1. Art and Diseño

COMMENT
6
OMAN TRIBUNE
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2015
No Imran fever now
At the same time he has tried a course correction
Thorn removed
S
UPERLATIVES of all kinds were used by the Indian media to describe the
visit to India of US President Barack Obama. The most common word used
was ‘historic.’ Though this description may have been exaggerated, the visit
was noteworthy since Obama was the first US president to make a trip twice
during his tenure. Ever since India attained freedom, each of four US presidents, who have visited India, have come just once. Moreover, the visit attains some kind of symbolic significance as he is the first American president to be invited as the chief guest at the Republic Day parade. The American president’s visit has not been a futile exercise although he left without
getting any kind of assurance from Modi on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, Obama got a commitment from the Chinese in this regard.
But the American president had every reason to feel elated since the barriers
in the way of the operationalisation of the 2008 nuclear agreement with India were broken. The impasse had stood in the way of smooth Indo-American relations. The sharp thorn that did not allow any kind of business deals
or cooperation to take place was the civil liability clause that created major
problems for US suppliers. India will now create an insurance pool of Rs15
billion, which will take care of suppliers’ liability. General Insurance Corporation and four other insurers will put in Rs7.5 billion. The operators
and suppliers will provide the remaining Rs7.5 billion.
With the major thorn in the way of
smooth Indo-US relations thrown away
by Obama and Modi, the two countries are
moving ahead on a new road. This was evident in the number of agreements in many The two countries are
areas like defence, business and international relations. Obama and Modi seem to moving ahead on a
have been on the same page in the context of new road
China. The two leaders signed a joint statement that charged China with provoking
conflicts with its neighbours over control
of the South China Sea. The statement also recommended reviving plans
to implement a loose security network involving the United States, India,
Japan and Australia. In this area, Obama has succeeded where many previous presidents had failed. It is a fact that for a long time successive American administrations have sought to have a strong partnership with India,
partly to offset China’s rise. All previous Indian prime ministers had rejected the idea. But Modi seems to have been thawed by Obama’s warm hug on
arrival at Delhi airport.
A number of deals for the supply of sophisticated armaments to India were
signed. At the same time the US president made a pledge of $4 billion in
investments and loans with the aim of seeking to release what he called the
“untapped potential” of a business partnership with India. Obama also complained about the low level of trade as India accounted for only 2 per cent
of US imports and 1 per cent of its exports. In other words, trade amount to
just $100 billion annually while Sino-US trade was over $ 500 billion. “We
are moving in the right direction,” concluded the American president setting the stage for ensuring that there was a major improvement in relations
between the world’s largest democracy and the world’s oldest democracy.
In the bargain, the business bigwigs in both countries are hoping that the
Obama-Modi partnership will yield tangible benefits for them.
T
HE Imran Khan fever has
subsided for a while in the
wake of the Peshawar tragedy. Realising that merely
protest politics will not pay,
Imran has also tried course correction.
He says that he would now focus on better performance in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) a province governed by his party. He has finally realised that by keeping the KP government engaged with
his sit-ins and public meetings, he had
also disturbed its focus. The terrorists
were quick to see security lapses in Peshawar and made gruesome use of them.
Meanwhile the case of a judicial commission, to probe alleged election rigging, has also become tedious.
Imran has been alleging all along that
there was a grand conspiracy , particularly in Punjab, to snatch victory from
his party. The government team for the
talks, led by Finance Minister Ishaq
Dar, now insists that the proposed judicial commission should be specifically tasked to look into the conspiracy charge. Imran’s lawyers must have
told him that such a general and sweeping charge would be difficult to prove
in a legal forum. So he stopped using
the word ‘conspiracy’ for a while. But
in his latest press conference, he has
used it again. And yet he is not willing
to put this word in the proposed commission’s terms of reference. The government side is trying to make the most
of this contradiction.
Within a month of Peshawar tragedy, Imran got married to a well-known
anchor. Marriages are a personal affair
but then Imran is no ordinary person.
His wedding, though kept very simple
due to a sombre national mood, was still
highlighted by a news hungry media.
While there was nothing wrong in remarrying, the timing was less than perfect. Party leaders did advise Imran to
wait but he decided to go ahead. In the
conservative Pashtun society, no weddings take place till 40 days of any demise in the family. And here, more than
a hundred children had been butchered
by the Taliban, who were once favoured
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VIEWPOINT
Javed Hafez
not allow PTI members to go to the national or Punjab Assemblies for they are
fake, in his opinion. And yet, he wants
to remain part of the system. This in my
opinion is a positive sign even though
self-contradictory.
Imran has clearly failed so far in
achieving his objective of forcing early general elections. But he has dented government credibility through repeated allegations of corruption. It is
heartening that people have now started voting on the basis of performance.
The way the Peoples Party was booted
out in the last elections clearly shows
that the electorate has matured.
For their future survival, the Muslim
League (Nawaz) will have to perform at
the centre and in Punjab, the PPP will
have to perform in Sindh and the PTI of
Imran will have to give a good account
of itself in KP.
All said and done, Imran remains an
important figure in Pakistani politics.
