the Line of Control through the Neelum Valley in Azad Kashmir and enters Pakistan near Domail.

The picturesque Neelum Valley – one of the most beautiful places on earth – was for years the scene of artillery shelling from the Indian-held side of the LoC, with Pakistani forces shelling Indian positions in reply. The shelling only stopped in November last year when Pakistan declared a unilateral ceasefire along the LoC, resulting in the Indian guns also falling silent. India has taken advantage of the ceasefire to press ahead with the construction of Kishan Ganga Dam.

Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to dawdle over its own plans for building a 960 megawatt hydropower project on the Neelum-Jhelum Rivers in Azad Kashmir.

It has been over a year since China offered to provide $ 1 billion worth of financing to Pakistan for the Neelum-Jhelum project through a mix of equity and credit. By starting work on the project without further delay, Pakistan would be in a better position to maintain its legal rights over the waters of the Jhelum under the Indus Waters Treaty.

Yet Islamabad has been dragging its feet over accepting the Chinese offer, claiming that the terms offered by them are not soft enough. But is that a valid reason to reject the offer? For one thing, the terms can always be re-negotiated to make them softer – which the Chinese would very likely be prepared to do given the close friendly ties between the two countries. For another, it’s not as if Islamabad has any better offer of financing from any other country or international aid agency.

The need for Pakistan to firm up financing for the project has acquired even greater urgency in light of the fact that India, meanwhile, is not only pressing ahead with the construction of the Kishan Ganga Dam but also with plans to build a 450 MW hydropower project – the Baghliar Dam – on the Chenab River in Indian-occupied Kashmir in violation of the Indus Waters Treaty, which gives Pakistan exclusive rights to the waters of the three western rivers (Chenab, Jhelum and Indus) in the Indus Basin, with India getting exclusive rights over the waters of the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej).

Beijing’s offer of May 2003 to fund the foreign exchange component of the Rs 87 billion Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project came at a crucial time for Pakistan, because the timeframe allowed to Pakistan by the Indus Waters Treaty to build a hydropower project on the Jhelum is running out. Unless work on the project is started without further delay, Pakistan may be obliged, under the terms of the treaty, to allow India to divert Jhelum waters for a power generation project of its own.

The danger of that happening makes Islamabad’s reluctance to accept the Chinese offer of financing for the Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project all the more inexplicable.

The sequence of events is instructive in this regard. On May 8, 2003, it was reported that Pakistan was putting India on notice on New Delhi’s violation of the Indus Waters Treaty, saying the two countries should appoint a neutral expert “within 15 days” to resolve the dispute over the construction by India of the proposed Baghliar hydropower project on the Chenab River in Indian-occupied Kashmir.

Aside from the fact that India has no right to be in Kashmir in the first place, Pakistan has serious technical objections to the design of the Baghliar Dam, which, it says, is not confined to power generation but will enable India to illegally divert Chenab water for irrigation purposes, thereby reducing water flows to Pakistan, in contravention of the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty.

India and Pakistan have been locked in a serious dispute over the issue for over five years. All bilateral means of resolving the dispute at the level of the Permanent Indus Commission (set up under the 1960 treaty to monitor the treaty and resolve disputes) have been exhausted, and India is illegally going ahead with the construction of the controversial gate-structure which could deprive Pakistan of more than 7,000 cusecs (cubic feet per second) of water a day from the Chenab.

Pakistan wants to appoint a World Bank official as a neutral expert to resolve the dispute, as the bank was the guarantor of the Indus Waters Treaty. India, however, wants the matter settled bilaterally. Yet India refuses to submit the design of the Baghliar project to Pakistani experts for review. How can the issue be resolved “bilaterally” if India refuses to agree to Pakistani experts reviewing the project’s design?

But India is mistaken if it thinks it can bulldoze Pakistan into agreeing with the Indian position. The dispute has to be settled in an equitable manner. Otherwise, it could end up becoming yet another stumbling block in the improvement of relations between the two countries.

