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Coalition dharma Helping farmers |
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Death traps galore
India matters
From Dariya to Nullah
Until they fight again Fight hatred in order to fight terror Chatterati
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Coalition dharma BY quitting as Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister, Mr Muzaffar Hussain Beig, the man in the eye of the Congress-PDP storm, may have saved the alliance from immediate danger but the episode has raised vital questions about the dynamics of coalition politics. While a coalition partner is justified in nominating its chosen men for the ministry, which portfolios to allot them is the Chief Minister’s prerogative. The PDP has encroached on the Chief Minister’s territory by dictating terms to him. Mr Beig has become the fall guy in the process and the feeling of hurt with which he has submitted his resignation is fully justified. He was one of the best ministers and had distinguished himself as a constitutional expert as well as a capable administrator. The ugly episode is not only a personal setback to him but has also left the Cabinet poorer. Besides, the standoff has resulted in the erosion of the authority of the Chief Minister, making it a pyrrhic victory for the PDP too. Mr Beig is not wrong when he says that the “change in confidence” in him has come about for wrong reasons. While publicly criticising the decisions of the government in which they themselves are partners was in itself undesirable on the part of the PDP leadership, their expecting Mr Beig to emulate them was all the more indefensible. He was the Chief Minister’s Deputy and it is a perversity that any minister should be asked to castigate government policies. After all, there is something called collective responsibility. The venom that has been injected in the relations can harm both parties, as also Jammu and Kashmir. If two or more parties decide to sup together, they must not be so suspicious of each other. Nor should they take potshots at each other, because that makes an ugly spectacle. Like mature groupings, the two should take a hard, dispassionate look at coalition ethics, demarcate the common grey area which neither must usurp and also refrain from doing anything that either actually weakens or gives the impression of weakening mutual ties.
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Helping farmers TO reap the political benefits from the package for farmers in 31 worst-affected districts announced by the Prime Minister recently, Congress leaders from Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala met Dr Manmohan Singh on Thursday to press for its implementation and provide additional inputs. Two facts stand out after the announcement of the Central relief. One, there has been no improvement in the situation in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region. Suicides have continued as before. Two, the suicide rate in Andhra Pradesh has come down significantly from a high of 150 a month to five now. It may not be entirely due to the package. The agrarian crisis in the country cannot be solved just by packages alone. The Centre’s focus — as reflected in the budgetary allocation and the Prime Minister’s package — is on strengthening irrigation, providing subsidies on seeds and fertilisers, making greater credit availability to farmers on easier terms and waiving interest on agricultural loans. There is need to cut down high production costs, introduce crop insurance and direct subsidies, promote organic farming and assure marketing of farm produce at profitable rates. In his Independence Day address the Prime Minister did promise higher prices for agricultural products. Why Punjab has been excluded from the Central package for farmers is not clear. If the number of suicides is any basis, Punjab too has been a witness to farmers taking the extreme step. Punjab farmers, according to official figures, are under a debt of Rs 2,087 crore of which Rs 1,200 crore they owe to commission agents. Capt Amarinder Singh has taken up Punjab’s case with the Prime Minister for a package as announced for other states. Dr Manmohan Singh is expected to visit the state later this month and it is hoped that he will not disappoint Punjab farmers.
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Death traps galore Five-year-old
Prince of Kurukshetra was lucky to have come out alive from the 60-ft hellhole into which he happened to fall. Ravi, a four-year-old from Chandigarh, met with a different fate. He accidentally fell into a six-foot-deep uncovered water tank of a public toilet last week, and paid for it with his life. While the whole nation commiserated with Prince when he was caught in the tubewell pipe, Ravi did not move the conscience of even the doctors in the neighbourhood. He was believed to be still alive when he was found in the water tank by his family members and was taken to a dispensary barely a few yards away, but the doctors there allegedly refused to attend to him and referred him to a bigger hospital nearby. The boy was declared dead on arrival. So much for the serving spirit of some doctors! But the larger question is the attitude of public servants towards even elementary safety measures. Life seems to be considered so cheap that nobody even cares to give a second glance to an open manhole, cattle on the roads, live wires jutting out precariously and a stretch of road left unlit. Every day lives are lost and yet no conscience is moved. Such incidents take place almost everywhere on a daily basis. Exactly one year ago, a Chandigarh Police constable Jaswinder Kaur lost her life after she accidentally fell into a drain, which was left uncovered by the Municipal Corporation. Shockingly, instead of owning up the blunder, the officials tried to implicate the lady’s husband by making it look like a case of murder. The unthinkable happens mainly because the culprits often go unpunished. Even in the latest case, if all goes according to the established practice, only the caretaker of the public toilet would get the rap. So why should the higher-ups lose their sleep over the man-made death traps that are there galore?