He represents a real challenge to the
government which may strengthen his
position by its own poor performance
and blunders.
Imran still remains a force to be reckoned with. Imran Khan fever may have
subsided but it is not over.
About the author
Javed Hafez is a former Pakistani
ambassador to the Sultanate.
Even low-level allies have been able to accumulate wealth, Leonid Bershidsky writes
H
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Imran also uses the logic of convenience in politics. He says while elections were fair in KP, those were rigged
elsewhere. It was the same Election
Commission that conducted the polls
all over the country. And now Imran has
announced that his party would contest
upcoming Senate elections. He would
Putin’s golden eggs
We often repent of our first thoughts, and scarce ever of our second.
Horace Walpole
by Imran. No wonder, some parents
shouted at the newly married couple
when they went to the school .
Imran thinks politics is quite similar to cricket. And he sincerely thinks
that the election game was fixed to keep
him out of power. That is why
he made repeated appeals to the
‘third umpire’
which in this
case was the military establishment. But they
were just not interested in sullying their hands in a civilian mess. That
forced him to up the ante. He tried the
idea of civil disobedience which misfired. Then he announced plan D which
was about bringing life in major cities
to a halt. This too was only a partial success. Real politics is not as simple as a
cricket match.
ERE’S a story that
sheds some light on
why Russian President Vladimir Putin is so firmly entrenched as
his country’s ruler and sole serious decision maker. It has to
do with the vast wealth even his
low-level allies -- not to mention his inner circle -- have
been able to accumulate while
he’s been in power.
London tabloid the Daily
Mail has been writing about
Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s Spanish villa since
2012, when a British contractor working in the ritzy Marbella area attributed the palatial building, then under construction, to Putin.
The last Daily Mail readers
heard about it just a week ago
was that the Russian leader was
planting a vineyard on the estate. The Spanish press, too,
has had a lot of fun with the Putin mansion story.
Now it appears that that the
home and the vineyard had
nothing to do with Putin: An
investigation by the team of
Russia’s leading anti-corrup-
tion activist Alexei Navalny revealed that it’s owned by Zoya
Ponomareva, the daughter of
Valery Ponomarev, a Russian
parliament member from the
remote region of Kamchatka.
He never declared any foreign
property -- that would have
raised questions in a country
that expects politicians to own
assets only in Russia.
He is, however, a wealthy
man: His company makes car
licence plates and all kinds of
cess to Putin. It’s enough that
Ponomarev supports the proPutin United Russia party, and
his fish business in Kamchatka is the party’s major donor
in the region.
The parliament seat is just
a tangible sign of his relative
importance in the Russian establishment.
And yet his house on the
Costa del Sol is, in the eyes of
locals and British journalists,
“fitting for a king... or Rus-
Their Bentleys and Porsches still zip
through Moscow in these lean times
official stationery used by Russian government agencies.
Ponomarev is not one of
Russia’s richest men, nor even
one of the 15 ‘Government Order Kings’ named annually by
the Russian edition of Forbes
magazine.
That is perhaps good for
him: Ponomarev’s main business, fully dependent on
the government’s largesse,
doesn’t require exclusive ac-
sian president,” as the Daily
Mail wrote. Men like Ponomarev number in the thousands. Their names are hardly ever in newspapers. Many of
the husbands of ‘The 50 Richest Wives of Russian Officials’
are obscure men from the middle layer of the Russian government hierarchy who, according to their income declarations, aren’t rich at all (owning property is what wives, sons
and daughters, and often more
distant relatives, are for).
It is their Bentleys and
Porsches that still zip through
Moscow traffic in these lean
times, and it’s their villas that
investigative reporters find in
European resort towns and in
walled compounds outside the
Russian capital.
The reason they work as
humble bureaucrats or sit in
regional legislatures, wasting
valuable time that could be better spent making money, is that
the money-making part of their
lives is dependent on the bureaucratic or political one.
In a country where private
property is protected only if its
owner in good standing with
the right people, and where
the state’s importance both as
a regulator and as the owner of
the most lucrative assets keeps
growing, these men know they
have to be part of the system
to keep and increase their
wealth.
It’s tempting to theorise that
these people could overthrow
Putin in a palace coup now that
Russia’s a poorer country and
western sanctions threaten
their wealth. Everything they
own, however, is only theirs
because ‘the state’ has allowed
them to have it.
Any change that might upset
the balance of ‘the state’ would
mean making new deals, forging new allegiances, and potentially losing lucrative commissions and assets to hungrier newcomers.
The United Russia crowd
already has its hands full taking care of what’s already been
built, seized, stolen or carved
out. These palaces are, in a
sense, all Putin’s -- but he lets
his people use them.
That’s why there will be
no palace coup even if all the
‘Putin mansions’ are confiscated by hostile Europeans.
The goose named Putin will
lay more golden eggs. Without him, who knows.
WP-Bloomberg
About the author
Leonid
Bershidsky,
a
Bloomberg View contributor,
is a Berlin-based writer.
Out-of-date Rajoy not in favour with Spaniards
The prime minister has been eclipsed in recent surveys by Pablo Iglesias, Esteban Duarte writes
M
ARIANO Rajoy is
struggling to convince
Spaniards he can lead
the country into a new
period of prosperity as a younger generation of politicians challenges his grip on power.
