Kargil: victory of valour
THE battle of Kargil is over. Pakistani soldiers, along with mercenaries brought by them for a strong backup and provision of a smokescreen of alleged anti-India fundamentalist sentiments, have retreated, leaving their daring dead without burial.

Avoidable rail accidents
THE early morning accident involving the GT Express and wagons of a derailed goods train near Mathura on Friday was in many respects a repeat of the rail disaster which occurred near Khanna in Punjab in November last year.

INDIA’S DEFENCE POLICY
Its evolution & effectiveness
by P. K. Ravindranath
IT is a significant fact, hardly realised, that Mumbai has provided four notable Defence Ministers to the country — V.K. Krishna Menon, Y.B. Chavan, Sharad Pawar and now George Fernandes. All four of them have left their mark on the Ministry and the country, with the last one still calling the shots.

A mixed blessing for India
by R. A. Singh
AN unintended outcome of the Kargil crisis is the fortuitous but fortunate improvement in Indo-US relations. For one, Washington and New Delhi are indubitably on the same side of the fence — a rare occurrence in the light of the “on-the-one-hand /on- the- other-hand” branch of diplomacy that the American foreign policy establishment has so far practised in South Asian affairs.

Judges within long arm of taxmen
by Anupam Gupta
JUDGES’ salaries are taxable like the income of any other citizen, the Supreme Court has ruled in a terse but important Constitution Bench decision that (with Kargil on everyone’s mind) seems to have escaped the nation’s attention.

No takers for Dilip Kumar’s cause?
by Humra Quraishi
YOU can judge the very functioning of this government by the fact that a man of Dilip Kumar’s stature and position isn’t sure of his very security and safety. This veteran, ageing filmstar had arrived here last Friday (July 9) and Saira Bano followed by a day later and though the general talk was that they’d be here only for three days but till the day of my filing this column (July 16 afternoon) they are still lodged in hotel Le Meridien’s Presidential suite.

But the govt goes on
by Shriniwas Joshi
“IF it were not for the Government, we should have nothing left to laugh at,” was said by the French writer Nicholas Chamfort.

75 Years Ago

Dehra Dun Military College
THE report of this college for the year 1923 shows that in the first term there were 59 cadets, of whom 24 were new arrivals and in the second term there were 69 cadets, one less than the full sanctioned strength.

Kargil: victory of valour

THE battle of Kargil is over. Pakistani soldiers, along with mercenaries brought by them for a strong backup and provision of a smokescreen of alleged anti-India fundamentalist sentiments, have retreated, leaving their daring dead without burial. There is no cause for celebration because our Armed Forces have thrown out the Pakistanis who had occupied our territory. A grievous mistake has been partly rectified and the mountainous belt in the Dras-Kargil-Batalik region has again got its Indian sovereign control back. What we have often erroneously described as intrusion or infiltration has, in fact, been a full-scale aggression. Since our lapses have been washed away by their blood, sweat and tears, a daily salute to the soldiers will be in order. We are not a militarised people, but we are able to show cohesion, solidarity and unity to the enemy in the hour of an assault on our freedom. The Bangladesh war woke us up to the realities of Pakistani adventurism, which we had forgotten even after the sad experience of two earlier invasions. Kargil is a symbol of eternal vigilance and a new awakening. Let us not pretend that we were not surprised by Pakistan. We suffered the consequences of lack of alertness and intelligence failure. However, the result was something like the regaining of the Lost Paradise. Now is the time to look beyond Kargil. It is a bitter fact that the aggressors have not retreated farther than their side of the Line of Control (LoC). In fact, they stay massed along the Pakistani side of the LoC. The threat of fresh attacks has not diminished a bit.