During the Pakistani delegation’s visit to New Delhi last month, the Indian side again brought up the Baghliar issue, rejecting Pakistan’s position that the dispute could only be resolved through third-party mediation.

When India insisted that the matter should be resolved bilaterally, Pakistan asked India to stop construction of the dam first and then enter into negotiations with Pakistan to find a solution. The Indian side agreed to get back to Pakistan after consultations with the government in New Delhi.

Under the terms of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, the Permanent Indus Commission is a key mechanism to ensure an equitable distribution of water resources between the two countries, with the riparian rights of both sides being protected.

The treaty has survived the worst of political upheavals, including two wars and several other military conflicts between India and Pakistan. Now, however, for the first time in more than four decades, a need has arisen to resort to a neutral expert for adjudicating a water dispute between the two sides, as provided for in the treaty.

On May 7 last year, Water and Power Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao told reporters in Islamabad that Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali had approved the summary submitted to him by the ministry to issue a notice to India. Press reports quoted the ministry’s then-secretary, Riaz Ahmed Khan, as saying that the two sides were bound under the 1960 treaty to meet and appoint a neutral expert within 15 days (that deadline expired more than a year ago).
Asked why Islamabad was extending a hand of friendship to India when New Delhi was trying to deprive Pakistan of its rights over the Chenab and Jhelum waters, Sherpao said that Pakistan, too, was initiating a hydropower project of its own on the Jhelum River in Azad Kashmir. However, he added, funds for the project had not yet been arranged.

That statement prompted the Chinese to come forward with an offer for financing the Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project.

Only three days after Sherpao’s remarks appeared in the press, the China Machine Tool Company, a state-owned power construction company, approached the Pakistan government and expressed its willingness to finance the project through an equity-cum-credit package on very competitive terms.

The Chinese offer demonstrated yet again that Pakistan has no greater friend than China. Pakistan, too, has been a very good friend to China. Indeed, the ties between the two countries are a model of good neighbourly relations.

Why, then, Islamabad’s seeming reluctance to accept the Chinese offer of financing for the Neelum-Jhelum project?

ECONOMYWATCH: Focusing on reforms with a human face

2004-05-21T12:50:00.000+05:45

By Kaleem Omar

In South Asian countries even periods of high GDP growth have tended to leave huge numbers of rural and urban poor outside the loop. Pakistan’s budget makers therefore need to focus on policies aimed at improving the economic lot of the poor, creating more jobs for them, providing them with basic services such as electricity and potable water and addressing some of the country’s most chronic social sector problems, including insufficient, ill-equipped and poorly funded government schools and colleges and the lack of proper healthcare facilities in the rural areas.

Incoming Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, who, as finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government, oversaw India’s first round of economic liberalisation in 1991, struck the right note on Thursday when he said that he would reshape economic reforms to benefit millions of India’s poor, protect workers in state-run companies and boost farm output.

“I have always been saying that we need reforms,” said Singh, 71, an Oxford-educated economist and a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. “We will increase reforms, but it will be reforms with a human face, reforms that benefit the common man of our country,” he told a news conference in New Delhi.

When Singh launched his economic liberalisation policy in 1991, he candidly admitted that many of its key measures had been inspired by the deregulation of Pakistan’s economy initiated by the Nawaz Sharif government a year earlier.

The Nawaz government, however, went back on one of the central elements of its deregulation policy when it froze foreign currency accounts in June 1998, reducing remittances from overseas Pakistanis and other private foreign currency inflows to a trickle, and resulting in a severe loss of investor confidence – a setback from which it took Pakistan years to recover.

After the Musharraf government took over in October 1999, one of the first things it did was to appoint New York-based, Citibank executive Shaukat Aziz finance minister. When the elected Jamali government took office in November 2002, President Pervez Musharraf made sure that Aziz was retained as finance minister in the new government to ensure continuity of the economic policies and reforms initiated by the Musharraf government.

