The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Religious rights
A victory in California

THE right of an immigrant to practise his or her religion and take up any job was upheld in California as a Sikh won a fight for a prisons agency job. The facts of the case are pretty straightforward. In 2005, Trilochan Singh Oberoi applied for a job with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In the final stages of processing, he was told to shave off his beard so that he could use a respirator mask. He refused to do so on religious grounds and, as a result, was denied the job. It took six years, $500,000 in legal costs, and many a bureaucratic and legal encounter before the case was finally settled. He will start working on November 1 this year. The state also has to pay him and his attorney $2,95,000. The decision is right because employees should not have to choose between practising their religion and performing their job. Turban-wearing Sikhs, sporting beards, have a long history of fighting for their rights. As a result of various struggles, there are a significant number of turban-wearing policemen in the United Kingdom and Canada today.

The authorities in California, which has the oldest gurdwara in the US at Stockton, could well have followed the lead taken by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Only last month he signed into law the Workplace Religious Freedom Bill which asks employers to make “reasonable accommodations” for the religious beliefs of their workers. With the new law, the New York police department will soon see some more policemen.

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights maintains that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, worship and observance. The Sikhs wear their turban and beard as a part of the observance of their religion. It is distressing that from time to time they are forced to take to legal action to demand what is their fundamental right.

Arab Spring and after
Tunisia towards coalition government

THE much-awaited election results in Tunisia, the country that gave birth to the powerful Arab Spring revolution, are on predictable lines. The Ennahda, a moderate Islamist party, banned during the rule of disgraced dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, has captured the maximum number of seats — 90 — in a 217-seat assembly. The leftist Congress for the Republic has got 30 seats and the centre-left Ettakatol 21. Indications are that the three will form an interim coalition government. Their leaders have been making accommodative statements, which may help Tunisia move smoothly on the road to democracy. The immediate task before the new government includes writing a constitution acceptable to all sections of society and then holding fresh elections for a full-fledged democratic set-up in a country that has seen only dictatorships since it won its independence from France in 1956.

The complexion of the interim government may prevent the Ennahda from ignoring secular ideals, which will help promote stability, essential for economic advancement. Ennahda leaders have declared that they have no intention to impose the Islamic banking system, feared by foreign investors. They appear to realise that controversial ideas have to be kept aside so that Tunisia’s march towards democracy and development remains uninterrupted. It will be interesting to watch how the new rulers pull along together as they have serious ideological differences among themselves.

The outcome of the Tunisian poll is expected to influence the November 28 Egyptian elections too. The composition of the forces that fought for the ouster of Egyptian dictator Husne Mubarak was no different from that of the groups involved in the Tunisian uprising. If Ennahda as an Islamist party was on the forefront in the pro-democracy movement in Tunisia, the banned Islamic Brotherhood along with some left-leaning groups worked for the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. If the elected regime in Tunisia wins the confidence of the world community, chances are that the new government in Egypt may follow in the footsteps of the Tunisians. The new rulers must remember that people in these countries want justice, fair play and economic advancement more than anything else.

Thought for the Day

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

— Anonymous

ARTICLE

Drive for N-disarmament
Is it possible or just a pipedream?
by P. R. Chari

GLOBAL Zero or the total elimination of nuclear weapons is in the news again. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1986 Reykjavik summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was commemorated recently, wherein they had seriously discussed eliminating their ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. This has inspired the Global Zero Group, comprising some 100 leading statesmen, experts and former military officers, to hold a conference in California to pursue this agenda. The Group has pushed for the nuclear-weapons powers to start talks and achieve complete nuclear disarmament within the next 20 years. Their intention was to build public momentum for new multinational nuclear negotiations to commence after the presidential elections are held in France, Russia and the United States in 2012. And the exhortations of the Global Zero Group resonates the proposals made earlier to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons by President Obama, former Soviet President Gorbachev and others, including the promulgation of the revised Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan.

Indubitably, the international system has changed radically over the last quarter a century. Nuclear terrorism, which implies the likelihood of non-state actors of various political and religious hues gaining possession of nuclear weapons, dominates the current thinking. Another major concern is that aberrant nations like North Korea and Iran might join the nuclear club with unpredictable consequences. But the rationale expressed at the Reykjavik summit in favour of eliminating nuclear weapons --- that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought --- remains uncontested. Even the threat to use such weapons has steadily eroded over the years with the continuing taboo against nuclear weapons for war-fighting or coercive diplomacy.

