Where Have Afia’s Children Gone?

Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. “I strongly doubt if the children are alive,” he says. “Probably, they have expired.” He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved.

As a witness, supposedly, to the mysterious 2008 re-appearance of Aafia Siddiqui – the “most wanted woman in the world”, according to former US attorney general John Ashcroft – I guess this 73-year-old Pakistani geologist is used to the limelight. But the children, I ask him again. What happened to the children? 

Dr Faruqi is Aafia Siddiqui’s uncle and he produces a photograph of his niece at the age of 13, picnicking in the Margalla hills above Islamabad, a smiling girl in a yellow shalwar khameez, half-leaning against a tree. She does not look like the stuff of which Al-Qaeda operatives are made.

Yet she is now a semi-icon in Pakistan, a country which may well have been involved in her original kidnapping and which now oh-so-desperately wants her back from an American prison. Her children, weirdly, disconcertingly, have been forgotten. 

Aafia Siddiqui’s story is now as famous in Pakistan as it is notorious in a New York City courtroom where her trial for trying to kill an American soldier in the Afghan city of Ghazni in 2008 – she was convicted in February 2010 and faces a minimum of 20 years in prison on just one of the charges against her – is regarded as a symbol of American injustice. “Shame on America,” posters scream in all of Pakistan’s major cities. 

She is known as the “grey lady of Bagram”, supposedly tortured for five years in America’s cruel Afghan prison. President Asif Ali Zardari has asked American envoy Richard Holbrooke to repatriate Siddiqui under the Pakistan-US prisoner exchange scheme, while the PM Gilani has dubbed her a “daughter of the nation”. Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif promises to demand her release. But none of them mention the children. Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam are their names. 

Ahmed was returned to Pakistan from Afghanistan in 2008, but Dr Faruqi tells me he doesn’t believe for a moment that it is Aafia Siddiqui’s son. “He came here to stay with me, but he said he didn’t know Aafia until he was taken to Ghazni. He said to me: ‘I was in the big earthquake in Afghanistan and my brothers and sisters were killed in their home while I was out fetching water – that’s what saved my life.’ He told me that after the earthquake, he was put in an orphanage in Kabul. He was shown a photograph of my niece Aafia and said he did not know this lady, that he had never seen her before. Then he was taken to Ghazni and told to sit next to this woman – my niece. The boy is intelligent. He is simple. He is honest.” 

All such mysteries require a “story-so-far”. It goes like this.

Aafia Siddiqui, a 38-year-old neuroscientist, an MIT alumna and Brandeis university PhD, disappeared after leaving her sister’s home for Karachi airport in 2003, taking Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam with her.

The Americans say she was a leading Al-Qaeda operative. So does her ex-husband. She had re-married Ammar al-Baluchi, currently in Guantanamo Bay, a cousin of Ramzi Yousef who was convicted for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. Not, you might, say, a healthy curriculum vitae in the West’s obsessive “war on terror”. In 2004, the UN identified her as an Al-Qaeda operative. 

But released inmates from the notorious American prison at Bagram near Kabul– where torture is commonplace and at least three prisoners have been murdered – have stated that there was a woman held there, a woman whose nightly screams prompted them to go on hunger strike. She was dubbed the “grey lady of Bagram”. At her New York trial, Siddiqui demanded that Jewish members of the jury be dismissed, she fired her own defence lawyers who said she had become unbalanced after torture; Siddiqui blurted out that she had been tortured in secret prisons before her arrest. “If you were in a secret prison … where children were murdered…” she said. 

And so to the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul. It was here that Afghan police stopped her in 2008, carrying a handbag which supposedly contained details of chemical weapons and radiological agents, notes on mass casualty attacks on US targets and maps of Ghazni. American soldiers and FBI agents were summoned to question her and arrived in Ghazni without realising that Siddiqui was in the same room, sitting behind a curtain. According to their evidence, she managed to take one of their M-4 assault rifles and opened fire. She missed but was cut down by two bullets from a 9mm pistol fired by one of the soldiers. Hence the charges. Hence the conviction. 

