“Navigating Sri Lanka’s Foreign Relations in a Turbulent World”

‘How a stormy Sri Lanka can navigate a turbulent world’ was the focus of a speech by former Foreign Secretary H.M.G.S. Palihakkara at the ‘Foreign Policy Forum’ held by the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations and Strategic Studies recently. We publish excerpts of the speech for their current relevance. 

“If the world is deemed turbulent it is also very much a tempestuous Sri Lanka that has to negotiate and deal with this world fraught with uncertainties, imponderables and even danger. Sri Lanka’s turbulence in fact peaked into stormy proportions during the crisis time impairing our sovereign autonomy as well as corresponding diplomatic outreach. Consequently, Sri Lankan diplomacy and negotiations, whether crisis related or other, may not necessarily be predicated on sovereign equality as in the past, but be an outgrowth of dire need. A prudent foreign relations and diplomacy calculus for Sri Lanka at this juncture, at least in the short and medium term, would therefore find it useful to factor this reality in.

Secondly, the Sri Lankan public policy apparatus have to reckon with a troubling dichotomy viz. the absence of, as well as the need for, reviving at least a bipartisan understanding, if not a wider common ground, on the key post-crisis public policy issues in general and foreign relations and domestic reforms issues in particular. If on the other hand, these critical issues continue to become expendables in the Medieval sport called the election politics in this country, the crisis recovery effort could mutate into a repetition of past follies yet again. And, down the road, we will most likely be chasing the lenders of last resort -IMF or other-yet again.

Navigating Sri Lanka’s foreign relations in this cauldron of churning issues in both international as well as national contexts, will require grappling with challenges in three principal areas. The three are obviously interactive and interrelated. Most, if not all, of the mare also outgrowths of domestic public policy deficits and political failures. 
First the elephant in the room- managing the inventory of external inputs necessary to recover from crisis, stabilise and reach a sustainable growth path as quickly as possible. This will require a carefully and pragmatically constructed binary of diplomatic activity viz. hard-nosed negotiations and harmonizing diplomacy. While technical negotiations must of necessity be based on sound economic analysis, diplomatic demarches to mobilise creditors on to a common platform helpful to us will be as important as good economic analysis.

The second task is the handling of the ‘trilemma’ of deepening and widening our vital relations with India, China, and the United States-led Western condominium, without ruffling their respective geopolitical feathers by developing a transparent policy and a prudent strategy  to remain engaged with all without getting entrenched with any.

The third is that Sri Lanka seemed to have acquired the image of an accountability starved country. Some may prefer to ignore this inconvenient truth. But it is the stark reality. The accountability issues relate not only to the ethnic conflict, but also to governance and politics in general straddling both the conflict as well as the post conflict period up to now. What is more, it has become highly externalised bringing in its wake a number of foreign relations and diplomacy challenges.

Given these diverse, but interrelated tasks, the overarching challenge for Sri Lankan diplomacy will be to show that we are after economic benefits, not strategic or geopolitical mischief and that Sri Lanka will aggressively exploit the full investment and trading potential of all FDI and credit sources including China’s BRI, The US led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and so on. 

However, this is easily said than done esp. in our region, the latest theatre of power play-the Indo Pacific– which is increasingly showing signs of a competitive breeding ground for power rivalries and countervailing alliances, armed or unarmed, nuclear or conventional. Adding to this, some emerging ‘Indo-Pacific alliances’ seek to aggressively contain one rising power while playing sherpa to other rising powers. 
In this context, alliance neutrality, not alliance partnership, is the sensible bet for the likes of Sri Lanka, to maximize and possibly leverage its much talked about strategic location value. 

In doing so, what should be the policy approach?
Is it having demarcated ‘zones’ for different investor States by ‘parceling out’ our sovereign assets including land, to contending powers  thus creating different ‘mono-national investment zones’ as may be happening now? Or the whole of Sri Lanka should and can become a venue for multinational investment and multilateral cooperation for growth and development? The former is unwise and may eventually make parts of Sri Lanka non self-governing territories. But the latter approach may help avert geopolitical binds for us involving regional or extra regional powers. And the country will not be the ground zero for a ‘zero sum’ strategic power play by anyone. 