Only a slight reflection would also inform that nuclear weapons have no relevance for countering the real and current threats to national and international security which arise from issues like the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, religious fundamentalism and the vast range of non-military threats like migration, environmental decay, energy depletion and climate change. Nuclear weapons, obviously, have no relevance to this range of national security threats.

Regrettably, progress towards nuclear disarmament after the Reykjavik summit has been very slow and halting. Whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on the predilections of the observer. For instance, the conclusion of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996 was a major positive achievement. But the US failure thereafter to ratify its entry into the CTBT has dissuaded other nations from either joining or ratifying it; so it remains in a state of suspended animation. But the greatest failure in progressing nuclear disarmament has been the paralysis in the 66-nation Committee on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva to either draft a Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), or a ban on deploying space-based weapons, or an agreement to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states. Pakistan’s obduracy in blocking discussions on the FMCT from taking place in the CD has effectively hamstrung its functioning for over a decade, since all decisions here need being reached by consensus. And the CD seems unable to take the logical step to overcome this impasse, which is by transferring these negotiations to the First Committee of the United Nations.

It would be an exaggeration to argue that nothing has been accomplished over the years. A New START arms control treaty was signed between the United States and Russia earlier this year, which limits their strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 for each side. The fine print informs that these numbers refer to deployed strategic nuclear weapons, implying that warheads will not be eliminated, but only retired and kept in storage. But that cavil apart, Global Zero is anxious that the momentum gained should not be lost, and further reductions will be effected in their nuclear inventories. Specifically, Global Zero wishes them to slash their arsenals to 1,000 strategic nuclear weapons each, at which point not only China, France and the UK but also India, Israel and Pakistan should join these negotiations. And the great urgency for proceeding with these reductions arises from the imminent danger of North Korea and Iran inexorably moving towards deploying their nuclear arsenals. Should that happen great alarm would follow in Northeast Asia and the Gulf region and trigger a nuclear proliferation phase in these two regions.

A new urgency now informs the United States for addressing its nuclear holdings, which is the imperative that Washington is required to identify how it will reduce the nation’s huge $1.2 trillion budget deficit. This parlous situation had brought the US to the edge of a default and resulted in an erosion of its credit rating. In other words, financial stringency could dictate a re-look at old shibboleths relating to the nuclear strategy, the nuclear doctrine and the numbers of nuclear weapons required to sustain them. A Congressional group has estimated, for instance, that the US would need to spend more than $700 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years. Naturally, any proposal to reduce its nuclear arsenal is opposed by the Republicans on the logic that this will undermine American national security since Russia and China are modernising their nuclear arsenals. In fact, the Obama administration had to accept a 10-year, $85-billion plan to modernise US nuclear research and production facilities and maintain its stockpile to gain Republican support for passing the New START agreement.

Clearly, the 20th century thinking continues to dominate the current decisions on defence and security despite its growing irrelevance. The US Congress has till November 23 to present a viable plan to meet its huge budget deficit. Hopefully, this reality will spur the US to proceed further in the direction of nuclear disarmament, inspiring the other nuclear powers to follow suit. China is pivotal for this process.

A dramatic way of signalling its intent would be for the US to announce that it wishes to reduce its strategic nuclear weapons below the New START ceiling of 1550.

MIDDLE

My childhood coterie
by Rachna Singh

I’M sure we all look back upon our childhood with pleasure and reminisce about the magical times. My childhood also had all the magic of an Alice in wonderland.

My first memory as a child is of helping my father apply ointment to the broken wing of a dove and feed her medicine and rice. I can still feel the thrill of satisfaction when the dove soared into the sky with her mended wing. I can still remember the overwhelming joy when the dove kept coming back to our house every day as if to express her gratitude for our help.

After this episode everyone in the vicinity, be it the milkman or the dhobi or the vegetable vendor, brought birds with broken legs or wings to our house for recovery. So at times we had a mélange of parrots, sparrows, blackbirds, doves in the house squawking, twittering or cooing for attention.

As I grew up, depending upon the local animal populace, my motley crowd kept changing its profile. Sometimes it was made up of squirrels, kittens and guinea pigs whom I guarded fiercely against predators. At other times it constituted caterpillars that I would bring home just for the pleasure of seeing them miraculously transform into beautiful butterflies.

Once I was lucky to have a tank full of turtles in the backyard. At another time a white rabbit strayed into our garden. It had been ravaged by a jackal and trembled with fear at the slightest noise. But slowly it recovered and we became inseparable like Mary and her little lamb.

