By Aakar Patel
We are in the second month of what is settling in to become a long war and I thought I should put down a few observations. The first is that nations around the world are preparing their populations for what is coming down the pike.
Australia has made public transport free in Tasmania and Victoria to encourage citizens not to use cars. Egypt requires shops and restaurants to shutter at 9 pm. Philippines now has a four day week and so does Pakistan. Myanmar uses an odd day-even day system to keep cars off the road. Slovenia has a 50-litre limit on fuel purchase and Nepal has reduced the gas in LPG cylinders. Thailand’s government has asked people not to wear jackets so air-conditioners may run at higher temperatures. Bangladesh closed its universities and introduced planned blackouts (what we used to call load-shedding in the old days). South Sudan is also limiting electricity use. Sri Lanka has made Wednesday a public holiday. The list goes on.
In India there is no similar measure yet. This is for two reasons. First, our government appears to think, though it has not said so explicitly, that there is no real problem. It has told us that the shortages people are feeling are the result of panic and if this irrational panic in Indians were to subside then things would be normal. The other reason is that our government calculates it has an adequate stock of the things we import from the Gulf: fuel, gas, fertiliser inputs and so on. ‘Adequate stock’ is of course an elastic term because nobody knows how long the war will continue. None of this squares with what we are seeing in terms of autorickshaw queues and the mass migration of workers. We will see how things change as Iran continues to hold out. People in the oil business say that physical shortages will be upon us from this week onward, now that all the ships which were on the water when the war began have been offloaded and new ones are not coming through.
Another observation I have is that America has attacked Iran without Congress, meaning its version of parliament, declaring war. Why is that relevant? When the American constitution was being debated its founders felt that the ability of an individual to declare war separated a king from an elected leader. The president could direct and manage the violence but only after the formal declaration; it was Congress which was required to shoulder the responsibility of declaring war. This vital separation of power has been eroded in the Iran war and there is no difference between the US president and a king if the difference rests on the capacity to invade nations.
The interesting thing here is that it is the conservatives, who usually pride themselves on being constitutionalists, who want this state of affairs. Another reason why this is worth mentioning is that the Donald Trump is a mercurial president. He can say and has said that the war is ‘very complete’ but will go on. He says talks are progressing well and in the next sentence adds there is nobody to talk to because America has murdered all the Irani leaders. He demands Iran open the Hormuz Strait in a post and then in a speech say America will leave and it is up to other nations to open it. America’s population and its media and its democratic structures seem fine with this, which is why Trump continues as he does.
The third observation I have is about India’s role in this. Many of our fine WhatsApp groups are convinced that Jawaharlal Nehru squandered our United Nations Security Council seat. It is unclear what the basis of this belief is, but perhaps it is that Nehru forgot to throw his hanky on the seat to reserve it (or that he threw his hanky and missed) or some such thing. But let us assume we actually had a permanent seat in the UNSC. What would we do with it today to address the war in the Persian Gulf? The seat’s holders have one primary power: the veto, meaning the right to reject things that come up for a vote in the security council. The United Kingdom has that power, and it says it is not a participant in this war. What has it done and what can it do with its seat? Nothing that one can think of, which is why the world is not turning to the UNSC at this moment.
What any nation including India can do to end this war or mitigate against its damaging effects must come from the initiatives it can take to rally other nations. Those who want to stand on the sidelines will make no difference whether they are clutching their precious UNSC veto or not. They are bystanders.
These are some of the observations I have and I suspect that this will not be the last time that this column will refer to the Iran war. There are events that reshape the world and change the way that it functions forever. This is one such instance and America’s president-king has forced all of us into this new reality, whether we like it or not and whether we want it or not.