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Where more is meant than meets the ear. — John Milton
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India matters THE monsoon session of the Lok Sabha concluded far from proudly, with something approaching fisticuffs. Nothing warranted or can ever justify such disgraceful conduct. There is much to forget about the last session of Parliament on account of a series of episodes of intemperate behaviour and storming the well of the House, compelling adjournments at a time when MPs are seeking higher emoluments! The irony is telling. Yet, there is a far more positive side to Parliament. The excellent Parliament Museum just established in the splendid new Parliament Library building must fill any visitor with pride in the audio-visual narration of the country’s democratic tradition, long pre-dating its adoption of the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy. This hi-tech display takes the visitor through a historical journey that is educative and evocative. The Buddhist Councils, janapada sabhas, tribal conclaves, inter-faith dialogues, dialogic strands of the freedom struggle and the fashioning of a composite culture truly made for unity through respect for every shade of diversity. The “idea” of India is indeed founded on the rock of shared experience. Too many look on India merely as a geographical expression rather than as a wonderful mosaic of peoples, ideas and aspirations. India of the Buddha, Asoka, Akbar, Nanak, Kabir, Ram Mohan Roy, Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi, Radhakrishnan, Azad, Patel, Nehru and many others recall time to provide space for all to achieve their cherished goals through togetherness or fraternity. “Our India” demonstrates how greater and lesser traditions have sometimes clashed but more often worked together in harmony. The museum’s sections on the freedom movement from 1857 to 1947 take us through Gandhi’s teachings and example, to Nehru’s call to make a Tryst with Destiny, wipe the tear from every eye and strive to win the future through peace and cooperation. This is an inspirational India that all Indians need to remember. Yet, far from building the country in this image, some seem bent on dividing it in pursuit of a narrow, self-serving agenda. Finding itself in an ideological and political bind after its reverses at the last general election, the BJP appears to be going back on its own initiatives and tentative forays towards more inclusive patterns of politics. It launched a nuclear dialogue with the United States but cavils at its unfolding under the present UPA regime. Likewise, it took a bold step under Mr Vajpayee to start a peace process in J&K and with Pakistan but is now seen backing away. Unfortunately the BJP has returned to its earlier pastime, especially after the Mumbai blasts, decrying “minority appeasement” and fundamentalisms other than its own. It was, therefore, necessary for the Prime Minister to reassure Muslim Indians that there is no question of targeting or labelling them in any manner. Even so, Mr Narendra Modi continues brazenly and even unconstitutionally to foster ghettoisation, unmindful of its dire potential to resurrect the two-nation theory. The Gujarat administration also continues to practise his vicious 2002 broadcast dictum that Muslims must choose between peace and justice, scornful of Mr Vajpayee’s plaintive call to Mr Modi contemporaneously that he should not forget his raj dharma. Through all of this, the BJP president and MP from Gandhinagar, Mr Advani, has maintained a culpable silence, both now and when he was Union Home Minister. Not content, the party has now directed all the states under its control to mandate the singing of Vande Mataram in all schools on September 7. This is not being ordained in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the composition, so much as to put down Muslim Indians. In extension of this same platform, all BJP states have been directed to adopt or make more stringent existing anti-conversion legislation. This goes beyond prohibitions against conversion by inducement, force or fraud, which already exist under other statutes and regulations. The purpose is essentially to lay down a procedure of prior permission and/or a requirement for post-conversion reporting to the District Collector on pain of consequences. So, now conversion, a fundamental right, is to be regulated by the use of a political filter, hugely caricaturising what faith is all about! The Chhattisgarh law further provides that re-conversion to the original faith is permissible. This is intended to protect the BJP’s mass countrywide campaign to convert or reconvert tribals, in particular, to Hinduism. The motives are here to counter Christian missionary influence and to expand its vote bank in tribal India. Nowhere, if at all, has any case of conversion by inducement, force or fraud been proven though shrilly asserted, echoing what may have been past practice until even some decades ago, but scarcely so today. That some revivalist Christian churches with foreign links should be strident and abrasive in their evangelistic fervour must be deplored, even condemned. But remedies for this lie elsewhere. Meanwhile, no one can take a patent on India, which remains “Our India”. The Parliament Museum reminds us of this great heritage. However, it is for Parliament in its day-to-day working to reflect this living heritage and the high ideals that must inform us if we wish to keep that tryst with
destiny.