Aziz, who holds an MBA degree from Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration, has been finance minister now for four-and-a-half years. During that time he has presented four federal budgets and presided over a dramatic improvement in the economy, with most macroeconomic indicators, including foreign exchange reserves, remittances, exports and aid inflows, showing an upward trend.

What Aziz now needs to do, starting with the budget for fiscal 2004-05 due to be announced on June 5, is to take a leaf out of Manmohan Singh’s book and focus on economic reforms with a human face.

One of the key areas of focus should be education, including providing more money for poorly funded government schools and colleges, boosting adult literacy, and building a chain of polytechnics across the country – at least one in each tehsil of every district, for starters – to provide vocational training to large numbers of young people in the rural areas and urban population centres to equip them with the skills they will need to find jobs. Tokenism will not do the trick. It has to be a massive programme, commensurate with the magnitude of the problem in a country of 150 million people.

“Knowledge is like light,” says a World Bank report. “Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still live in the darkness of poverty – unnecessarily. Knowledge about how to treat such a simple ailment as diarrhoea has existed for centuries, but millions of children around the world continue to die from it because their parents do not know how to save them.”

Health problems are especially common in rural communities, including those in Pakistan where there are often no healthcare services or medical clinics within easy reach. And even where such facilities do exist, they are often poorly funded, ill-equipped and lacking in sufficient numbers of properly trained staff. Water-borne diseases, most of whose victims are children, are also all too common in rural areas, due to people not having access to safe drinking water and lacking the knowledge to adopt even low-cost water-purification techniques. It is estimated that nearly 70 per cent of all diseases afflicting children in Pakistan’s rural areas are water-borne.

Pakistani policy makers need to address such health problems on a priority basis. The quantum of money to be allocated for healthcare in the forthcoming federal and provincial budgets, and future budgets, should reflect these priorities, with the expansion and upgrading of health services in the rural areas getting special attention.

Poor countries – and poor people – differ from rich ones not only because they have less capital but because they have less knowledge. As the World Bank report notes, “Knowledge is often costly to create and that is why much of it is created in industrial countries. But developing countries can acquire knowledge overseas as well as create their own at home.” Forty-five years ago, Ghana and South Korea had virtually the same income per capita. By the early 1990s, however, South Korea’s income per capita was six times higher than Ghana’s. Some analysts reckon that half of the difference is due to South Korea’s success in acquiring and using knowledge.

“Knowledge also illuminates every economic transaction, revealing preferences, giving clarity to exchanges, informing markets,” says the World Bank report. “And it is lack of knowledge that causes markets to collapse, or never come into being. When some producers began diluting milk in India, consumers could not determine its quality before buying it. Without that knowledge, the overall quality of milk fell. Producers who did not dilute their milk were put at a disadvantage, and consumers suffered.”

Sometimes, however, it is not lack of knowledge but market manipulation by individuals or companies in rich industrial countries that cause markets in developing countries to collapse. That’s what happened in Southeast Asia, for example, when Western speculators suddenly pulled their money out of Thailand’s share market in July 1996, causing the country’s currency (the baht) to collapse and triggering a financial crisis across the region that lasted for more than three years.

Poor countries also differ from rich countries in having fewer institutions to certify quality, enforce standards and performance, and gather and disseminate information needed for business transactions. Often this hurts the poor. For example, village moneylenders often charge interest rates as high as 80 per cent, because of the difficulty in assessing the creditworthiness of poor borrowers.

Following the pioneering successful example of Bangladesh with its Grameen Bank scheme to provide low-interest loans to the rural poor for income-generation mini projects, other developing countries have begun setting up similar schemes. Pakistan’s Khushalli Bank scheme is a case in point. Set up by the Musharraf government three years ago, the bank is now expanding its operations to cover more rural communities. But the pace of expansion is still too slow and needs to be sharply speeded up in order for the scheme to have a significant impact on poverty alleviation across the country.

