Shailendra Chauhan

The idea that war is increasingly resulting from and driven by greed over abundant resources should be carefully examined and qualified. The contrast resulting from a wealth of natural resources giving the perception of 'easy riches' and relative poverty can exacerbate both greed and grievances - among the poor themselves or those seeking to represent them for altruistic or political reasons, including political entrepreneurs.

The pattern of relations between natural resources and armed conflicts raises several questions and controversies: Does a wealth of natural resources actually increase the risk and duration of conflicts? If so, what is different in the relations between natural resources, power struggle, and violence compared to other economic resources? Countries with a wealth of natural resources like Botswana or Norway are not affected by conflicts, nor do all belligerents rely on natural resources to fund their struggle.

Despite a diversity that stresses the importance of specific contexts, patterns can be identified which have been affecting entire regions. Three major factors can be briefly presented to explain these patterns:

1. Resource dependence has distortionary effects upon the economy and politics, which weaken states.

The economies of resource rich countries can be affected by ‘Dutch disease’, where the national currency appreciates due to greater export revenues and the non-resource sectors shrink because efforts and investments are directed towards the resource sector.

This orientation can be associated with rent-seeking activities (see). Politically, resource rents influences governance by providing political leaders with a classic means for staying in power by establishing a regime organised through a system of patronage rewarding followers and punishing opponents.

The resource rent can be deliberately used to avoid the emergence of a class demanding political change (e.g. by impeding the growth of a middle class independent from the resource rent). The risk of domestic political competition can even be further curtailed by devolving the exploitation of the resource sector to foreign firms (e.g. through privatisation schemes); a measure that also offers the advantage of satisfying international financial institutions and consolidating external political support.

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2. Resource extraction and the allocation of revenues are often in themselves highly politicised and conflictual activities. As the wealth and power gap between the ruling and the ruled increases, so does the frustration of marginalised groups seeing political change as the only avenue for satisfying their aspirations or expressing their grievances.

Such groups may include competing elites, such as marginalised politicians or military officers, and disenfranchised groups, such as unemployed youths and petty criminals, or generally a combination of both. In Sierra Leone, the take over of diamond fields by Presidential cronies and the resulting economic marginalisation of young men participated in the emergence of the RUF rebel movement.

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3. Conflict is facilitated because extractive resources are resources highly amenable to taxing and looting. This lootability arises in part from the fact that natural resources are often easily accessible to governments and rebels alike with minimal bureaucratic infrastructure. The higher the availability of valuable resources at the periphery of control, the greater the likelihood of prolonged conflict.

To take the example of Angola, if the rebel group UNITA wanted to control offshore oil, it had to control the state and gain the recognition of petroleum companies. UNITA could not even inflict major damages to the oil revenue of the government, as the overwhelming majority of the oil fields were offshore.

Similarly, if the government wanted to control all diamonds, it had to secure a monopoly of access over a vast territory. Even though the major mines are concentrated in one single province (Lunda Norte), alluvial diamonds can be found in many riverbeds over a huge territory of bush facilitating guerrilla activities. If diamonds had been found only in Kimberlite pipes, as in Botswana, or on the seabed along the coast, as in Namibia, access to diamonds by UNITA would have been complicated, not to say impossible.

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The core mechanism at work in all three cases is the propensity of natural resources revenues to weaken political accountability. As an example, following peace agreements in both Mozambique and Angola, cash-strapped RENAMO was forced to rely on an intergovernmental Trust Fund and adhered to the peace process, whereas UNITA - awash with cash from diamonds exploited by private corporations - returned to war.

The incorporation of resources in armed conflicts has also specific strategic implications upon the course of the conflict. Military targets mostly consist of business opportunities and the cost of engaging adversaries is calculated in terms of financial reward. As adversaries can prove too costly to challenge on a nation wide basis, sub-national territories remain under the control of local ‘warlords’ directing their violence mostly against civilian populations for the sake of control and predation.

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Policy conclusions: For both conflict resolution and peace enforcement, local and international institutions need to refine their instruments of control over war economies. The definition of more targeted or smart sanctions, their monitoring through expert panels, the greater capacity of NGOs, and the emergence of global regulatory instruments for sensitive commodities such as ‘conflict diamonds’ are important steps forwards.

An engagement is also needed on the part of extractive businesses to help populations hold government or rebel groups accountable for both economic and political misdeeds.