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From Dariya to Nullah MOST of the ancient civilisations grew on the banks of rivers. Even today millions of people all over the world live near the rivers and depend upon them for their survival. My city (Ludhiana), though situated on the left bank of the Satluj is more identified with a small rivulet called the Budha Dariya. Only a few decades ago it used to flow unpolluted between the Satluj and the town. I as a child grew up residing only a kilometre away from it. The water was so clean that my mother used to go to its bank to feed the fish. Invariably I had accompanied her and remember the Kartik Poornima when scores of handmade lamps were ritually made to flow on it. Many people of my generation have fond memories of its sandy banks where we used to go for school excursions. It was a favourite place for people to relax and there were a few temples with bathing ghats also. The Budha Dariya was considered the northern limit of the city and I have crossed it walking precariously on a heavy wooden log which connected its banks and served as a bridge for the pedestrians. With the passage of time as Ludhiana grew from a mere town of two or three lakh people to become a mega city of four million souls, bad days fell on the Budha Dariya. Massive industrialisation, unplanned housing and insensitive and callous governments played havoc with the most famous landmark of the city. I do not remember when it got its new name — the Budha Nullah. Gone were the sandy banks, the clean water and the bathing ghats. We Ludhianavis have defiled it beyond recognition. Nowadays while driving towards Jalandhar and crossing it on the G.T. Road, I watch the same Budha ‘Dariya’ with a reflective mood. There are now no fish in its water, only pigs swarm on the banks. The water is also thick, black and gives very offensive odour compelling one to hold the breath. As a doctor, I know the ground water along its banks is very toxic and see a number of patients who while residing in the nearby colonies remain in constant bad health. This rivulet which only four decades ago was the lifeline of Ludhiana is today called the curse or bane of it. I have read in The Tribune, which has taken up the cause of the Budha Dariya that the Chief Minister has ordered its cleansing. I wish him to be a bit more serious as it needs a master plan enabling to restore the Budha Dariya to its old grace and glory. But no government plan of such nature can be successful unless actively supported by the public. At present I can only envy the people of Sultanpur Lodhi for cleansing the Kali Bein or pray to God to give Ludhiana a Baba
Seechewal.
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Until they fight again AFTER the war in Lebanon, comes the hypocrisy, the mendacity, the threats, the sheer brazen lies. Let’s start with the man with the burning eyes, Hizbollah leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah. It was Nasrallah’s men who crossed the Israeli border on 12 July, captured two Israeli soldiers, killed three others and thus unleashed the entirely predictable savagery of the Israeli air force and army against the largely civilian population of Lebanon. Now get this from Sayed Nasrallah. “If I knew that the capture of the soldiers would have led to a war on such a scale, had Hizbollah had known even 1 per cent, we definitely would have not carried it out.” This, folks, is what I call a whopper. If the Hizbollah had no idea what Israel was going to do to Lebanon – and they are intelligent, disciplined people who knew full well Ehud Olmert’s political situation at the time (it is certainly worse now due to his army’s failure in Lebanon), then why did Hizbollah build all those concrete bunkers in caves and rocks and hillsides for years before the war? Why did they bring thousands of missiles into the south of Lebanon? Why did they prepare to fire at an Israeli warship - which they did, and almost sunk it after hitting the vessel amidships - and prepare so successfully for the tiny ground offensive that Israel subsequently mounted? Are we supposed to believe that they held out under intense Israeli air attack - which killed more than 1,000 civilians as they must have known it would - without any planning? Or that the Hizbollah men who hit the Israeli warship got up in the morning, ate their cheese manouche sandwiches, and said: “Hey, let’s shoot at an Israeli warship today!” No, that attack - a perfectly justifiable military target in view of Israel’s aggression - was also very carefully planned. According to Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, Israel’s attack had also been carefully planned - and given the “green light” by the Bush administration as part of its campaign to humble Iran. I think Hersh is right. But I think both sides planned this, and a hint came in another part of Nasrallah’s breathtakingly hypocritical address. “In any case,” he said, “Israel was going to launch a war at the start of this autumn and the degree of destruction then would have been even greater.” Well, thanks for telling me, Hassan. So you can see how Hizbollah are planning their post-war narrative. They never intended the Lebanese to suffer, but they were anyway going to suffer later and, besides, Hizbollah won. And now, the Hizbollah leadership formally announces that it intends to abide by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 - which calls for disarmament - but that they are not actually going to disarm. Phew. So it’s peace in our time yet again. Until the next war. But equally pernicious is the utterly false narrative which the Israelis and their supporters are now preparing for the world, one which includes all the old lies about the anti-Semitism of reporters and the involvement of the Red Cross in terrorism. Take, for example, an outrageous article in the French newspaper Liberation on Thursday by Shmuel Trigano, entitled “War, Lies and Videotape”. This posits some