Like many other developing countries at the low end of the income scale, Pakistan needs to look at the problems of development in a new way – from the perspective of knowledge.

As the World Bank report notes, there are many types of knowledge, but two sorts of knowledge and two types of problems are especially critical for developing countries.

The first is knowledge about technology or simply know-how. Examples are nutrition, birth control, sanitation and hygiene. Typically, developing countries have less of this know-how than industrial countries, and the poor have less than the higher income groups. These unequal distributions across and within countries is sometimes called the knowledge gap.

The second is knowledge about attributes, such as the quality of a product, the diligence of a worker, or the creditworthiness of a firm – all crucial to effective markets. The difficulties posed by incomplete knowledge of attributes, or lack of such knowledge, are information problems. Mechanisms to alleviate information problems, such as product standards, training certificates and credit reports, are fewer and weaker in developing countries. Information problems and the resulting market failures especially hurt the poor.

“The twin issues of knowledge gaps and information problems cannot be untangled in real life: to unleash the power of knowledge, governments must recognise and respond to both types of problems, often simultaneously,” says the World Bank report.

Closing knowledge gaps will not be easy, however. For one thing, developing countries like Pakistan are pursuing a moving target, as the high-income industrial countries constantly push the knowledge frontier outward. Indeed, even greater than the knowledge gap is the capacity to create knowledge. Differences in some important measures of knowledge creation are far greater between rich and poor countries than even the huge difference in income.

High income economies, those with a GDP per capita of $ 16,000 or more, spend about $ 220 per million of population on R & D (Research & Development). By contrast, low income economies, those with a GDP per capita of $ 328 or less, spend only about $ 1 per million of population on R & D. Thus, while the GDP per capita of high income economies is 48 times more than the GDP per capita of low income economies, R & D spending by high income economies per million of population is a staggering 328 times more than R& D spending by low income economies per million of population.

These figures show that, in R & D spending terms, the creation-of-knowledge gap between high and low income economies is almost seven times greater than the GDP per capita income gap.

But developing countries can acquire knowledge that is readily, and, thanks to the information revolution, increasing easily and cheaply, available in rich countries and do need to reinvent the wheel in order to get their economies moving toward high rates of growth, as the example of China shows. For the past quarter of a century, the Chinese economy has averaged an annual growth rate of 9 per cent or more, doubling its GDP every ten years – a feat that took the United States 50 years to achieve in the 19th century (from 1850 to 1900). If China can do it, so can other developing countries like Pakistan.

Who was Sacagawea?

2004-05-20T16:19:00.000+05:45

By Kaleem Omar

May 21 marked the 200th anniversary of the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition, a seminal event in American history that opened up a way to the West – a route hundreds of thousands of settlers were to later follow. The expedition’s bicentennial is being commemorated at special events and ceremonies across the United States.

The Lewis and Clark expedition was the first US overland exploration of the American West and Pacific Northwest, beginning in May 1804 and ending in September 1806. The expedition was commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. It was led by army officers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

The expedition took over two years and covered a total of about 8,000 miles, from a camp outside St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back. Like other scholars of his time, Jefferson believed in the existence of a Northwest Passage, or some kind of water connection between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The principal goal of the expedition was to discover such a route and survey its potential as a waterway for American westward expansion. Lewis and Clark didn’t find any such route, of course, because there wasn’t one, but they did succeed in making contacts with many Red Indian tribes and in uncovering a wealth of knowledge about the peoples, plants and animals of what eventually became the western United States.

Unlike the white settlers who followed them and soldiers of the US army who massacred thousands of Red Indians and drove whole tribes from their lands on the orders of the government (one of the most shameful episodes in American history), Lewis and Clark’s contact with the Red Indians was entirely peaceful in nature.

The account that follows is based on Lewis and Clark’s journals, Jefferson’s writings and on articles and books about the expedition by various American historians and scholars.