She wasn’t helped by an alleged statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – the man who supposedly planned 9/11 and who is the uncle of her second husband, Ammar al-Baluchi – who claimed that Aafia Siddiqui was a senior Al-Qaeda agent. But then, he’d just been waterboarded 183 times in a month – which hardly makes his evidence, to use a phrase, water-tight. 

The questions are obvious. What on earth was a Pakistani American with a Brandeis degree doing in Ghazni with a handbag containing American targets? And why, if her family was so fearful for her, didn’t they report her missing in 2003, go to the press and tell the story of the children? Ahmed – son of Siddiqui or Afghan orphan, depending on your point of view – is now staying with Siddiqui’s sister, Fauzia, in Karachi; but she refuses to let him talk to journalists. The Americans have shown no interest in him – even less in the other two, younger children. Why not? 

It’s odd, to say the least, that Dr Faruqi also maintains that in 2008 – before the Ghazni incident – Aafia Siddiqui turned up at his home in the suburbs of Islamabad. “She was wearing a burqa and got out of the car, just outside here,” he says, pointing to the tree-lined street outside his office window. “I only caught sight of her once, and I said ‘You have changed your nose’. But it was her. We talked about the past, her memories, it was her voice. She said the ISI (the Inter-Services Intelligence) had let her come here. She wanted to get away, to go back to Afghanistan where she said the Taliban would protect her. She said that since her arrest, she knew nothing of her children. Someone told her they had been sent to Australia.” 

More questions. If Siddiqui was a “ghost prisoner” in Afghanistan, how come she turned up at Dr Faruqi’s home in Islamabad? Why would she wear an Afghan “burqa” in the cosmopolitan capital of her own country? Why did she not talk more about her children? Why could she not show her face to her own uncle? Did she really come to Islamabad? 

Fauzia Siddiqui is now touring Pakistan to publicise her sister’s “unfair” trial, her torture at the hands of Americans. Most of the Pakistan press have taken up her story with little critical attention to the allegations against her. She has become a proto-martyr, a martyr-in-being; if her story is comprehensible, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. But America’s constant protestations of ignorance about her whereabouts before 2008 have an unhappy ring about them. 

And the children? Rarely written about in Pakistan, they, too, in a sense, were “disappeared” from the story – until the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, paid an uneasy visit to Pakistan this week and, according to Fauzia, told the Interior minister, Rehman Malik, that “the children of Aafia Siddiqui will be sent home soon”. Was Karzai referring to the other two children? Or to all three, including the “real” Ahmed? And if Aafia’s two/three children are in Afghanistan, where have they been kept? In an orphanage? In a prison? And who kept them? The Afghans? The Americans?

What Happens to People Depends Not Merely on Institutions But also on People’s Behavior & Social Interactions

The ongoing theories of justice in mainstream political philosophy are strongly dependent today on a way of thinking largely initiated by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, with an overwhelming concentration on a hypothetical “social contract” that the people of a sovereign state can be imagined to have endorsed.

This presumed contract is supposed to identify the “just institutions” needed. This “contractarian” approach is the dominant influence in the contemporary political philosophy of justice, and its limited focus has narrowed the analysis of justice unduly, and in particular distancing the theories of justice from the actual lives of people. 

In contrast with the contractarian tradition, a number of other Enlightenment theorists (Adam Smith, the Marquis de Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, for example) took a variety of approaches that shared a common interest in the people’s actual lives, rather than on institutional perfection. What happens to people depends not merely on the institutions that exist, but also on other influences, in particular people’s behaviour and social interactions.

This alternative approach has much to offer to contemporary political philosophy and also to our actual practices and policies. 

If our concentration has to be on the actual lives of people, the question that immediately arises is how to understand the richness and poverty of human lives. The approach I have tried to pursue has largely focused on the freedoms, in various forms, that people enjoy.