usual but deliberately misleading themes, the most obnoxious of which states that, by showing the children slaughtered by the Israeli air force in Qana, the press was trying to “reactivate a very ancient anti-Semitic idea: that Jews kill children. In antiquity, they (the Jews) were accused of cannibalism, in the Middle Ages - and still today in the Arab world - of ritual crimes.” And of course, I get the message. We should not have shown those pictures of the innocents of Qana blasted to death by Israeli bombs (even worse it would be, no doubt, if we said “American-made” Israeli bombs) and we should never have pointed out that a decade ago, Israeli artillery men killed another 106 innocents in Qana, more than half of them children, and in fact we should show no dead Arab children at all - unless we want to be libelled as medieval anti-Semites. Shmuel then comes up with an Israeli narrative almost as objectionable which I am now hearing from Israel’s spokesmen: that because one part-time Lebanese photographer pasted two extra plumes of smoke on to a bomb-site photo and sold the falsified picture to Reuters - an act of mendacity that rightly earned him the sack - all photographs from Beirut were probably doctored and fake. This, of course, is nonsense, although the moment I heard about the false photo I predicted to a friend that Israel’s friends would now cast doubt on all images from Lebanon. The lies against the Press by Israel’s friends are as predictable as they are vile. Next comes the accusation that we reporters all worked in southern Lebanon under the “control” of the Hizbollah - and that our colleagues in Gaza all work under the “control” of Hamas. “All journalists,” according to Shmuel, know that they work “under the authorisation of the powers that be which exert their authority over the pictures and give accreditations to journalists” to work there. Forgive me, Shmuel, but this is the kind of material that comes from the rear end of a bull. We carry no “authorisation from Hizbollah”; in fact those of us who tried to interview Hizbollah during the war couldn’t find them - any more than the Israeli air force could find them. But no, we journalists, according to this tract, believe it is “just” that Israeli civilians should suffer. We focus only on the “victims” of Israelis - and this is “anti-Semitism ‘by default’.” Being an old hand at Lebanon’s dirty wars, I have to say that this is exactly the same lie that was told about us during Israel’s bombardment of 1978 and its invasion of 1982 and its bombardment of civilians in 1993 and its bombardment of civilians in 1996 - and here it is again. Does one sigh with weariness or rage at such dishonesty? Well, I’ll tell you one thing. When it comes to dishonesty, Nasrallah is up there with the rest. But he’s still got a lot to learn from the Israelis. — By arrangement with
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Fight hatred in order to fight terror THE latest US Congressional Report on terrorism has come out at a very inopportune time as far as US President Bush and his team of neo-con advisers is concerned. The report presents a graphic portrayal of the way “international terrorism was increasingly becoming a threat to US foreign, as well as domestic, security”. But it does not stop at that. It does not absolve the US administration completely of any role in creating or sustaining the whole situation. It not only underlines the “obvious difference between the US administration’s declared objective of promoting democracy in the Islamic world and its practices” but also holds it responsible for “allowing terrorist groups to win sympathies of the people” by its “support to totalitarian regimes in some Muslim countries”. Obviously it would have been easier for the neo-cons to reject the findings of the study had it been prepared by someone from the Democratic Party or one of those regular peaceniks. But the problem is that it has been prepared by Congressional Research Service, which prepares policy papers for US lawmakers. It is clear to a layperson that the conclusions of the report definitely challenge the orthodoxy which has been carefully built around the whole idea of “terrorism”, which hinges around terrorists’ supposed abhorrence of democracy and “our way of life” and therefore their keenness to destroy “us”. This view paints the terrorists as some lunatic fringe of society who are ready to destroy everything before them. Adherents would like to believe, in one analyst’s words, that the “rise of anti-American terrorism owes nothing to American policies — in effect postulates an America that is always the aggrieved innocent in a treacherous world, a benign United States government peacefully going about its business but being “provoked” into taking extreme measures to defend its people, its freedom and democracy.” Public posturing apart, the rulers of the USA are not unaware about the interconnections between their policies and terrorist activities. A Department of Defense study in 1997 had concluded: “Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States”. Jimmy Carter had told the New York Times in a 1989 (March 26) interview: “We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers — women and children and farmers and housewives — in those villages around Beirut. That is what precipitated the taking of hostages and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks.” In one of his celebrated pieces “Our War On Terrorism” Howard Zinn had rightly concluded that “Unless we reexamine our policies—our quartering of soldiers in a hundred countries (the quartering of foreign soldiers, remember, was one of the grievances of the American revolutionaries), our support of the occupation of Palestinian lands, our insistence on controlling the oil of the Middle East—we will always live in fear. If we were reconsider those policies, and began to change them, we might start to dry up the huge reservoir of hatred where terrorists are hatched.”