We as Sri Lankans may dislike or even despise this particular characterization. However, for a number of well-founded or ill-founded reasons, it may well be a troubling consternation to the Indian security establishment and also a spot of bother to the Western Alliance.

Do we need to invent a brand new policy act as if nothing existed or is there an immediate external threat to the fundamentals of the nation state and people? Probably not - so what we need is a refurbishing of what exists, in order to try to cope with the current flux.

These considerations take us to the kernel of an overall policy framework that can be anchored in three elements: -

■First, a neutral policy that does not entail military alignments or military foot prints while shunning power rivalries and related doctrines. If one is shy of calling this non-aligned because it is old-fashioned, so be it ‘neutral’- without having to get enmeshed in a semantic debate about nomenclatures. (Neutrality principle)

■Second, friendship and engagement with all expecting reciprocal respect for Sri Lanka’s sovereign autonomy, territorial integrity and independence.  

■Third, an enlightened policy of international cooperation including with the UN for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Peace and Security in accordance with international law including the UN Charter. Accountability challenge can be subsumed here.

Some tend to confuse or conflate the ‘institution’ of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) with the ‘idea’ of non-alignment. This is too simplistic an attitude towards a dynamic conception. 

Neutrality is not about distancing and meek diplomacy. It is about engagement and robust diplomacy. It is engagement with all without getting entrenched with any. Core of the policy is shunning power rivalries, old or new leading to war - hot or cold.

For Sri Lanka, a good start will be to consider the desirability of public articulation of a prudent Port Calls regime—a policy that will inter-alia invite, subject to safeguards, all vessels plying the Indo-pacific waters to visit us and boost our port incomes consistent with the ‘freedom of navigation’ and ‘innocent passage’ norms, barring those ships on overt or covert conflict related missions.

Last but not the least, almost every crisis embeds an opportunity as well. The current crisis in Sri Lanka, is no exception. In its broadest sense, it is a crisis of accountability. 

What was unique and common to all this was a good bipartisan political support for these diplomatic endeavours. The determinant was the national interest, not partisan posturing. 

The late Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar was an indefatigable advocate of such a consensual culture in governance and foreign policy. It enabled us to do things like peacemaking nationally while combating terrorism internationally. 

This is the month of August-yet another anniversary of this visionary man’s untimely death.It is perhaps time to revisit these rewarding policies.

US and Germany 'trained' Saudi forces accused of Yemen border massacre: Report

UN is investigating the killing of hundreds of migrants in what rights groups say is a 'systemic' pattern of attacks

By MEE staff

American and German forces trained Saudi soldiers accused of carrying out "deliberate mass killings" on the border with Yemen, according to a report by the the Guardian.

The report says the German federal police service and the US military have been involved in training  Saudi soldiers currently under investigation by the United Nations over abuses carried out at Saudi Arabia's border with its southern neighbour.

According to the US training agreement, Washington was required to monitor how the training was being used. The agreement also stated that those being trained were only allowed to operate defensively, to protect themselves and their sites from attacks.

The Guardian reported that Saudi authorities have been treating illegal incursions along the Yemen-Saudi border as a "counter-terrorism" issue, which allows them to respond to the movement of people across the border with lethal force. 

A source told the newspaper that Saudi Arabia uses extensive electronic surveillance that makes it possible to differentiate between groups of migrants and those involved in armed incursions or drug smugglers.

The training of Saudi authorities by the US military is part of a long-running programme known as Ministry of Interior-Military Assistance Group (MOI-MAG), dating back to 2008. A US official confirmed that the training had taken place.

"The US army Security Assistance Command provided border guards training, which had been funded for a period from 2015-2023, with the funding period ending in July this year," the source told the paper.