India has to see to it that Pakistan does not appear just to have vacated its aggression. Its respect for the LoC should be total. Its military agencies should accept the folly of launching a cunning operation to intensify the proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir and to escalate tension from Leh to Siachen. One point, wisely emphasised by the Ministry of External Affairs during its daily briefings, is that the respect for the LoC includes a commitment to end the sponsorship or export of terrorism into Jammu and Kashmir as well as in other parts of India. The ISI is a part of the Pakistani establishment and there is no point in looking at it as an autonomous terror-fuelling organisation. We should resist all pressures from the USA and other countries to accept any illogical or short-term solution. A powerful lobby in the USA is praising President Bill Clinton for his "constructive role" in ending the Pakistani war, howsoever limited. A.N. Kosygin, the President of the erstwhile USSR, provided a forum to Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and President Ayub Khan for talking peace bilaterally. Will Mr Clinton do so? We should learn to call a spade a spade. We are coming out quite scathed from the Pakistani aggression. The loss of lives and resources was colossal. The threat of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that he would create many more Kargils is reverberating across the LoC. We have to sustain many families of martyrs and take care of the needs of the disabled soldiers and their kin. We also have to upgrade our intelligence and weaponry. We have to become able to strike before we are struck. All bilateral talks should be pragmatic and not merely magnanimous. Our diplomacy has shown good results and its methods should be practised with greater effect. Islam is not merely a religion but also a social philosophy. The core of the Koran and of Islam is that religion is a mode of moral governance. Remember the Upanishads and think of the origin and growth of all beings and conflicts. No Indian, Hindu or Muslim, should ever fall prey to defeatism or religious fundamentalism. Kargil, as a symbol, has proved that India is indivisible and invincible. The sincerity of Pakistan's talks or the wiliness of its tactics will make or mar its image before the wide world. Who dies if India lives?

Avoidable rail accidents

THE early morning accident involving the GT Express and wagons of a derailed goods train near Mathura on Friday was in many respects a repeat of the rail disaster which occurred near Khanna in Punjab in November last year. The only difference was that in the earlier accident the Sealdah Express rammed into the derailed coaches of the Frontier Mail while the latest mishap was caused by derailed goods wagons. The end result was the same — an avoidable human tragedy. As usual, a mandatory enquiry by the Commissioner of Railway Safety has been ordered. Once the formality is completed the Mathura rail accident, like most such mishaps, too would become part of the inglorious passenger safety record of the Indian Railways. Every rail accident involving the loss of human lives proves as false the promises of successive Railway Ministers that passenger safety would be accorded the highest priority. It is evident that an appeal to the Railway Board to take the necessary steps for improving the passenger safety record of one of the biggest mass transport networks in the world would serve no purpose. To say that the Railways need officers of integrity and proven efficiency and not time-servers for averting Khanna and Mathura-type rail accidents is to state the obvious. It is almost futile to expect the authorities concerned to wake up to the need of introducing a zero-error rail safety technology. The only other option available to rail travellers and public spirited individuals is to involve organisations like Common Cause and activists like M. R. Pai to help them evolve a legally sound strategy for making the Indian Railways realise their contractual responsibility of ensuring the personal safety of every bona fide passenger. There is a saying that the system treats those shabbily who lack the courage to fight for their rights.

The public sector banks have lagged behind the private banks in improving the quality of their services because of "public indifference" to the insults heaped on depositors. However, in the case of the Indian Railways the current debate is not about the poor passenger services. It is about passenger safety. Therefore, the debate on the subject should also explore how the Railways can be made to introduce internationally accepted procedures and laws for protecting the right of every rail passenger to the safety of his life, limbs and property between the points of journey for which he has a valid ticket. In the famous General Motors case a California court directed the world's leading car makers to pay an amount of nearly $5 billion as damages to a family of six seriously injured in a road accident in which the faulty placement of the fuel tank of the car in which they were travelling proved to be an aggravating factor. GM had ignored improving the safety features of its product because they were told by a company executive that deaths by fire would cost the company far less than what they would have to invest in improving the safety features of the fuel tanks of the cars. Most of the amount the company was directed to pay as compensation was in the nature of punitive damages. The Indian Railways too should be dragged to court for causing deaths of and injuries to rail passengers by not introducing internationally proven technology for averting accidents and for alerting the driver and the guard much before a train running at full speed rams into a stationery train or derailed coaches on the same track. The Indian Railways must be made to realise that it would be less expensive for them to invest in technology for improving passenger safety than taking the risk of being directed by courts to pay heavy amounts as punitive damages to the families of those killed in avoidable rail mishaps.

INDIA’S DEFENCE POLICY
Its evolution & effectiveness
by P. K. Ravindranath

IT is a significant fact, hardly realised, that Mumbai has provided four notable Defence Ministers to the country — V.K. Krishna Menon, Y.B. Chavan, Sharad Pawar and now George Fernandes. All four of them have left their mark on the Ministry and the country, with the last one still calling the shots.

