India's Middle-East challenge

By: Sundeep Waslekar/ Forbes India

The Arab World is in a state of flux. Leaders are going out, leaders are coming in. It is an opportunity for India to renew its ties to the region

On Friday, December 17, 2010, when most Indians were watching a cricket Test match between India and South Africa (in which Jacques Kallis and Hashim Amla tortured Indian bowling with a 200-run stand), a sad but momentous event took place in a small town called Sidi Bouzid in faraway Tunisia. A 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself afire in protest against corruption and harassment by police. This isolated incident would anger Tunisians so much that a revolution would ensue and overthrow the 23-year-old regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Within weeks, it would spread to Egypt, Libya and several other countries in North Africa and the Middle East, finally blossoming into the Jasmine Revolution. The Arab World would stand redefined and several countries - including India - would see their strategic and economic interests hanging in balance.

As much as 70% of India's oil imports comes from the Middle East and North Africa. A large portion of our exports and imports pass through the Suez Canal. In recent years, a large number of Indian companies have set up businesses there. If they were to be uprooted, investor hearts would burn. As many as five million Indians live in the region and their safety cannot be taken for granted. All this requires that we, in India, understand the conflict in all its facets.

To do so, we turn to someone who has a first-hand experience of the region. Sundeep Waslekar, president of Strategic Foresight Group, a think tank, has worked closely with many governments and leaders of the 22-nation Arab League. He is the author of Cost of Conflict in the Middle East and The Blue Peace, both reports on the Middle East. He also advises governments around the world and makes recommendations on policy and strategy.

So, over to Sundeep Waslekar.

We, in India, are at the risk of not understanding the changes that are taking place in the Middle East. The problem with Indian strategic thought is that it is completely obsessed with the US, Pakistan and China. It doesn't see the storm gathering in a region that we are completely dependent on oil for. But we can ignore it only at our peril.

So, why did the protests happen in the region and why have they ballooned into revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya so far? Actually, I am not surprised at all. In my frequent visits to the region, I could sense the desperation that people had been pushed into. Like the time I was in Cairo.

Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the then President Hosni Mubarak, heard that I was in Cairo and wanted to meet me. When I went to see her, she asked me to visit some slums in the city. Now, she is a kind lady working to improve the livelihood of these poor people. Her emphasis was not just to give them a better life but also give them better dignity. She would build colonies for them and set up cultural and sports centres there.
 
I could never understand why she wanted me to go and see the slums. But I went anyway. And boy, the sight I saw! The slums there were worse than anything you could see in India in terms of filth and the low level of hygiene. In the outskirts of Cairo, there are huge garbage dumps; people make holes in those dumps and live there. It is not just a question of inequity but of indignity. What I saw there was not just the development deficit or the democratic deficit. It was the dignity deficit.

Well, now any reasonable human being would protest against this quality of life but in Egypt, there have been all kinds of blockage including that of free speech. You can't blog or express any sort of dissent. And that is where the anger against Mubarak came from. What his wife and her well-meaning friends were doing on their own didn't matter in the end. She was the President's wife but even she could not get the state to step in. The state run by her husband perpetuated inequity and it paid the price.

This is a lesson for India. There are limits to which individual actions can go. To bring about real change, you need a change in state policy.

The Middle East has been a tinderbox for several years. The triple deficit - democratic, development and dignity - is simply untenable in any society. In the Arab World, the conflict with Israel adds to the people's anguish. While Israel has moved ahead despite the conflict, the lack of freedom in the Arab countries has suppressed the potential of youth. In the 1990s, Al-Qaeda tried to mobilise such young people with a religious ideology. But in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, its armed strength was cut from about 1,000 in 2001 to less than 100 now by the US-led War on Terror. Thus the project of a supra-state based on religious ideology has diminished. As a result, in the last five to six years, Arab youth have directed their ire at their own regimes. Presidential elections are due in Egypt in September 2011 and Hosni Mubarak wanted to contest himself or nominate his son. That had created a stir in the crowds that gathered at Tahrir Square. The fruit vendor's suicide in Tunisia ignited it in December 2010, instead of September or December 2011. The Arab youth and indeed the elite benefiting from the system have been whispering about the coming crisis to Western scholars. But it fell on deaf ears.

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