This differs sharply from many other approaches to assessing the demands of justice: for example, looking for the fulfilment of certain formal rights that people should have, and whether or not these rights can be actually exercised. Many of these rights can, of course, have an instrumental rule in advancing more free social lives, but the pursuit of justice can hardly stop there.

Individual freedoms can be seen to be a social commitment, and this requires the state to play an active role in advancing the substantive freedom of the people to do what they have reason to value, as well as to know what is feasible. 

If it is important not to be restricted by the reading of freedom within institutional libertarianism, the need to go beyond the utilitarian concentration on the mental metrics of utilities in the form of pleasures or desire-fulfilments is no less strong. Even if chronically deprived persons — the hopelessly poor, or long-term unemployed — learn to come to terms with and accept cheerfully their deprived lifestyles, that cultivated cheerfulness will not eliminate the real deprivation of freedom from which they will continue to suffer. 

Freedom has many aspects, and it is necessary both to distinguish between them and to choose the focus of analysis depending on the nature of the problem being addressed.

For example, in dealing with the issue of torture and its unacceptability as a means to other — allegedly more important — ends, what would be particularly important is to see the relevance here of the classical libertarian aspects of freedom, arguing for the immunity of every human being from forcible infliction of pain by others. 

When, however, the focus is on issues of economic and social inequality in the lives that different people lead, the relevant aspects of freedom can be captured better by a fuller assessment of what is called, in the new literature, “capabilities”, which reflect the actual opportunities of a person.

It is easily checked that means such as incomes and other resources, while valuable in the pursuit of capabilities, are not themselves indicators of the capabilities and freedoms that people actually have.

The real opportunities that different persons enjoy are  substantially influenced by variations of individual circumstances (eg age, disability, talents, gender, maternity) and also by disparities in the natural and the social environment (eg epidemiological conditions, pollution, prevalence of crime). An exclusive concentration on inequalities in income distribution cannot be adequate for an understanding of economic inequality. 

Consider an example. Being disabled has a double effect, in reducing the person’s ability to earn an income (the “earning handicap”) and in making the conversion of income into good living that much harder, thanks to the costs of assistance, and the impossibility of fully correcting certain types of disadvantages caused by disability (the “conversion handicap”).

A person who happens to be physically disabled may need to pay for assistance, and even then may not become able to move around freely.

The conversion handicap is routinely missed in poverty relief programs that concentrate only on the lowness of incomes. 

As Wiebke Kuklys, a brilliant young student at Cambridge, has recently shown (she died tragically shortly after completing her work), the conversion handicap for British families with disabled members is four or five times as important as the income handicap, in terms of their respective impacts on deprivation. A system of poverty removal that concentrates only on the lowness of income, in particular whether a person’s — or family’s — income is below the poverty line, will catch the earning handicap, but not the conversion handicap, and this could make the poverty relief program fundamentally inadequate. Indeed, the nature of every serious economic and social problem may be significantly influenced by taking the importance of freedom and capabilities seriously. 

What about power — a concept that closely relates to the idea of freedom? To say that a person is powerless in reversing the kind of neglect that they have been experiencing can also be expressed in the language of capability: they are not capable of reversing the neglect from which they suffer. And yet there is some evocative strength and rhetorical force in the language of power, particularly in dealing with powerlessness, that the word capability, which is really a term of art, cannot really match.

Analysing power and powerlessness can help to generate a better understanding of the divided world in which we live. Mary Wollstonecraft’s wrath and bitter irony about the subjugation of women complemented her cool reasoning against gender hierarchy in her 1792 classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 

Or take Steve Biko’s remarks on “powerlessness” in the apartheid-based South Africa in the 1970s. “Powerlessness breeds,” Biko said, “a race of beggars who smile at the enemy and swear at him in the sanctity of his toilet; who shout ‘Baas’ willingly during the day and call the white man a dog in their buses as they go home.”