A decade after Independence, India had been continuing with the same defence policy as the British had designed and left for us, except for the fact that the forces had been Indianised. All this changed when Krishna Menon was appointed Defence Minister in April, 1957.

Menon brought in the concept that the defence system should have its own industrial base and should not be dependent upon imports. From recovery and reconstruction of condemned equipment lying in military depots to raising the salaries of defence personnel, he brought about several changes. He initiated extensive defence production programmes, much to the detriment of the private sector.

While Menon came to the Defence Ministry with the reputation of a defence expert, built assiduously while in England, Chavan came to it as a novice. He went about learning his job through what he later called his “prayer meetings” every morning at 9.30 when he met the three armed forces chiefs, the Secretary for Defence and the Secretary for Defence Production collectively. He took the step of making the defence forces self-sufficient further ahead.

Till his time, Congress leaders were warped in their thinking on why India, wedded to the Gandhian ideal of non-violence, should maintain a huge defence establishment. They pressurised the government to cut defence budgets to the minimum, despite the conflicts with Pakistan.

Chavan paid tributes to his predecessor: “It must be said to the credit of Krishna Menon that he planned many useful projects for the armed forces, including the production of aircraft and tanks.... The tank project was a rather long-drawn-out affair and did not make any progress before I arrived in the ministry.”

Menon had initiated plans for the manufacture of MiG-21s, tanks, semi-automatic rifles and electronic equipment. Chavan carried them forward, with his easy access to defence personnel unlike Menon whose very presence was overbearing. Menon lectured them, scolded them, and mocked them when they came out with outdated strategies and proposals. Chavan sought to learn from them.

S.S. Khera, former Cabinet Secretary, writes in his “India’s Defence Problems”: “For the first time at the head of the Defence Ministry we had a minister with a successful administrative record and experience, both able and willing to require formulations of policy, as well as initiative in the consequential arrangements to make that policy effective.”

There is need for a proper evaluation of the contributions of these two stalwarts to the creation of the defence system of the country. One expected such an insight into this little-known chapter in R.D. Pradhan’s “Debacle to Revival” a record of Chavan as Defence Minister, 1962-65. Pradhan was his trusted Private Secretary at the relevant time. The book turns out to be little more than a bureaucrat’s personal diary crammed with irrelevant details.

There is no attempt throughout the 310 pages of the book at an appraisal of the achievements and failures of Chavan in the ministry. There is not even a personal portrait of the Maratha leader, like one finds in Lt-Gen. B.M. Kaul’s “The Untold Story” about Krishna Menon. It makes delightful reading, touches of intimate personal observations, notings of Menon’s idiosyncracies and his behaviour with puffed up generals and starchy admirals.

I do not compare Pradhan’s work with the professionally journalistic biographies of T.J.S. George (on Menon) or T.V. Kunhi Krishnan (on Chavan). The first one was written in 1964 and the other in 1971. Both remain highly relevant and readable almost three decades later.

Pradhan can be discarded after one reading. He devotes excessive attention on himself as when a columnist of the Hindustan Times “had a longish chat with me” when she had to wait till the Defence Minister was free. Whether the “chat” produced anything worthwhile for the columnist is unknown, but Pradhan has nothing more to say on it.

Pradhan’s chapter, “Black Friday” is a classic example of his blotchy thinking and incapacity to present a story as it should be. The Black Friday is November 22, 1963, the day Chavan completed one year in the Defence Ministry and the day when two generals, one Air Vice-Marshal and three other senior officers perished in a helicopter crash. One of them would have been the Chief of Army Staff and another the Chief of Air Staff, if they had survived the crash. But they would have had a lot of explaining to do on why all of them violated defence regulations on taking the same flight in each other’s company.

“Black Friday” does not go into these details. Instead, Pradhan almost “reeled with shock when I opened the newspapers” the next day. “There it was, a black boldly printed headline: Kennedy Assassinated.” Pradhan’s comment: “Our tragedy appeared almost small compared to the death of this great leader of the western world.”

The only personal touch, no doubt with great perceptive insight is: “Chavan wept over (Air Vice Marshal) Pinto’s death.”