The 60-year-old prime minister has been eclipsed in recent
surveys by Pablo Iglesias, 36,
leader of the new, anti-austerity
party Podemos. Socialist leader
Pedro Sanchez, 42, says Rajoy is
out-of-date.
Even within the government,
43-year-old Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria’s
approval rating was 11 percentage points higher than her bosses,
in a Metroscopia poll for El Pais
newspaper released last month.
Spanish voters are desperate for change after a seven-year
economic slump pushed unemployment to a record 26 per cent
in 2013.
While Rajoy has stabilised the
economy and forecasts the fastest
growth in seven years for 2015,
his support has plunged amid a series of corruption scandals.
“Youth is not a political asset in
itself, but Rajoy looks very old,”
Podemos founder and executive
committee member Juan Carlos
Monedero, 51, said in an interview. “He would look like a member of the Soviet old guard if he
was sat round a table with Sanchez and Iglesias.”
The prime minister will kicked
off his battle to prove his enduring
relevance to Spaniards on Friday
in Madrid when his People’s Party begins its national conference.
That will mark the beginning of a
year of campaigning which will include local and regional elections
in May and a ballot in Catalonia in
September before a general election due around the end of year.
Rajoy appointed 33-year-old
lawmaker Pablo Casado spokesman for the local election campaign on Jan. 12.
While the official agenda will
be focused on PP plans to nurture the economy and boost liv-
ing standards, talk on the sidelines may be dominated by the
release on bail last night of the
party’s former treasurer, Luis
Barcenas.
Barcenas told the National
Court in 2013 that he helped
manage a secret party slush fund
over 20 years.
He named Rajoy among the
beneficiaries and gave the court
handwritten ledgers showing the
payments. Rajoy has repeatedly
denied any wrongdoing. Prosecutors are seeking a 42 1/2-year
jail term for Barcenas for his role
in the scheme.
The former treasurer’s reemergence casts a shadow over Rajoy’s
efforts to rebuild his support.
The PP was in third place on
19.2 per cent, 25 percentage
points below its vote in the 2011
general election, in a Metroscopia
poll for El Pais released January
11. Podemos led with 28.2 per
cent. Metroscopia interviewed
1,000 people between January 7 and 8 and the margin of
error was 3.2 percentage points.
That survey confirmed a trend
shown by other pollsters including stated-owned CIS and My
Word. A Sigma Dos poll for Mediaset Espana released on January 20 showed support for Rajoy’s
party recovering to lead Podemos
by 29.4 per cent to 26.2 per cent.
Spanish voters are
desperate for change
after a seven-year
economic slump
Rajoy isn’t the only European leader offering experience as
an antidote to the magnetism of
youth. Angela Merkel, 60, still
dominates German politics in
her third term as chancellor, JeanClaude Juncker became president
of the European Commission last
year when he was 59 after spending 18 years as prime minister of
Luxembourg and Giorgio Napolitano finally announced his decision to step down as president of
Italy last week at 89.
Rajoy on December 26 said he
plans to see out his term and run
for re-election.
“Spain is focused and clearly
set on the path to economic recovery,” the premier said Thursday in parliament. “We avoided
some very difficult cuts, especially in pensions and unemployment
benefits.”
A spokesman at the party’s Madrid headquarters, who asked not
to be named, declined to comment on whether the prime minister’s age poses a problem for
the party.
Other parties will probably follow the lead of the Socialists, who
elected Sanchez leader last July
to replace Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, who’d been jousting with Rajoy and the PP for the past three
decades.
The 62-year-old head of the
United Left, Cayo Lara, said Nov.
16 he won’t run a candidate for
next general elections, leaving Alberto Garzon, 29, the youngest
Spanish lawmaker, as favorite to
replace him.
Rosa Diez, the 62-year-old
leader of the centrist group UPD,
hasn’t decided whether to lead
her party into the general election, raising the hopes of Irene
Lozano, 43, Vozpopuli website
reported last month.
“Almost all candidates will be
newcomers, with a different style,
and more contemporary ways,”
Antoni Gutierrez, a Barcelonabased political consultant who
advises Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa.
“That will make the contrast
between the past and the future
all the more apparent.”
Indeed, the PP itself is not immune to the national appetite for
change.
The party has a ready-made
replacement for Rajoy in Saenz,
according to Antonio Barroso, a
political analyst at Teneo Intel-
ligence in London. “She is the
one that has been accumulating
more power,” said Barroso, a former pollster.
“She is well placed.”
Rajoy may need to prove he can
turn around the party’s fortunes
in May’s local elections to keep
a lid on concerns within his own
party that it too might be better
served with a younger face on its
campaign posters, according to
Jose Ignacio Torreblanca, head of
the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“The municipal elections could
call into question Rajoy’s leadership,” Torreblanca in a telephone
interview.
“That will be the moment for a
decision on whether to change the
candidate or not as the party heads
towards the general election.”
WP-Bloomberg
About the author
Esteban Duarte writes regularly
for the Washington Post.