Historians tell us that although Jefferson had long been interested in the American West, it was not until 1802 that he began to plan an expedition to the Pacific. After reading “Voyages from Montreal” by Canadian explorer and fur trader Sir Alexander Mackenzie in the summer of 1802, the president began to make preparations for an American expedition aimed at countering Mackenzie’s plans to make the West and Pacific Northwest part of the British Empire.

Jefferson envisaged an official expedition that combined diplomatic, scientific and commercial goals. He believed that the nation that dominated a water passage through the continent could control the destiny of all North America.

In hindsight, it’s just as well that no such fabled Northwest Passage was found, otherwise the world today might have been facing the spectre of George W. Bush as president of the whole of North America, instead of only of the United States – a chilling thought.

Jefferson was also convinced that the West would be a paradise for American farmers. That conviction turned out to be right, as the vast agricultural wealth of such western states as California and Oregon show.
Jefferson turned to his young private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, an army officer and experienced naturalist, for leadership in this enterprise. But the demands of the expedition were enormous, and Lewis soon turned to William Clark, a friend from his army days in China, to act as co-commander. Despite the fact that Clark was officially a lieutenant, and therefore of lower rank than Lewis, a captain, Jefferson and Lewis considered Clark an equal leader of the party.

In June 1803 Jefferson completed his demanding exploration instructions after receiving advice from several leading American scientists of the day and the noted surveyor, Andrew Ellicott.

In a detailed letter now recognised as a classic exploration document, Jefferson itemised more than a dozen areas of inquiry for the expedition, ranging broadly from astronomy and botany to linguistics and zoology. He sought information about plants, animals, rivers, mountains and native culture, which Lewis and Clark recorded in journals during the expedition.

The Corps of Discovery, as the expedition party was properly known, demanded more people than Jefferson first envisaged. Before reaching their base camp at Wood River outside the town of St. Louis, Lewis and Clark recruited a sizeable number of civilian hunters, army soldiers and French boatmen. While not all made the entire journey to the Pacific, some 48 men were part of the team when it left St. Louis, heading up the Missouri River on a large keelboat (a riverboat used for carrying freight) and several smaller boats.
The Corps of Discovery’s route across the continent was dictated by Jefferson’s notions of American geography. He believed that the most practical passage across the continent followed the Missouri River to its headquarters in the Rocky Mountains. Once over the mountains by a presumably short and easy portage, Jefferson was sure that his explorers would find another river leading directly to the ocean. However, the president’s assumptions about geography did not match ground realities.

As commanding officers for the expedition, Lewis and Clark divided leadership responsibilities: Lewis became the party’s naturalist, and Clark served as the mapmaker and negotiator. The expedition set out on May 21, 1804. In its first season of travel, the expedition made its way up the Missouri, built Fort Madison in present-day North Dakota, and spent the winter among the Mandan and Hidatsa peoples.

The second travel season (April to December 1805) proved far more challenging as the expedition moved into country unknown to the non-natives. The Corps of Discovery now counted 33 members in the permanent party, including a Red Indian woman, Sacagawea, her husband, French Canadian interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau and their infant son Jean Baptiste, all of whom joined the group at Fort Madison.
Sacagawea, a Shoshone who had been captured by the Hidatsa tribe and then sold to Charbonneau, helped the party as an interpreter and peacemaker. She proved instrumental in negotiating for horses and supplies along the way.

The expedition struggled around the Great Falls of the Missouri, searched for a pass over the North American continental divide, and was stunned not to find a water passage direct from present-day Idaho to the ocean. Instead, the party laboured in deep snow over the Lolo Trail, crossing the border of present-day Montana into Idaho, where they encountered the Red Indian tribe known as the Nez Perce.

The Nez Perce taught them how to eat camas roots and assured them that the rivers ahead were navigable. The explorers then traveled on the Snake River into present-day Washington State before finally reaching the Columbia River. By the time Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific Ocean in November 1805 and built Fort Clatsop, their winter residence near present-day Astoria, Oregon, they had a much clearer sense of the continent’s geographical complexity.