German training of Saudi forces started in 2009, and paused only briefly following the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist and MEE contributor Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

The training partnerships between Saudi forces and the US and Germany were agreed as part of the kingdom's efforts to bolster its security. 

'Deliberate mass killings'

The route into Saudi Arabia has been used by Ethiopian and Yemeni refugees and migrants for years. Many of them are escaping economic hardship and war, with Saudi Arabia being a favoured final destination as well as a transit point towards other Gulf states.

In recent years, the journey has become increasingly dangerous, with around 430 deaths and more than 650 injuries recorded in the 1 January to 30 April 2022 period alone. 

Evidence documented by human rights groups includes cases of people being shot at from close range and women facing sexual harassment.

Earlier this month, Ethiopian survivors recounted to Middle East Eye how they were shot at with heavy machine guns.

One described being directly targeted by border guards who would "aim and fire at large rocks, which would send shrapnel and stone flying in multiple directions and maximise casualties amongst the refugees".

Activists have asked why Saudi forces were unable to differentiate between civilians and those who are armed. 

The kingdom's surveillance technologies include CCTV, ground monitor sensors and thermal imaging, which help to pick up on the movement and location of people. 

According to a detailed and damning report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) this month, survivors said they saw cameras tracking their movements mounted on what looked like "street lamps" on the Saudi side of the border.

In October, several UN special rapporteurs highlighted the killings in a letter, describing them as "gross human rights violations against migrants". 

Rights groups say that the attacks were carried out by Saudi and Houthi forces. Saudi authorities have denied responsibility, saying that they did not find any evidence to show violations. 

HRW has called on Saudi Arabia to "immediately and urgently revoke any policy, whether explicit or de facto, to deliberately use lethal force on migrants and asylum seekers, including targeting them with explosive weapons and close-range attacks".

The rights group has also called on Riyadh to investigate and discipline those responsible for abuses. 

More Suspected Graves Found Near Canada Indigenous School

By Al Ahed Staff, Agencies

An Indigenous community in western Canada has discovered around 100 suspected unmarked graves near the site of a former residential school for forced assimilation of natives, according to the officials.

"What we found was heartbreaking and devastating," Jenny Wolverine, chief of the English River First Nation Indigenous group, told a news conference on Tuesday. "To date, there are 93 potential unmarked graves, 79 children and 14 infants."

"Let me be clear... this is not a final number," she said, warning that the death toll could be higher.

The discoveries, near the site of what was the Beauval Indian residential school in the province of Saskatchewan, were made using ground-penetrating radar.

According to the University of Regina, the residential school was demolished by former students after its closure in 1995.

Since 2021, Aborigine communities across Canada have registered more than 1300 unmarked graves near religious educational institutions, which took in Indigenous children for more than a century as part of a Canadian policy of forced assimilation of the country's native population.

By way of background, some 150,000 Indigenous children were forcefully separated from their families and packed into 139 residential schools across Canada from the late 19th century to the mid-1990s.

The residential system for the forced assimilation of Canada's indigenous population cut off these native children from their family, language, and culture.

Canada's colonial history was brought back into the spotlight after the discovery in the spring of 2021 of the first child graves associated with a school.

The residential schools for natives were run by the Catholic Church and the Canadian government, with the sole objective set to "kill the Indian" in the heart of the indigenous child.

In 2008, the Ottawa government, and in 2022, the Catholic Church’s Pope Francis offered their apologies to the native Canadians.

"We have heard 'I am sorry,'" Wolverine said, adding that native Canadians are asking instead that the government put words into action.

"We... ask Canada and Saskatchewan to accept the wrong" and "reflect in their approaches with Indigenous governments," Wolverine said, to ensure "history never repeats itself."

A national truth and reconciliation commission was set up to investigate the issue, which declared in 2015 that the forced placement of Indigenous children in the forced residential school system amounted to "cultural genocide" against the country's rightful owners.

The documents revealed that many students had lost their lives from exposure to outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis, influenza, and other contagious diseases.