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Chatterati THE capital has the highest rate of crime against women according to the National Crime Records Bureau. No other city comes anywhere close to Delhi in the number of cases of molestations, sexual harassment, dowry deaths, kidnapping and rape. Well, with crime on the rise, any brother would like to protect his sister in the Capital. So, Sunil Duggal, son of V. K. Duggal, Home Secretary, has penned a book on how women can keep themselves secure. Sunil already runs one of India’s largest security agencies where women bodyguards are employed. The inspiration of course came from his sister, and the book is dedicated to the urban Indian women. At the launch function, Renuka Chowdhry, in her usual manner, went hammer and tongs on how uneducated, rude and egoist Indian men are. Renuka does not need any such book — we do remember the incident where she slapped a rude constable and then was dragged to court for many years. This book also tells you various ways of handling eve-teasers and sexual harassment at work. Sunil Munjal and the head of Hindu college had great words of praise for the young author. Sunil’s mother is actually the one who got a standing ovation. The author said that she was his inspiration and guide and the one who kept the family secure with the right values ingrained into them since childhood. Legal front The legal brigade in the Congress seems to have taken over as the party’s vocal face, both in Parliament and out of it. Whatever the crisis, it is the lawyers who seem to be doing all the talking. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has literally raised the bar as he is the firefighter on most crises ranging from Bofors to Vocker. Kapil Sibal has been vocal on the Pathak debate and recently Anand Sharma also had a brief moment in the sun when he spoke on the Indo-US nuclear deal. Impose order The detention of 12 Indians travelling by the North West Airlines to Bombay, in Amsterdam, raised a storm of protest across the country. The media brought the issue alive to the doorstep of the average Indian, who was incensed with the whites for treating the browns in such a fashion. Here was an act of racial profiling, according to some, which went against the very grain of equality amongst the nations and people. Some people however, adopted a more mature approach while reacting to the incident. If you are in Rome behave as Romans do. If you are travelling by foreign airlines, accept the drills imposed by them. The marshals were unable to comprehend the frenetic activity going on in the area where these passengers were seated — shifting of seats, passing of mobiles, moving up and down the aisle etc. The government needs to cooperate with the International Civil Aviation Authorities and include Indian security men as marshals in India bound and outward flights. It would also help in briefing the Indian passengers on the need to keep discipline on foreign airlines, which of course they don’t consider necessary while travelling by Indian or by Air
India.
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From the pages of SECOND SPACE FEAT FOUR years after launching “Aryabhata”, whose odyssey in space has far exceeded its designed life of six months, India has scored her second success in satellite technology by putting “Bhaskar” into orbit. “Aryabhata” was named after an eminent mathematician, while “Bhaskar” takes its name from an astronomer of equal eminence. Unlike many of the satellites sent up by the super powers, both Indian ventures, launched with Soviet rockets, are meant for purely scientific purposes, notably collection of data to promote economic development and transmission to ground control stations. The study of hydrology and meteorological phenomena which “Bhaskar” will make may not appear dramatic, but the significance of the effort must not be lost sight of. The functioning of the sophisticated electronics equipment in “Aryabhata” has exceeded the expectations of both Indian and foreign scientists. Very much an Indian project from the very start and constructed entirely by our own experts, “Bhaskar” marks another landmark in the country’s technical development, though by U.S. and Soviet standards it may look trivial.
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What shall we utter with our lips, so that He is moved to give us His love? — Guru Nanak If saying Ram gave liberation, saying candy made your mouth sweet, saying fire burned your feet, saying water quenched your thirst, saying food banished hunger, the whole world would be free. — Kabir Everyone must be treated equally irrespective of relationships. Sages spend life times searching for this balance. — The Mahabharata Let us all be one heart, full of love. — Mother Teresa
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