Indian Poetry Today

# Shailendra Chauhan

To what is the poet responsible? Can poetry involve itself with politics? Or is it an autonomous, aesthetic object? While there can be no hard-and-fast rules, poetry that ignores the historical relationship between the self and society becomes lifeless.
A QUESTION I should like to ask myself today is: If poetry makes us more conscious of the essence of our day-to-day existence, of life's complexities and meaning, does it have an effect upon action, even political action? One would confirm that this is a very old idea; and that one cannot deny the truth of the statement that there is an eventual effect on our actions, whether social or political. And if poetry may influence politics, we could say that poetry is politics, and so this poetry is not poetry at all, it is just not good for anything.
But life is reminiscence, and therefore our poetry too is reminiscence. This memory, this terrible sepulchre which we have inherited, and carry inside us, will not leave one alone, ever. And the poet will ask: Who is that child crying, why, without a mouth? Along with that eternal equation of rich and poor, the splintered dilemma of day and night, of peace and war. Can poetry ever help to solve it? Can poetry ever turn the world and the workings of the world into song?
Familiar as I am with a little of Indian English poetry and the poetry written in Hindi, Marathi and Bengali would I be wrong to conclude that most of our poets are encased in a private world of their own invention, where they cultivate certain delusions? For example, in their superiority to practical life, the belief in the autonomy of their poetry, and their innermost desire to resist change formally, intellectually and emotionally. The dilemma of narcissism, of too much self, I should think, deviates from the direction of true poetry that should find a sense of relation between self and other, the inner and outer world, the personal and social worlds. John Berger, in The Success and Failure of Pablo Picasso, writes perceptively about this dilemma of modern artists. I like to quote:
They are far away and unseen - so that at home most people are protected from the contradictions of their own system: those very contradictions from which all development must come.
Many of our poets (those who live in a bureaucratic of academic world) elevate the artist to the ethereal, where we deny the connections between self and other, separating language from social relations. We revere this isolated human being (our artist, our poet) and treat his imagination as something he has inherited, a gift from God, as though there were no logical relationship, or historical relationship between the self and the world. We are then aware that we write without any real sense of community or audience.
That is probably why the poetry of many Indian English poets fails, when these poets prefer to live abroad, "exiled" by their own choosing. Such a poet, humanly, would be very lonely. But what will this loneliness mean to his art? It will mean he will begin to write longingly about the country he abandoned; or write patronisingly on the values he grew up with. Later, he is sure to run out of subjects or themes. He might not run out of emotion or feelings but he will, one feels, run out of subjects to hold them.
Clearly, the great poets of Latin American and Eastern Europe live inside history, as is the case with our poets writing in their respective regional languages, and their imaginations are vitalised by that deeper perspective. In comparison, much of Indian poetry in English appears lifeless, stuck in the mire of trifling intimacies, without the arms of history and tradition. Frankly, I should like to write such a poetry, a poetry which comes out of the ashes of our own culture. However, to cultivate this relationship between the social and the personal doesn't seem easy. One is afraid that such writing could bring in a measure of self-consciousness to it because of a loss of moral poise.
.Eliot, however, with his stance of resigned defiance, was often against the idea of the poet as thinker. In his words: "In truth neither Shakespeare nor Dante did any real thinking - that was not their job." What appears as thought in a poet is no more than the emotional equivalent of thoughts prevalent in his time. As far as poetry is concerned, whether these thoughts were part of a great philosophy or not is indifferent, so long as they express some permanent human impulse. At the same time, poetry should have the freedom to express in any way appropriate to it the diversity of human experience. We may take this further to say that a poet is responsible to his conscience, to his sense of what is right and wrong, that comes from both knowledge and judgment. To locate the relation of poetry to social action is difficult. Perhaps this has never been done; so it is not possible to define what that relation is. But this is true: that poetry has some effect upon conduct, in so far as it affects our emotions. To what extent then, is the poetry, say of someone like Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, an effect?
Poetry has the right to judge. One feels one has the right to make such a statement. One can infer that our right to judge is fed by the obsequious ways of our politicians, who must ingratiate themselves with a mass electorate. This is evident because our public men may think and feel like the emperor Aurangzeb, but there are none who would talk like him in front of their public audiences.
Poets, probably, watch the game of politics from the sidelines. We are spectators, when we are poets: not players. Although the view from the sidelines enables us to see clearly much that is blurred to the players, it also distorts vision in certain ways. And our poet, the spectator, easily assumes toward the players an attitude of condescension, inclining toward disdain.
So, a great danger we encounter, as poets, away from direct participation in the affairs of the community, is that we take ourselves easily as the guardians of moral purity. I could say: Politics is dirty and the government is a fraud; but I, as a poet, am clean, my aims honourable. I have better things to do than politics, and no time to waste on plotters and schemers. Politics can only distract me from those better things, remove me from the better people who do those better things, and probably splash me with mud and blood in the end.
So let a poet not be snug in his belief that he is the upholder of his society's (or of his country's) morals. This is wrong. Let not this vanity lead to a sort of ranting, a protest that could ultimately veer him away from the true poetry that is his goal. In one of my own poems, there are three lines which say:
Any time my Government breaks its promises, a line of this poem is dragged along the wide, clean streets of New Delhi...
Maybe this is an example of what I referred to, i.e., of my stand as a guardian of moral behaviour. In stating this I do seem to suffer from a small sense of guilt - a guilt that our educated middle-class carry with them when they go on to criticise the government for whatever ails our people. And yet, no world would perhaps exist unless poetry (out of all the arts) creates it for us. And this poetry has its source within every person who lives.
Therefore, I don't think it would be out of place to say that the poet who doesn't see what is happening around him is dead; and the poet who only sees reality around him is also dead. The poet who is only irrational will only be understood by himself and his closest friend or lover, and this is very sad. The poet who is all reason will even be understood by fools, and this is also terribly sad. So poetry will not stand by hard and fast rules, by good and evil; but it will be there and cannot be defeated.
In the end, two alternatives come to mind when one thinks of the responsibility of poets. First, is it right to put such a burden on a man of imagination and dreams, on a poet? Secondly, is there no other class of individuals (I should say, intellectuals like scientists, philosophers and statesmen) who might also be held responsible?
Poetry is a deep, inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the Vedas and Psalms, and the content of religions. The poet confronted nature's phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation. In the same way, to defend his poetry, the poet of the modern age accepts the honour from the masses. Today's social poet is still a member of the earliest order of priests. In the old days he made his pact with darkness, today he must speak and interpret the light.