The return journey from Fort Clatsop to St. Louis (March to September 1806) held its own unique dangers and accomplishments. With several important tasks still ahead, Lewis and Clark divided the Corps of Discovery into two parties. Clark led one group on a reconnaissance of the Yellowstone River. Meanwhile, Lewis took a small detachment into present-day north central Montana, thinking that the course of the Marias River might provide an American claim to fur-rich country in what is now the Canadian province of Alberta.

On August 12th 1806, the groups reunited on the Missouri River, near the present-day headquarters of the Mandan, Hidasta and Arikarn Nation. The expedition traveled on to the Knife River Hidatsa and Mandan villages, where they bid farewell to their interpreter Sacagawea and her husband. Before leaving the Mandan villages, they persuaded one tribal leader, White Coyote, to return with them to meet President Jefferson. On August 20th, 1806 the expedition left what is now North Dakota.

In August 2006, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation of North Dakota will observe the return of the Corps of Discovery to their homelands, the reunion of Sacagawea with her people at Awatixa, her Hidatsa home, and the journey of White Coyote to the nation’s capital.

The perils of punditry

2004-05-20T15:47:00.000+05:45

A lot of pundits got the outcome of the Indian election horribly wrong and are now having to eat humble pie, none more so than M. J. Akbar, chief editor of The Asian Age, New Delhi. In the months leading up to the election, he had railed in column after column against Sonia Gandhi’s style of leadership of the Congress Party, calling it an unmitigated disaster and predicting that Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s BJP-led National Democratic Alliance would win the election in a cakewalk, putting a virtual end to the Congress Party as we know it.

Akbar, a former Congress Party MP who, until only a few years ago, never tired of reminding his readers that India was a “secular country” and that Congress was the party that best symbolised those secular credentials, became a bitter opponent of the party after his know-it-all manner caused him to fall into disfavour with the Sonia crowd.

With the advent of the Hindu nationalist BJP-led government in 1999, Akbar suddenly metamorphosed into an ardent supporter of Prime Minister Vajpayee. Akbar’s writings seemed to suggest that Vajpayee was the font of all political wisdom and quite easily the best thing to come along since sliced bread.
In a column published shortly before the election, Akbar took a leaf out of the BJP’s book by lashing out at the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi for speaking such hesitant Hindi. He even criticised Sonia for bringing Rahul, 33, and Priyanki, 32, into the electoral fray, deriding their advent into the campaign as “the return of the babalogue.” The same column had him repeating his familiar mantra about how Vajpayee’s NDA would win the election in a cakewalk.

Well, now we all know what really happened. Far from the NDA winning in a cakewalk, it was trounced in 24 out of 28 states and ended up with 187 seats, as against the Congress-led alliance’s 217. With the support of the two communist parties, the Communist Party of India and the CPI (Marxist), which put up their strongest showing ever, winning 62 seats, plus the support of several other smaller parties, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (a grouping of 20 parties), has 320-plus MPs, giving it a very comfortable majority in the 545-seat Lok Sabha (including two MPs to be nominated by the president of India).

To add to the discomfiture of pundits like M. J. Akbar, Dr Manmohan Singh, 71, an Oxford-educated economist and former finance minister, and the first non-Hindu to hold the office of prime minister in India, told reporters at the presidential palace in New Delhi on Wednesday after meeting President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam that Sonia Gandhi was the one who had secured a mandate from India’s electorate to rule, but he was assuming the post of prime minister because of the wishes of the Congress Party leader.
“With madam’s guidance and support, I am sure we are going to make the future happy,” Singh added, just in case anybody still had any doubts about who was going to call the shots in the new dispensation. Echoing Singh’s words, senior Congress Party leader Kapil Sabil said, “Sonia Gandhi will be the guiding light, a friend, philosopher and guide.”