Now that the fighting in Kashmir over Kargil has ended, there is bound to be a probe into our defence preparedness, and possibly some inspired accounts. Apart from presenting his own version in the Rajya Sabha as and when it debates the issue, following the clamour of the Congress, the CPI and the CPM, it would be advisable for the present Defence Minister, Mr George Fernandes, himself to write down his own version before some bureaucrat takes a hand at it. Mr Fernandes has a facile command over his pen to produce an interesting and engrossing account of Kargil and Pakistan’s duplicity.

The roles of Mr Sharad Pawar and Mr Fernandes in the vital ministry also need to be recorded for posterity. Mr Pawar made an impact on the ministry during his brief 20-month tenure. He struck an unusual degree of rapport with servicemen everywhere and of all ranks. He proved that he was willing to share the perils that defence personnel face, whether at sea or in the inhospitable terrain of Siachen. He was the first Defence Minister of the country who visited the troops at Siachen.

Mr Pawar initiated moves to utilise the Directorate-General of Ordnance to boost exports. He boosted the morale of the troops when he went visiting them to find out for himself their working and living conditions. In tune with the higher echelons of the defence forces, he even took to playing golf with them.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr Pawar initiated a move to cut defence expenditure from 6.2 per cent of the GNP to 2.8 per cent of the GNP, without reducing the capability or the defence potential of the services. India has the fourth largest defence force in the world, but spends only a meagre amount on it.

The defence forces are certainly not the only guarantee of a nation’s unity or even its borders. If that were so, the Soviet Union with one of the mightiest and largest armed forces equipped with the most sophisticated conventional, nuclear and thermo-nuclear weapons would not have faced the cataclysmic changes it did in 1991.

Krishna Menon’s principal aide was H.C. Sarin, his Joint Secretary in the ministry, whom Pradhan describes as an “encyclopaedia of men and matters relating to defence.” “Debacle to Revival” gives one the impression that Chavan, like some of his proteges, did not know how to choose his colleagues.

A mixed blessing for India
by R. A. Singh

AN unintended outcome of the Kargil crisis is the fortuitous but fortunate improvement in Indo-US relations. For one, Washington and New Delhi are indubitably on the same side of the fence — a rare occurrence in the light of the “on-the-one-hand /on- the- other-hand” branch of diplomacy that the American foreign policy establishment has so far practised in South Asian affairs.

At one stroke, the Clinton Administration absolved itself from the odium of bending over backwards to favour Pakistan when it showed itself to be unmistakably in India’s corner as far as the rights and wrongs of the Kargil intrusion were concerned. The White House, and even the State Department which has, more often than not, tilted towards Islamabad, backed India’s version: that the aggressors were regular Pakistani troops with a smattering of Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen serving as a fig-leaf; and there was no dispute over the Line of Control, which was clearly defined as part of the Simla Agreement.

What was worse for Islamabad, when embattled and desperate Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif came running to Uncle Sam for succour, President Clinton told him in no uncertain terms that he had to vacate the aggression, respect the Line of Control, and go back to negotiations with India under the Lahore Agreement.

How did Islamabad, which had so far been treated with indulgence by the State Department and the Pentagon, go from that favoured position to the dog house in such a short order? The reason has to do with the absolute moral bankruptcy of Pakistan’s plans as well as the short-sightedness of its tactics and strategies. The Pakistani power elite, weighted more in favour of the ISI and the Army rather than the civilian administration, though that by grabbing a few hundred square miles in the inaccessible but commanding heights of the Himalayas near Kargil and positioning a few hundred well-trained fanatics called Mujahideen there would be the beginning of a creep-and-grab approach to Kashmir. The Pakistani plans were indeed myopic because their planners never foresaw potential dangers beyond the land grab.

The biggest shock for Pakistan was the brush-off it received in Beijing. With the USA, Russia, France and Britain wagging disapproving fingers in its face, Islamabad was certain that China, its staunch ally from the days of the Shanghai Declaration, would stand by it. But Beijing had other ideas. Partly prodded by the USA, China advised a visiting Nawaz Sharif, in effect, to go and make up with India and live in peace. The unexpected denouement was such a shocker that Mr Sharif had to cancel his scheduled six-day trip and returned home from China in two days. Caught as he was between a steady accretion of Indian military advances and the pressures of the fundamentalist lobby at home, the only alternative Mr Sharif could think of was to rush to Washington for an emergency meeting with President Clinton.