Over 4100 children who died due to disease or in accidents at schools have been identified to date. They were often buried in unmarked graves, without identification or notice to their parents.

Moreover, while the residential schools may be closed, Indigenous children continue to be separated from their families in disproportionate numbers.

According to the country's census data, in 2016, more than 52 percent of foster care children were Indigenous, while Indigenous children only made up 7.7 percent of Canada's foster children in care population.

This systematic discrimination against Indigenous people in Canada has existed for decades. Despite making up just 5 percent of the country's population, almost 30 percent of the country's prisoners are believed to be of native origin.

Iran to continue support for Lebanon: FM

TEHRAN, (MNA) – Upon arrival in Beirut, the Iranain foreign minister said that Iran will continue its support for Lebanon, calling on other governments to help the Lebanese government amid the financial crisis.

"I am happy that I am in Lebanon today," Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said upon arrival at Beirut airport talking to reporters on Thursday.

He added that Iran wants nothing but good things to happen to Lebanon and stability for the country.

"In talks with high-ranking Lebanese officials, I will urge them to elect a president as soon as possible through understanding and dialogue," he said.

He went on to refer to his recent trip to Saudi Arabia and said that, "in the talks with the Saudi authorities, we heard constructive remarks with regard to helping the situation in Lebanon."

"We invite all countries to give economic assistance to Lebanon. Iran will continue its support to Lebanon," he added.

Amir-Abdollahian arrived in Lebanon from Damascus, the capital of Syria, where held talks with the President Bashar Assad, prime minister Hussein Arnous and his Syrian counterpart Faisal Mekdad.

Women victims of moral values decline, promiscuity in Western societies

 By Sara Atta

Women from the Leader's point of view - Part 30

TEHRAN – Statistics reveal a high rate of rape and sexual assault against women and girls in Western societies.

Rape is a serious crime that affects the lives of millions of people, mainly women and girls, around the world; Based on available data, it is estimated that approximately 35% of women around the world have experienced sexual harassment in their lives.

The presence of European countries among the mentioned countries is worthy of consideration in the study of countries with high rape statistics.

Statistics show that the sex trade in Europe is associated with low risk and high profit. European governments do not have the power or the will to fight the trafficking of girls, women, and children for sexual services.

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei in a speech on October 20, 2009, said, “There has always been a wrong outlook towards women. Today, the same wrong outlook exists in the West. Of course, a number of women may become outstanding, honorable, and modest personalities in Western systems. This holds true for men too. But the general outlook towards women, which has become firmly established in Western culture, is an objectifying and insulting outlook… It [the West] wants women to entertain men's eyes and it wants to use them in an illegitimate way. It wants women to have a special appearance in society. This is the greatest insult to women. Of course, they cover it up with certain beautiful words and give it different names. Respecting women means giving them the opportunity to develop, at different levels,..”

Governments have allocated very little funding to combat this issue and have provided few penalties and convictions for human traffickers in Europe. Even many policemen in European countries, sexually abuse victims of sex trafficking, instead of arresting them and returning them to their country. These victims are also abused by some doctors and lawyers who should support them.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, human trafficking has become the second fastest-growing criminal industry — just behind drug trafficking — with children accounting for roughly half of all victims.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has identified the Washington, DC area as one of the 14 major sex trafficking centers in the U.S. More than 100,000 American children are exploited through the commercial sex industry each year. The average age of entry into CSEC is 12 to 14 years old.

“They are the ones who must justify why they have used women as an object of promiscuity. Yesterday, I was given the figures for domestic violence - these figures were reported a week earlier - which said that two-thirds of the women throughout the world are beaten up by their husbands! I believe this is pitiful. It moves one to tears. This violence occurs mostly in developed Western countries, and result from sexual harassment and sexual demand that men have of women. This slandering is about the issue of women,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. (April 21, 2010)

While rape and widespread violence against women in Western societies is carried out on a large scale, Western governments as claimants of defending women's rights present their country as a model of an ideal society.