If capability failure of any kind is a matter of concern, those related to people’s inability to act freely or speak openly because of the power of others have special urgency. This is an important concern in the advancement of freedom and capability, since societies involve conflicts as well as togetherness and mutual support.

The pursuit of justice in enhancing freedoms and capabilities in peoples’ lives has to be alive to both. 

Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist, teaches philosophy and economics at Harvard and is author of The Idea of Justice.

Happiness Relating to Wealth Depends if You Making More Than Others

The Beatles sang that money can’t buy you love. But what about happiness? Research consistently shows that the more money people have, the more likely they are to report being satisfied with their lives.

And that makes sense: money buys you things that make life easier and more satisfying; the easier your life, the happier you tend to be. That relationship isn’t entirely linear, since there’s a limit to how much wealth can please you; the happiness benefit of an increasing income is especially powerful among people who don’t have much money to start with, and diminishes as wealth increases.

But studies also reveal that as average income levels have risen over time — in the U.S. and European nations, for example — residents of those countries have not reported being any happier than people were 30 or 40 years ago.

It’s a paradox that while income and happiness may be associated within a population at any given moment, overall economic growth does not appear to correspond to a boost in national satisfaction over time.

To understand why, researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University decided to break down how individual people evaluate their income. What does wealth mean to people? Previous work has suggested that people tend to value their own wealth more — and are happier — when it compares favorably to everyone else’s. The so-called reference-income hypothesis holds that it’s not simply how much money you make that contributes to satisfaction, but how much more money you make than, say, the national average.

The higher your salary than the norm, the happier you tend to be. That could explain in part why populations as a whole do not experience sunnier dispositions with economic growth, since a majority of individuals may not fall above the national income average.

But the reference-income hypothesis is rather abstract. The researchers wondered whether there was a more nuanced way to capture how people valued their income. They reasoned that people tend to make specific comparisons of personal wealth, not only with the average income of the larger population, but with the individual incomes of their neighbors, colleagues at work or friends from college. And the higher their rank, the greater their sense of happiness and self-worth would likely be.

“For example, people might care about whether they are the second most highly paid person, or the eighth most highly paid person, in their comparison set,” write the authors, Chris Boyce, a psychologist at the University of Warwick, and Simon Moore, a psychologist at Cardiff University.

Working with a data set of 12,000 adults in Britain, Boyce and Moore assigned a rank to each participant based on income, and compared these positions to their answers on life-satisfaction surveys. The status rankings were determined using a statistical formula that incorporated factors such as geography, age, gender and educational status.

So, a participant’s income could be ranked along with those of neighbors, for instance, or with those of other similarly educated peers.

Boyce and Moore found that an individual’s rank, viewed this way, was a stronger predictor of happiness than absolute wealth. The higher a person ranked within his age group or neighborhood, the more status he had and the happier he was regardless of how much he made in dollars (or, in the study’s case, pounds). “What we’re trying to do is understand and explain why, over 30 to 40 years, the large economic growth we have experienced hasn’t made us any happier,” says Boyce.

“If absolute income matters, as we increased our income, everybody should get happier at a national level, but we don’t seem to. So what we are showing is that in terms of life satisfaction, rank is a better predictor than absolute wealth.”

The data did not include an analysis of which ranking scales were more powerfully associated with satisfaction — that is, whether you are happier or not if you make more than your neighbor or if you make more than others in your profession — but that’s the next step in the research. Money may not buy you love but it may be enough to purchase status — and a little bit of happiness.

Hindu’s N Ram in Panic Threatens to Initiate Legal Action Against Indian Express for its Internal Tussle Story

A bitter battle has broken out among family members for control of one of the country’s oldest and most respected media companies, Kasturi & Sons Ltd, the publisher of the 132-year-old English newspaper The Hindu and business daily The Hindu Business Line. 

At the heart of this battle is the proposed retirement of publisher and the group Editor-in-Chief N Ram and his decision to dig his heels in. 

The first casualty in the battle is N Murali, Ram’s younger brother and the company’s managing director. He was divested of his powers in last week of March 2010 and replaced with K Balaji, a member of the extended family and also a board member.