The Congress Party president was under intense pressure from her emotional supporters to accept the prime minister’s post, but decided to nominate Singh for the job, in a decision that shocked her party rank and file.

Sonia Gandhi, who accompanied Manmohan Singh to the presidential palace on Tuesday, told reporters that the Indian government would be “safe in the hands” of Singh after he was invited by President Kalam to form a government.

As for Sonia’s response to the pressure she was under, it has to be said that it was the essence of cool: “Being under such pressure takes you down a bit. But I’m glad everything is over,” she said. How do you like them onions, Mr Akbar?

Speaking of punditry, though, I, for one, am in the happy position of being able to exclude myself from the ranks of the red-faced pundits who got the outcome of the Indian election wrong. I say this because I never made any predictions about the outcome in print.

Although I had a sneaking suspicion about how the election might turn out, I kept my thoughts to myself, not so much because I was afraid to go out on a limb by making a prediction but because I simply didn’t know enough about the complexities of India’s politics, with its 700 registered political parties and bewildering array of regional alliances and special interest groups.

Being conscious of my lack of knowledge (I mean, does anybody here in Pakistan know the names of even a hundred of India’s political parties, let alone 700?), I held my peace, preferring in the days leading up to the elections to talk of other things – such things as “shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings,” to quote from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”

What is relevant about this poem in the present context is that it goes on to say: “’I weep for you,’ the Walrus said; / ‘I deeply sympathise.’ / With sobs and tears he sorted out / Those of the largest size, / Holding his pocket handkerchief / Before his streaming eyes.”

I suspect there must be a lot of streaming eyes in the ranks of the BJP, too, these days, as they endlessly debate what went wrong.

What went wrong, of course, were many things. First, there was the Vajpayee age factor. At 78, he’s no spring chicken and not getting any younger, or any fitter for the hurly burly of politics and the demands of being in government. Running the government of a country of India’s size would be enough to give anybody the screaming meemies. The fact that Vajpayee, despite his advanced age, was able to cope with the demands of running that government for four-and-a-half years, says a lot for his grit. In the end, though, voters evidently thought he didn’t have much grit left, or at least not enough for another five years in office.
Second, there was the Muslim swing vote factor. Although Muslims comprise only 12 per cent of India’s population, their votes can make a critical difference in closely fought contests.

This time, most of the Muslim swing votes went to the Congress Party, which has long projected itself as a secular party, as opposed to the Hindu nationalist BJP and some of its more militant allies, including Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and Narendra Modi’s bloodthirsty Hindu mobs in Gujarat – the scene, in February 2002, of a horrific massacre of Muslims, in one of India’s worst outbreaks of communal violence. The BJP’s alliance with such groups didn’t help its cause any with Muslim voters across India.
Third, and perhaps most important of all, was the backlash generated among India’s hundreds of millions of rural poor against the Vajpayee government’s “India Shining” slogan, an advertising campaign touting the benefits of the country’s high economic growth. The BJP-led NDA is said to have spent five billion rupees on the campaign. The slogan may have resonated with India’s middle class, but it boomeranged badly with the rural poor, who quite rightly felt that they had received none of the benefits of this high economic growth. It was not computers the poor wanted but jobs and basic services – electricity, potable water and healthcare.

Then, there was the incumbency factor. Incumbent governments are always blamed for everything that goes wrong. And the Vajpayee government proved to be no exception, with the rural poor blaming the ruling BJP for all their woes.

Why a whole legion of high-powered pundits couldn’t see all this in the run-up to the election, is anybody’s guess – though I suspect it has more than a little to do with the fact that pundits think they have an “inside track” on things that makes their predictions impervious to what the poor are thinking.

Ultimately, however, it’s what ordinary people think that counts. As a character says at the end of John Steinbeck’s 1930s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” about people in the impoverished dustbowl states of America’s depression years, “We go on forever, ‘cause we is the people.”