Perhaps the dearest member of my animal coterie was a Neelgai. There was a forest fire in the area we stayed in and the ‘jawans’ rescued a Neelgai calf from the fire. The poor grief-stricken motherless calf gave up eating and drinking. Upon me fell the onerous task of cajoling the calf to drink milk from a bottle.

I would patiently pet the neelgai and feed it milk every day before going to school. A strong bond developed between us but there was grief ahead as the fully recovered calf had to be sent back to her own habitat. I missed her but my dad would drive me down the forested area once in a while and the fully grown neelgai would leave her herd and stand in the path of the jeep as if to greet us.

These childhood friends were not like the spruced up pedigreed pets of today but they made my life magical with their raw spontaneity. My animal coterie is lost in the mists of time but even after several decades brings a happy smile to my face.

OPED — POPULATION

MISPLACED SCARE OVER RISING POPULATION
The idea that there are too many poor people is the propaganda of a rich, Western elite, determined to preserve its privileged stranglehold on the world's resources
Paul Vallely

Photo : PTI THE world's seven billionth person will be born on Monday, October 31 according to the United Nations population estimating clock, which adds nearly 150 people a minute to the number of us living on this planet.

For many, the occasion is a gloomy reminder of our ecological predicament. Their argument goes something like this: more people, at the rate of an extra two every second - more mouths to feed, more environmental degradation, more species extinction, more global warming and an even bigger demand on the planet's depleting resources. We are going to breed ourselves out of existence.

A man stood up at a conference the other day and told us that over-population was the problem which underlay all others. Nothing would improve until effective population control was put in place. Should we start by getting rid of Americans, I asked him, since they consume 35 per cent of the world's resources even though they are only 6 per cent of the world's people? The entire population of what used to be called the Third World uses up only the same quantity of the world's resources as the US.

Or should we perhaps begin with the Dutch ? In Holland there are more people per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world, apart from odd little principalities such as Monaco, Gibraltar, or Vatican City, which has its own singular policy to birth control, requiring almost all its residents to be men.

There is more nonsense talked about population than almost any subject in international politics. That has been so ever since Thomas Malthus first predicted in 1798 that human reproduction would end in famine and catastrophe. Malthus failed to foresee the Agricultural Revolution which increased food production radically.

Today the world is still easily capable of producing enough to feed seven billion, and more. We will need to increase agricultural productivity by two-thirds by the time the population peaks at nine billion in 2050, but food production rose by five times that amount in the four decades to 2010.

The truth is that changes to the climate, biodiversity, oceanic acidity and greenhouse-gases are all 20 times more the fault of the West, measured in carbon emission tons, than that of poor people in Africa and Asia.

It is our industrial processes, SUVs, fertilised lawns, protein-based diets, and pet-keeping habits that are the real problem. A British cocker spaniel has a bigger carbon paw print than the average human being in India. The average American consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. Yet population growth in the next two decades is mostly in countries which make the smallest contribution to greenhouse gases.

Demographic dividend

You could, anyway, fit seven billion people into Texas with a density no higher than that of New York. But it's not how many people that's the issue. It's who, and where they are.

The number of children a woman can expect to have is far more important than crude numbers. When the fertility rate rises, as it did in the UK in 1945, a generational wave surges through society. When that generation becomes old enough to work it means there are lots of economically active adults, smaller families, rising income, better standards of living, greater life expectancy, economic growth, increased demand and social change. Economists call it a "demographic dividend". Post-war Europe had one after 1945 and East Asia had one post-1980.

That may be the real story of the rise of China and India as economic super-powers. Previously this was put down to globalisation and high wages in developed countries. But it may well have been a demographic dividend. The emergence of America in the 1800s may have had the same cause, rather than the old explanation of increased global free trade. In China this rising population became sophisticated manufacturers; in India they developed software outsourcing.

All that explains why Malthus, and his latter day followers, have repeatedly got it so wrong. In 1968, the biologist Paul Ehrlich rekindled the Malthusian fire with his bestseller, The Population Bomb, which predicted the deaths of hundreds of millions in the 1970s. Around that time, President Lyndon Johnson, fearful that America could be overwhelmed by desperate masses, compelled recipients of US aid to adopt family planning. India set sterilisation quotas, with whole villages rounded up; eight million Indians were sterilised in 1975 alone. China's One Child Policy prevented 400 million births and saw millions more sterilised or aborted in the world's most aggressive population control initiative.

Individuals in poor countries need choice, not control. Where life is uncertain, people want big families because there are so many jobs to do - fetching water from distant wells, collecting firewood, tending herds. Children are the only life insurance available in your old age. When half your children die before the age of five, it makes sense to have lots. Big families are a symptom of poverty, not a cause.