Statistics show that most Western women are victims of the decline of moral values and promiscuity in Western societies.

“Describing the Western attitude towards women as "freedom" is a deception: it has nothing to do with freedom. The cornerstone of Western culture is that women should be socially presented as a product, an object that men can benefit from; for instance, promoting immodest clothing is a step in this direction. Over the past 100 years, or more, violence against women in the West has been on the rise: there has been no decrease in violence in this regard. Sexual freedom and unprincipled sexual behaviors in the West have not curbed sexual desires, which are natural and instinctive. In the past, they used to promote the idea that men and women should be allowed to have free relationships with one another to diminish their sexual desires; later on, clearly, quite the opposite happened. The more that they allowed men and women to have free sexual relationships with one another, the more the resulting situation of sexual desires increased. Today, Westerners feel no shame in promoting homosexuality as a moral value: this makes any dignified human embarrassed, but Westerners have no shame. The Western view of women is perverted, flawed, misleading, and simply wrong,” the Leader of the Islamic Revolution noted. (July 11, 2012)

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• moral values
 
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Ben Gvir's racist comments are no different from those of Israel's founders

Joseph Massad

The superiority of Jewish colonial rights over the rights of the indigenous Palestinians has always been the hallmark of the Zionist movement

Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on 25 April, 2023 (AFP)

Last week, the US State Department and a number of Jewish and Israeli groups condemned comments by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir justifying restrictions on Palestinians' freedom of movement.

"My right, my wife's right, my kids' right to move around freely on the roads of Judea and Samaria is more important than the right of movement of Arabs. Sorry, Muhammad, but this is the reality," he declared.

The Americans likened his "inflammatory" rhetoric to racist statements. Lobby groups, including the Democratic Majority for Israel and the Israel Policy Forum, also condemned Gvir's statements as "hateful" and harmful to Israel's image abroad. Anti-occupation groups in Israel also joined in the condemnation.

Such condemnations from liberal Zionists and pro-Israeli western governments have become de rigueur since the Israeli parliament's passing of the Nation-State Law in 2018, which declared that "The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people."

But are these new laws and declarations any more racist than those of any Israeli government since 1948, or even of the Zionist movement since its inception in the late 1890s?

Zionist superiority

Right-wing Jewish settlers know Zionist and Israeli history very well. A group of settler leaders protested last week the right-wing Israeli government's alleged mild military actions against the colonised Palestinians, demanding a tougher approach.

One of the settler leaders, Yossi Dagan, was more explicit: "I call on the right-wing government to learn from the governments of Mapai how to fight terror." The Times of Israel explained that Dagan was "referencing the predecessor to the present-day centre-left Labor party, which governed the country during its early years and oversaw deadly reprisal operations in response to cross-border attacks."

'We are seeking to colonise a country against the wishes of its population, in other words, by force'

- Vladimir Jabotinsky

Dagan is correct of course. Indeed, the founder of Zionism himself, Theodor Herzl, had already confided to his diary in 1895 that the Jewish colonists should "gently" expropriate the natives' property and "try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country.

"The property owners will come over to our side," Herzl added. "Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

The superiority of Jewish colonial rights over the rights of the indigenous Palestinians has always been the hallmark of the Zionist movement.

As the most sober analyst of the Palestinian people's resistance to Zionism, the Ukrainian leader of the right-wing Revisionist Zionists, Vladimir Jabotinsky, likened the Palestinians to all people whose lands were being colonised by foreigners. Jabotinsky insisted that the Zionist project is clear: "We are seeking to colonise a country against the wishes of its population, in other words, by force."

Arguing against those who believe that Zionism is immoral for colonising the land of the Palestinians, Jabotinsky affirmed that "either Zionism is moral and just or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually, we have settled that question, and in the affirmative." He concluded: "Zionism is moral and just."