According to people close to the developments, the board is split, one supporting Ram and the other seeking his retirement.

These sources said that at a meeting held in September 2009, Murali, who also looked after administrative processes at the company, proposed governance norms for retirement of family members on the board. “While the retirement age for all employees at Kasturi is 60 years, there was no such stipulation for board members. It was proposed by Murali that 65 years be set as the retirement age for board members,” said the sources.

The Kasturi board has 12 members, descending from four cousins—G Narasimhan (father of N Ram, N Ravi, N Murali); S Parthasarathy (father of Malini Parthasarathy, Nirmala Lakshman and Nalini Krishnan); S Rangarajan (father of Ramesh Rangarajan, Vijaya Arun and Akila Iyengar) and G Kasturi (father of K Balaji, K Venugopal and Lakshmi Srinath).

According to the faction opposed to Ram, all members at the meeting agreed to the proposal and Ram, who turns 65 in May 2010, was identified as the first member to step down from the board followed by Murali and N Ravi, who will turn 65 in August 2011 and 2013 respectively.

It was also decided that after Ram’s retirement, Ravi would take over as Editor-in-Chief of the group while Malini Parthasarathy would be appointed the editor of The Hindu and Venugopal the editor of The Hindu Business Line. In a follow-up meeting held in February, however, Ram is said to have declined to give up the positions he holds across the company, including the board membership.

In an email response, Ram said: “No retirement age has been stipulated for directors or the editor-in-chief or editor etc.

No retirement age is stipulated in the Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Company.”

On whether he had agreed to give up all positions in May 2010, he said that was “completely, utterly wrong.”

Prior to the meeting in February 2010, Ram is said to have recruited two family members in the company: Narayan Lakshman, son of Nirmala Lakshman; and Vidya Ram, his daughter. A PhD from London School of Economics, Narayan was hired as the Washington correspondent of The Hindu whereas Vidya, a graduate from the Columbia School of Journalism, was appointed the European correspondent of The Hindu Business Line.

This was strongly objected to by Murali, Ravi and Malini Parthasarthy, among other members, who said that these appointments were made without the board’s consent and proper governance norms were not adhered to.

They also pointed out several alleged financial irregularities in the way in which Kasturi’s resources, financial as well as editorial, were used to further the interests of some board members.

The family members had another stormy meeting on March 20, 2010 where the issue of retirement and, also, the norms for the induction of family members on the board were supposed to be discussed. “Instead of these issues, the pro-Ram faction targeted Murali alleging he was trying to tarnish the image of the company,” a source said. Murali was eventually removed from the position of the MD. A formal announcement to this effect, however, has not been made as yet.

Meanwhile, Ram declined to comment on whether the board had decided to divest Murali of his powers saying it was an internal matter of the company.

On allegations of irregularities in appointments of family members in the company, he said: “Any appointment of a relative of a Director that needed approval by both the Board of Directors and Shareholders before going to the central government was approved unanimously without a murmur of dissent by any Director or Shareholder. Every one of the 12 Directors of the Company approved every such appointment.”

Stripped of his powers by N Ram, his brother N Murali has hit back saying that he will not quit. And that he would try to “make Ram see reason and retire as Editor-in-Chief as committed by him in September 2009 and ensure a smooth transition.” 

“Some members of the Board of Directors have been trying to systematically undermine and erode my authority and responsibilities and rights and obligations,” Murali wrote in an email to “colleagues” in the company today. “I will not allow that to happen.” 

Murali was blunt in his email: “At the Board meeting on 20th March, some Directors subjected me to utter humiliation and attempted disempowerment. I will resist all attempts to deny me my rights, responsibilities and duties as the Managing Director.”

When contacted by The Indian Express, Murali said his email was in response to a circular sent by Ram to heads of departments announcing a change in his designation and his role.