In order to ensure his political survival and to avert a military coup — a constant lurking danger in Islamabad — Mr Sharif had to have America’s blessings. For, it is a fact of global life today that no Pakistani President or Prime Minister can long survive without America’s strong and overt support.

There is also an economic angle to America’s South Asian calculus. India might be no Asian tiger, but it is an Asian elephant, massive, strong and moving steadily forward. It is bound to be a major economic entity in the near future, especially in the cutting edge areas of information technology which is certain to be the force of the future. In contrast, Pakistan is very close to being an economic basket case, with its instability driving away global capital, and unable to meet its loan commitments without more charity from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. If nothing succeeds like success, the opposite is also true: nothing fails like failure.

All the above notwithstanding, the Kargil crisis can at best be a mixed blessing. It is only with deep anguish that India can think of the 300-odd brave officers and other ranks who sacrificed their lives in defence of the motherland. Their deaths and the maiming of hundreds of others constitute a needless tragedy. It will take years of penitence and penance for Pakistan to wash away the stain of guilt. History will not forgive it lightly.

(The author is based in Washington.)

But the govt goes on
by Shriniwas Joshi

“IF it were not for the Government, we should have nothing left to laugh at,” was said by the French writer Nicholas Chamfort. The other day I was in the State Revenue Department when a desk-officer told me that his office had received an application from a field functionary requesting for blanket permission for the use of the official vehicle for going to a particular station which permission could only be given by the State Government. The applicant had clarified that he was seeking the blanket approval because his official duties required him to visit the station very often. The farsighted office in its wisdom inferred that the proposal did not stand on sound legs. To give soundness to the legs, it applied its mind to prepare a note for the Deputy Secretary. It read, “The case is wanting. The officer has not given reasons as to why he requires permission for blankets. He has also not clarified whether he wants one blanket or more than one. In case his prayer was to be considered, he should clearly state, in the first instance, whether the purchase of blankets will be done from the open market after following the laid-down procedure or from the government-run “Khadi Bhandar”. The case may be returned to the officer directing him to do the needful so that the office, before giving the required permission, is fully satisfied.” No wonder Alan Clark writes in his diary: “Give a civil servant a straight case and he’ll wreck it with cliches, bad punctuation, double negatives and convoluted meaning.” Notwithstanding Clark or Chamfort, the Government goes on and on.

I am reminded of the days when I was in the lower echelons of bureaucracy. I had received official calendars from the Secretariat Administration to be distributed to the superiors. I had asked my PA to deliver the goods and then make a report to me. The report which I had received read: “Secretary — hanged in his room; Additional Secretary —hanged in his room; And so on.” I had thanked the hangman congratulating him to complete the cold-blooded hangings with finesse.

Once in a cartoon-drawing competition, the cartoonist who presented a blank page with caption “Silence! The Government Office at Work” was awarded the First Prize. The experience of that cartoonist matched with that of mine when I visited a Directorate recently. I found none in the office except a Joint Director sitting lonely and lost. I entered into his chamber and asked: “What is the matter? One swallow making an office or is it closed today?” Using his good sense of humour he said, “No, you have come slightly late. Our de facto office hours are from 12.30 to 1.30 with an hour off for lunch.”

Judges within long arm of taxmen

by Anupam Gupta

JUDGES’ salaries are taxable like the income of any other citizen, the Supreme Court has ruled in a terse but important Constitution Bench decision that (with Kargil on everyone’s mind) seems to have escaped the nation’s attention.

The argument that Judges’ salaries are not liable to income tax “is quite unacceptable”, says the pronouncement, rejecting an appeal filed by a Judge of the Allahabad High Court. “The salary of a Judge of a High Court and the Supreme Court is income and is taxable by Act of Parliament in just the same manner as is the income of any other citizen.”

Other arguments having failed, it was contended rather ingeniously on behalf of the appellant that Supreme Court and High Court Judges hold office under the Constitution and are, as they should be, totally independent of the executive. They have, therefore, no employer and what they receive as remuneration cannot be called salary; and accordingly, the remuneration is not taxable under the head of “salary” under the Income Tax Act.

“To our mind,” answers the Supreme Court, “there is a misconception here.” It is true that High Court and Supreme Court Judges have no employer but that does not mean that they do not receive salaries. They are constitutional functionaries. Articles 125 and 221 of the Constitution expressly describe what they receive as “salaries”. It is “not possible to hold, therefore, that what Judges receive are not salaries or that such salaries are not taxable as income under the head of salary.”