Jabotinsky further explained, in line with the racist philosophy of the English political theorist John Locke, who legitimised the theft of lands of Native Americans, that justice for Jews overrides the right of the Palestinians to their homeland: "The soil does not belong to those who possess land in excess but to those who do not possess any. It is an act of simple justice to alienate part of their land from those nations who are numbered among the great landowners of the world, in order to provide a place of refuge for a homeless, wandering people. And if such a big landowning nation resists, which is perfectly natural, it must be made to comply by compulsion." 

Colonial justifications and denials

The same Lockean principle guided the Polish leader of the Zionist movement in Palestine, David Ben Gurion. For him, as modern Europeans, colonising Jews were developing the land of Palestine, which allegedly lay fallow in the hands of the natives.

In 1924, Ben Gurion explicitly stated: "The national autonomy which we demand for ourselves we demand for the Arabs as well. But we do not admit their right to rule over the country to the extent that the country is not built up by them and still awaits those who will work it," meaning, European Jewish colonists.

Similarly, the Belorussian head of the Zionist Organisation, Chaim Weizmann, invoked his opposition to Palestinian self-determination in 1930 while supporting it for world Jewry, affirming that the "rights that the Jewish people has been adjudged in Palestine [by the League of Nations Mandate] do not depend on the consent, and cannot be subject to the will, of the majority of its present inhabitants."

Weizmann was clear that when the British promised the Zionists a national home in Palestine "the agreement of the Palestinian Arabs was not asked." The reason that Palestinian consent was of no import, he added, was on account of the "unique" nature of the Jewish "connection" to Palestine.

As for the Palestinians themselves, they could not "be considered as owning the country in the sense in which the inhabitants of Iraq or of Egypt possess their respective countries". To grant them self-determination or self-government or a "legislative assembly...would be to assign the country to its present inhabitants."

Despite their acknowledgements of the exact nature of Zionism as a European settler-colonial project and of the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance - even if they believed they had the moral and superior right to suppress it - Jewish colonisers understood that this would be seen as too dangerous in the context of the anti-colonial discourse of the 1960s and could alienate Israel's white liberal western supporters.

As a result, a new policy of outright denials of what Zionism entailed for the Palestinians became necessary. It was then that the Ukrainian-born Golda Meir, as prime minister in 1969, denied the very existence of the Palestinian people on the occasion of the second anniversary of the June 1967 conquest of the remainder of Palestine.

Then and now, Meir has been hailed internationally as an enlightened western stateswoman. Her hateful speech filled with lies such as "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist," has not diminished her stature in the eyes of western pro-Zionist liberals.

Same racism

Still, the superiority of Jewish rights over those of the Palestinians was not only expressed by the entire panoply of Zionism's founders, but also by Israel's liberal politicians, who insisted on the superiority of Jewish over Palestinian rights without any sense of embarrassment. The liberal South African-born Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, affirmed in 1972 that "Israeli self-determination should take moral and historical precedence over Palestinian self-determination, though it does not rule it out entirely."

It should be noted here that the rights Zionism accorded colonising Jews were not only superior to the rights of the Palestinian people but also to the rights of diaspora Jews. A horrifying illustration of this logic was in David Ben Gurion's response to a British offer, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, to take thousands of Jewish children from Germany directly to Britain: "If I knew it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), then I would opt for the second alternative, for we must weigh not only the life of these children but also the history of the people of Israel."

There are myriad examples of such assertions throughout Zionist and Israeli history, not to mention the dozens of Israeli discriminatory laws that grant Jews differential and superior rights over the Palestinians, none of which seems to offend the sensibilities of the many western pro-Israel liberals and many liberal Zionist Jewish organisations.

Why, then, is it that many among them seem to experience a grave sense of offence by Israel's Nation-State Law, Ben Gvir, and the declarations of other Jewish settlers?

The answer is simple: What the right-wing leaders of Israel and its Jewish settlers say and do with outright honesty is exposing the entire history of Zionism and Israel as one and the same with its racist present.