“The circular was sent announcing my re-designation as senior managing director whereas I am currently the managing director. Along with this, all my powers were substantially and purportedly removed. My post has been given to another board member,” said Murali. “My responsibilities have been farmed out to some other members on the board.”

While Murali declined to name the new appointee, sources said K Balaji, the younger brother of K Venugopal, currently the joint editor of The Hindu Business Line, has been appointed as managing director in place of Murali by the faction supporting Ram.

“These reports are riddled with demonstrable falsehoods and defamatory assertions, some of them attributed to unnamed sources, made with reckless and malicious disregard for the facts and the truth,” Ram said in a statement issued in Chennai.

According to Ram’s statement, which was posted on the websites of The Hindu and The Hindu Business Line newspaper, one of the decisions of the board at a meeting on 20 March was to redesignate Murali as senior managing director with responsibility and supervisory powers over the department of circulation.

The statement added that Balaji had been appointed managing director.

A careful reading of the statement seems to suggest that Murali’s considerable powers over administrative and business functions at Kasturi and Sons have been distributed among several board members, with R. Ramesh overseeing the key function of advertising.

If the Express report—which said the original plan was to have Ravi replace Ram—is true, this won’t be the first time Kasturi and Sons is witnessing a tussle between the members of its founding family.

One such instance, in the early 1990s, saw Ram’s exit from The Hindu—he oversaw Frontline, Sportstar and The Hindu Business Line, between 1991 and 2003. Another such, in 2003, saw his return to The Hindu.

Defending its report, a statement issued by The Express Group said: “The report, ‘Battle for control breaks out in The Hindu very divided family’, (The Indian Express, The Financial Express, 25 March 2010) is based on information received from multiple and high-level credible sources. All facts were verified and cross-checked to the highest standards of accuracy and fairness that The Express Group holds itself to. We believe our report was neither malicious nor defamatory. We have great regard for The Hindu as an institution and for its editor-in-chief N. Ram as a journalist and editor for their commitment to principled journalism. We stand by our report and the reporter.”

Meanwhile, some members of the board posted messages on Twitter indicating their stand in the fight. Responding to a message from Ram on his decision to initiate defamatory proceedings, civil and criminal, against The Indian Express and The Financial Express, N Ravi, his younger brother and also a board member, said: “When The Hindu has taken a strong stand against criminal defamation, to use it as a threat to silence journalists does seem strange.”

Another board member Malini Parthasarathy said in her message: “As journalists, why should we be afraid of public scrutiny?”

Besides the proposed retirement age, another bone of contention among the family members is the appointment of two children of two board members in senior editorial positions in the US and Europe.

Sources in the group said the anti-Ram faction raised objections to the manner in which these appointments were made. Ram, in his email response yesterday, maintained “any appointment of a relative of a Director that needed approval by both the Board of Directors and Shareholders before going to the central government was approved unanimously, without a murmur of dissent by any Director or Shareholder.”

Sources in the company, however, said that three shareholders of the company expressed their concerns. They are Murali’s children Kanta and Krishna and Ravi’s daughter Aparna.

In fact, in a strongly worded letter to board members, all three of them questioned the manner in which family members were appointed. They wrote:

“It is essential that the Board considers issues of corporate governance and the appointment of family members seriously. To point out the obvious, the business cannot accommodate every member of the family, particularly when there are no institutional mechanisms in place to prevent the receipt of unjustifiably large entitlements over a long period of time. Each of us, whether in the previous, current or next generation, has received and continues to receive tremendous benefits from Kasturi and Sons, which far outweigh those received by non-family employees. It is high time that we recognize that our privileges are derived primarily from the contributions and loyalty of over 3500 non-family employees. Each one of us has, in some way or the other, abused their loyalty, trust and contribution.

 

“The inequitable and arbitrary system that currently exists is not only unfair to non-family employees but to shareholders as a class as well. If there is ever any intention of instituting sound and modern corporate governance practices and discontinuing the feudal system that exists, then issues such as the ones we have raised need to be addressed squarely, honestly and without fear or favour.”