It is an eminently correct decision and the Supreme Court has very wisely spurned the invitation to treat the judiciary as a privileged class. The brevity with which the Bench has spoken — the judgement is less than two printed pages long — bespeaks its firmness on the issue. But considering the importance of the issue for the moral standing of the judiciary, the Bench could have said more in support of the view it has taken.

“It was felt by the Drafting Committee as well as by a large body of members of this House,” B.R. Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly on October 12, 1949, “that no person who is a functionary under the Constitution or a civil servant under the Constitution shall be immune from any liability imposed by any fiscal measure for the general people of this country.”

He was opening the discussion on the Second Schedule to the Constitution, which prescribes the amount of salary payable to the Head of State (President and Governor) and Supreme Court and High Court Judges.

His colleague in the Drafting Committee and the former Advocate General of Madras, Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar — who played a role in the drafting of India’s Constitution next only to B.N. Rau and Ambedkar — was even more forthright.

“Unless an immunity is given in the Constitution,” said Ayyar, endorsing Ambedkar, “it is an accepted principle of constitutional law that every officer, be he the President, the Chief Justice or a Judge of the High Court, or be he a Minister, will be subject to income tax.”

Impossible as it may have seemed to our founding fathers, and quite unethical besides, the countervailing view that Judges’ salaries are not liable to be diminished by income tax was once the law in the world’s most powerful democracy, the USA.

Judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, says Article III, Section I of the American Constitution, “shall...receive for their services a compensation which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.”

The Article, declared the Supreme Court of the USA in 1920 in Evans versus Gore, was intended to be directed against all diminution, whether by taxation or otherwise. Next to permanency in office, it said (quoting Alexander Hamilton), nothing can contribute more to the independence of the judges than a fixed provision for their support, for a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.

The independence of the judges, added the court, was of “far greater importance than any revenue that could come from taxing their salaries.”

One of the greatest judges of this century, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissented. “To require a man to pay the taxes that all other men have to pay cannot possibly be made an instrument to attack his independence as a judge,” he said. “I see nothing in the purpose of this clause of the Constitution to indicate that the judges were to be a privileged class, free from bearing their share of the cost of the institutions upon which their well-being, if not their life, depends.”

Seven years after Holmes’ departure from the court, the US Supreme Court overruled itself in 1939.

It spoke this time through Justice Felix Frankfurter, that great apostle of judicial self-restraint whom B.N. Rau was to consult a decade later when drafting our own Constitution.

“To suggest,” held Frankfurter in O’Malley vs Woodrough, “that it makes inroads upon the independence of judges...by making them share their aliquot share of the cost of maintaining the Government, is to trivialise the great historic experience on which the framers based the safeguards of Article 3, Section 1.”

The Supreme Court of India has carried forward the best traditions of judicial independence in following the path of Holmes and Frankfurter.

No takers for Dilip Kumar’s cause?

by Humra Quraishi

YOU can judge the very functioning of this government by the fact that a man of Dilip Kumar’s stature and position isn’t sure of his very security and safety. This veteran, ageing filmstar had arrived here last Friday (July 9) and Saira Bano followed by a day later and though the general talk was that they’d be here only for three days but till the day of my filing this column (July 16 afternoon) they are still lodged in hotel Le Meridien’s Presidential suite. I’d last spoken to them on Monday night and Dilip Kumar had said, “Now we have postponed our return by a day, as tomorrow we have to call on the President and the Vice-President and just after that we will return to Bombay...” I suppose these “calls” centred around his apprising those dignitaries about the harassment he has been facing ever since the Shiv Sena issued a series of threats on his refusal to return the Nishaan-e-Imtiaz award.

And to all those speculations about his further stay in the Capital, a member of Citizens For Democracy (CFD) commented that since there have been further threats from the Shiv Sena — threats to gherao the Le Meridien hotel and even the Bombay home of Dilip Kumar (where Saira Bano’s mother Naseem Bano and her brother’s family also stay) — and so with that backdrop Dilip Kumar and Saira Bano want to leave New Delhi after being absolutely sure that those assurances given to them by the Prime Minister have a backup to them. And it might be painful for many to know that with the exception of the CFD no other organisation has openly come forward in support of Dilip Kumar. Even the CFD reacted late, holding a Press conference only on July 15 at the Press Club of India, to express their anguish at the way communal and fascist elements are tormenting citizens and they have appealed to the National Human Rights Commission to intervene and stop this ongoing harassment to Dilip Kumar.