It is the liberal pro-Israel imperative to conceal the colonial and racist history of Zionism that is violated when the right-wing Israeli government, Ben Gvir and the settlers do so.

What threatens such liberal and imperial pro-Israel paeans is the refreshing honesty of Israel's right-wing government and that of Ben Gvir

It must be remembered that all US presidents have avowed their support for Zionism, including Joe Biden who declared himself a "Zionist". And it was none other than Barack Obama who chastised the Palestinians in his infamous Cairo speech in 2010 for resisting Israel and urged them to recognise its alleged "right to exist" as a Jewish state and "to recognise Israel's legitimacy".

He further accused Palestinians who challenge Israel's racist structure and laws of threatening Israel’s "destruction" and demanded that "Palestinians", but not Israelis, "must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed."

What threatens such liberal and imperial pro-Israel paeans is the refreshing honesty of Israel's right-wing government and that of Ben Gvir and the other Jewish settlers. It is this honesty that seems to cause the offence, not anti-Palestinian racism or Jewish supremacy.

Indeed, the insistence on the superiority of the rights of colonising Jews over the rights of indigenous Palestinians is what the liberal pro-Zionist chorus, including the Americans who have supported and sponsored Jewish settler-colonisation since 1948, has always accepted and defended unreservedly.

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.

The roots of Chandrayaan success

It was Jawaharlal Nehru’s passionate advocacy of a “scientific temper” and his pioneering role in shaping independent India’s national policy on science that made Chandrayaan 3 possible

CaptionsLaunch Vehicle Mark-3 blasting off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre Second Launch Pad in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, India  

Vikram Sarabhai (L) and Jawaharlal Nehru (R) at the inauguration of the first building on the campus of the Physical Research Laboratory, recognised as the cradle of the Indian space programme, on April  10, 1954

If the Indian moon probe Chandrayaan 3 was an unqualified success, it was due not only to the scientists who toiled on the project resolutely against odds but also due to Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who built, brick by brick as it were, India’s scientific and technical infrastructure from the day the country became independent.   

In his 17-year stint as Prime Minister from 1947 to 1964, Nehru gave India a national policy on science and built research and educational institutions in a bid to create a scientific temper to guide India in all its endeavours, whether scientific, economic or social.   

This is remarkable, in as much as most of Nehru’s colleagues in the freedom movement had no clear blueprint for a free India.  

Some like Mahatma Gandhi wanted India to return to its rural roots with village industries replacing the ‘ugly and exploitative’ urban factories. Others wanted India to revive its glorious Hindu past. Most just wanted the British to go.   
Even as he was Gandhi’s closest lieutenant in the freedom struggle, Nehru had a radically different notion of a free India. He advocated Soviet-style industrialization, application of modern science and technology and the development of a ‘scientific temper’ which he passionately believed, was the panacea for India’s economic and social ills.   

In an article in The Statesman in 2019, Praveen Davar recalls that in 1937, ten years before independence, Nehru told the National Academy of Sciences at Calcutta that “Science alone can solve India’s problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.”  

It was at Nehru’s initiative that the Congress party set up a National Planning Committee in 1939, and invited leading scientists to formulate plans for the scientific, technological and economic development of the country.   

Even when he was only the Interim Prime Minister in January 1947 (Eight months before Independence) Nehru laid the foundation for the National Physical Laboratory, India’s first national laboratory.   

To give the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) a boost, Prime Minister Nehru himself assumed its Chairmanship. He wanted to turn the CSIR, an institution set up in 1942 to do World War II-related research, into an instrument for the peaceful application of science in independent India.   
According to Britannica.com, the CSIR’s major achievements include, the development of the Light Combat Aircraft (LAC) “Tejas” and the supercomputer Flysolver; the creation of a relatively cheap antiretroviral drug for treating HIV infection, and the organization of expeditions and research studies in Antarctica.  