History shows that a sustained fall in birth rates is always preceded by a significant fall in child death rates. Women in poor communities do not just need family planning they need full health services. They need rights to food, water, justice and fair wages alongside reproductive rights. Women's literacy programmes are what reduce infant mortality and birth rates. That was obvious in India if you compared Kerala with the more impoverished northern states, as Amartya Sen showed. Development is the best contraceptive.

But the demographic dividend generation ages. When it retires, it depends on a smaller generation coming behind to pay for its care. That has already happened in Japan, the oldest society the world has ever known. It is happening in the US and Europe, where the dependent young and old now nearly outnumber the working population. According to The Economist, China will be older than the US as early as 2020 and older than Europe by 2030. That will bring an abrupt end to its cheap-labour manufacturing. Its dependency ratio will rise from 38 to 64 by 2050, the sharpest rise in the world.

Within two decades, the burgeoning young, high-fertility population of Africa could become the fastest-growing continent in the global economy. Theirs will be the only part of the world to see its dependency ratios falling. Africans may then look to the old world and begin to wonder if it were not time that its useless and ineffective population were controlled, though that would mean "encouraging" euthanasia rather than birth control. It's a dodgy business, blaming the victims.

By arrangement with The Independent

Americans consume 35 per cent of the world's resources even though they are only 6 per cent of the world's people

We will need to increase agricultural productivity by two-thirds by the time the population peaks at nine billion in 2050, but food production rose by five times that amount in the four decades to 2010.

Seven billion people can be fitted into Texas with a density no higher than that of New York

Facts and forecasts

THE much-anticipated milestone of the seven billionth person on Earth has occasioned much gloomy forecasting, a feature of demographics ever since Thomas Malthus first did his calculations and concluded we were doomed.

But, as his later devotees discovered, population growth rates are highly susceptible to changes in wealth and education: if they rise, birth rates fall. Nor are available resources likely to remain constant. They can be used up, but alternatives will be invented, just as the car replaced the horse. Technology does not remain static. Predictions, especially from pressure groups, need to be handled with caution. But here, as population passes a milestone, are the salient facts (and forecasts):

Short-to medium-term projections The UN says with some certainty that world population will be nine billion by 2050 - the equivalent of adding almost two Chinas. Much of the present and medium-term growth comes from Africa, where population is now growing at 2.3 per cent a year - more than twice Asia's rate. Some experts have simply applied this rate to the rest of the century and forecast that Africa's population will treble by 2100. Economic growth and education make that unlikely.

Long-term projections The global fertility rate - the number of children per couple - is about 2.5, but in richer countries this number has already nosedived. And while exact predictions vary, most suggest the global population will peak at about nine to 10 billion around 2070 and then start to fall, perhaps swiftly.

Food Today, about a billion people suffer from malnutrition. Investment in agriculture is not keeping pace with population growth. Nearly 30 years ago, about 25 per cent of US foreign aid went to agriculture. It is now 1 per cent. To feed the two billion more mouths predicted by 2050, says the UN, food production will have to increase by 70 per cent.

Fertility In many countries, fertility is high because women are poor, face sexual violence and have limited access to family planning. In Kenya, says the UN, 43 per cent of pregnancies are unwanted, and at least 2,600 women die in hospitals after back-street abortions. In Somalia, where 70 per cent are under 30, only 1 per cent of married women have access to modern contraception. Ireland's former president Mary Robinson said in Julyduring a visit to Somalia: "One of the ways you open up a conversation is to ask how many children do you have. Not a single woman said less than six children. They were having seven, eight, nine children because they hoped maybe one or two might survive - an appalling situation."

Water Usage has grown at more than twice the rate of population in the past century, and will rise by 50 per cent between 2007 and 2025 in developing nations, and 18 per cent in developed ones. Today, more than a billion people lack access to clean drinking water, and two billion do not have adequate sanitation. About five million, mainly children, die from waterborne diseases each year.

Urbanisation In 1950, about 730 million people lived in cities. By 2009, it was nearly 3.5 billion and in four decades it will be 6.3 billion, says the UN.

Ageing population Some forecast that, if falling birth rates in Western Europe continue, the continent could have less than half of its present population by 2200. What is certain is that, by 2030, more than a third of people in some countries will be aged over 65, an imbalance which produces severe pressure on health and care services, and many disputes over pension age.

Based on research by Reuters. By arrangement with The Independent