And just yesterday at a get-together hosted by Ajit and Arpana Caur in honour of Khushwant Singh, talks did concentrate on this issue of growing intolerance and both Khushwant Singh and Kuldip Nayyar seemed visibly upset by the happenings in the country and the way communal hysteria seems to be building up. Here let me also add that it seems to be increasing at such a rate that this week when Kuchipudi dancer Raja Reddy tried to mobilise artistes support for Dilip Kumar, he couldn’t find any takers to his call. Does that mean the communal bug has travelled into those realms too or does that mean that each is worried about his or her own survival and so doesn’t want to speak out? Whichever way, it is a depressing scenario.

The French National Day

Want a lift from that depression? Come along to the French National Day celebrations held on July 14 evening at the sprawling lawns of the French Embassy. I haven’t really seen a bigger national day celebration. What with wine flowing in such abundance that teetotallers were almost left punished with no water offerings, food spread stretching from the cheese to the custard, a live band (in all probability airlifted by Air France) to lift sagging spirits. And to top it all, every known or lesser known person of the city was around. Let me quickly fit in a few names — M.S. Gill, Brajesh Misra, K.R. Malkani, Dilip Padgaonkar, O.P. Jain, Geetanjali Aiyar, Inder Malhotra, Jaya Jaitly... And though I had reached almost two hours late, the crowds hadn’t thinned; in fact many had drifted towards the dance floor. Alas! That didn’t really cut across a neat picture, what with our out-of-shape bodies attempting a fox-trot! But the mood seemed to be so heady that it could be overlooked. And amidst it all, the French Ambassador to India, Claude Blanchemaison, moved about with an air of absolute contentment. One really can’t blame him, for playing host to some hundreds and that too amidst almost perfect arrangements must have required a lot of planning and hard work. All the more because the French do things in style. So much so that during the course of an earlier interview, Blanchemaison told me that like a true Frenchman he is very particular about the wine and cheese he serves. He specially gets them all the way from France. But here at the Embassy he has even employed a French chef to see that the most authentic is served. And that particular evening the way people ate and drank seemed nothing short of showing their appreciation of the French hospitality, to put it absolutely mildly.

And the Iraqi National Day

And though I will be attending the Iraqi National Day celebrations this evening after filing this column, two aspects stand out even at this stage. From the invite it becomes very apparent that this year there is a change in the hotel venue — after years of hosting these celebrations from one particular luxury hotel, this time they have changed the venue to another luxury hotel. Also evident is the fact that this year it is an evening reception, as against those afternoon receptions they’d earlier been hosting. And the timings (12 pm to 2 pm) of those had intrigued me so much that I had even asked the previous Iraqi Ambassador the reason for this. To this he had pointed out that since they did not serve liquor, afternoon timings seemed perfect. Let’s see what servings are in store for this year’s reception. Especially in keeping with the fact that the Iraqi Embassy here has a new Ambassador, Salah Al Mukhtar, who isn’t just a career diplomat, but the Editor-in-Chief of the leading newspaper of Iraq Al Jamuriya and had been especially chosen by the Iraqi President Saddam Husein for this posting.

75 YEARS AGO

Dehra Dun Military College

THE report of this college for the year 1923 shows that in the first term there were 59 cadets, of whom 24 were new arrivals and in the second term there were 69 cadets, one less than the full sanctioned strength. It appears that at first 17 cadets and later only 6 were sons of Indian officers in the Army and the rest were sons of civilians.

Though preference is given to the sons of officers, the number of admissions from this class is decreasing.

It is probable that the heavy expenditure to be incurred on education by the parents of cadets stands in the way of large admissions from this class. Moreover, it is said that the boys “cannot understand any form of English poetry except simple verse.”

We do not know if the level of intelligence of the boys thus recruited from a limited class of people is sufficiently high. But whether it is so or is not so, it seems advisable to enlarge the field of selection so as to include educated middle class people who are better capable of profiting by the education provided and, if possible, reduce the cost per pupil by admitting a large number of cadets.