A number of national laboratories and research institutes were set up between 1947 and 1964, the year Nehru died of a stroke. Seventeen national laboratories, specialising in different areas of research, came up. Among them were, the Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute at Pilani in Rajasthan (1953); the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in 1958 and the National Aerospace Laboratories in Bengaluru (1959).   

Within a year after independence, Nehru set up the Atomic Energy Commission and established the Department of Atomic Energy. On 4 August 1956, the Nuclear Research Reactor APSARA was commissioned by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) near Bombay.   

APSARA was the first Nuclear Research Reactor in India and also Asia. Nehru was insistent that nuclear power be used only for peaceful purposes.   

“The use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes is more important for a country like India whose power resources are limited than for an industrially advanced country. It may be to the advantage of countries which have adequate power resources to restrain the use of atomic energy because they do not need that power. It would be to the disadvantage of a country like India if that is restricted or stopped,” he reasoned.  

Nehru pioneered space research in India as well. The Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) was set up in 1962. It established a Rocket Launching Facility at Thumba (TERLS) in Kerala.   

In 1963, the first rocket was launched. This eventually led to the successful Mangalyaan Mission to Mars in 2014 and the Chandrayaan 3 Mission to the moon in 2023.

In 1952, the first of the five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), patterned after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, was set up at Kharagpur in West Bengal. The other four came up later at Madras, Bombay, Kanpur and Delhi. By the last count, there were 23 IITs spread across the length and breadth of India.   

Preveen Davar says the expenditure on scientific research and science-based activities increased during Nehru’s tenure from about INR 10 million in 1948-49 to INR 850 million in 1965-66. The number of scientific and technical personnel rose from 188,000 in 1950 to 731,500 in 1964. Enrolment at the undergraduate stage in engineering and technological institutions went up from 13,000 in 1950 to 78,000 in 1964.   
Thus, Nehru laid the foundation for future Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rejuvenated Atma Nirbhar (self-reliance) and ‘Make-in-India’ projects.   

Nehru did not set the natural, experimental and exact sciences in opposition to human sciences, says historian Madhavan. K. Palat, an editor of the Collected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Oxford University Press).   

Nehru’s concept of the ‘scientific temper’ was akin to a ‘free soaring of the creative spirit’, Palat says in an article in The Hindu in 2021.  

To Nehru, knowledge was the product of empirical investigation and logical reasoning, usually known as the scientific method, and any other process led to error. 

The philosopher, historian, jurist, or literary critic had to be as scientific as the sociologist, economist, or linguist; and, unlikely as it might seem, they had to be no less so than the mathematician, astronomer, and zoologist.   

Nehru believed that the sciences admit of no ‘privileged knowledge.’   

He was thus firmly against its confinement to special classes or castes in society. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), like other scientific institutions in India, has many people in high positions from humble, lower middle class and non-anglicized backgrounds.  

And these men and women have scored as many successes as those from elite backgrounds and elite institutions.  

Nehru also abhorred gender discrimination. No wonder, 58 of the scientists in the Chandrayaan 3 project were women. 
For Nehru, the propagation of science and the scientific temper was linked to his mission to get his people to use scientific reasoning in whatever they did.   

Science he said, “Liberated the mind from superstition, dogma, ritual, habit, and custom, and permitted it to explore both the infinite expanse of the universe of nature and the limitless internal spaces of the mind.”  

In spite of the misuse of science for destructive purposes, Nehru believed that science and technology were inherently good and beneficial to mankind. Palat points out that Nehru “Firmly adhered to the position that true knowledge alone could bring awareness of danger even if such knowledge could be perverted.”  

Nehru regretted that scientists and laypeople tended to have a narrow and limited vision of science. He called for a broader vision of science.   

“We live in a scientific age, so we are told, but there is little evidence of this temper in the people anywhere or even in their leaders,” he noted and added:  

“The true scientist is the sage unattached to life and the fruits of action, ever seeking truth, no matter where this quest might lead him. For me, a true scientist is more spiritual than a man who may call himself religious and whose mind is limited by some religious values and does not go beyond it.”