EDITORIALS

Coping with AIDS
Tackle it on war footing

IT is scary. At least 40 million people are reportedly infected with the HIV virus today —most of them in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Some 4.5 million AIDS patients live in India alone; China’s figures are equally disturbing. Anti-AIDS programmes have been launched, but there is still limited awareness about how this disease is caused and transmitted, and how devastating the effects of this scourge can be.

There is also the misconception that the AIDS menace is confined to the urban areas in states like Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, where the maximum HIV positive cases have been detected. The latest figures made available by the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS/HIV present an inaccurate and inadequate picture of the prevalence of the disease in the northern region. Rajasthan is reported to have 892 victims, while Punjab and Haryana have 248 and 313 such cases, respectively. Jammu and Kashmir, with a population of one crore, has reported only two AIDS patients, which might be because of poor surveillance.

As no cure is available at any price, the deadly disease poses a formidable challenge to doctors and researchers the world over. Thanks to the growing awareness, governments are making more funds available for anti-AIDS programmes. The US Congress is expected to clear $2.4 billion to fight AIDS in 14 countries next year. However, strings are often attached to the Western aid and politics, not the need, decides where the funds should go. At present only eight lakh patients the world over are taking a cocktail of drugs needed to control the HIV virus. There is an urgent need to make the treatment available to the needy in poor countries. A positive development is that the cost of treatment is coming down. In the last three years the cost of drugs needed to treat the disease has come down from $10,000 a patient annually to $300. This is because of competition offered by Indian drug makers. Making the treatment available to every patient in every country is the daunting challenge before the world leaders today. They better devote some attention to it — for saving the humanity from the deadly disease.

Vote for status quo
Caste equations matter more in UP, Bihar

THE Samajwadi Party can justifiably take pride in the fact that it could win both the Harora and Mahasi seats for which byelections were held on Monday. What has made the victory sweeter for Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav is that both constituencies were considered the strongholds of the Bahujan Samaj Party. The defeat is a major setback for BSP leader Mayawati as it shows that the party cadres have not found any substance in her charge that Manuwadi forces had ganged up against her. It underlines the fact that the voters are no longer enamoured of her leadership and have got alienated from the party. The benefit has naturally gone to the Samajwadi Party, which can claim that it also enjoys the support of the Scheduled Castes also.

A noteworthy feature of the byelections is the failure of the Bharatiya Janata Party to make any improvement in its position in Uttar Pradesh. It is true that the BJP had never been strong in these constituencies but that is no consolation for a party which can only ill afford to lose UP. The BJP's ambition to return to power is dependent on its ability to win a sizeable number of seats in the largest state. Its electoral calculations will be upset if the BJP remains far behind the SP and the BSP. Obviously, the anti-incumbency factor has not been to the benefit of the BJP. In other words, the decision to sit in the Opposition in the state has not yet yielded the desired dividends to the BJP.

In neighbouring Bihar, Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav continues to enjoy the upper hand as is borne out by the victory his Rashtriya Janata Dal has achieved in Barachatti and Fatuha. The division in Opposition votes also helped the RJD retain these two seats. By now Mr Yadav has perfected the art of overcoming the anti-incumbency factor. It seems as long as the Muslim-Yadav combination is intact, he and his wife can preside over the virtual pauperisation of the state. Where the combination does not work as in Sitamarhi, the voters have given a severe drubbing to the RJD by giving a bigger margin of victory to the BJP.

Wooing OBCs for votes
Why not create more jobs?

THE Union Cabinet’s decision on Tuesday to expand the Other Backward Classes (OBC) list with new castes and communities from Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Sikkim is yet another attempt by the Centre to strengthen the vote banks in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections next year. The casual manner in which the decision has been taken suggests that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government is more worried about its vote banks than the upliftment of the backward classes. True, the Centre would like to provide the new castes benefits like reservation in the direct recruitment of candidates to the Civil Services and other posts. But where are the jobs?

Sadly, a system that was devised in 1950 for only 10 years has been strengthened, expanded and perpetuated with the inclusion of more and more castes and communities. This is the most telling evidence of the country’s social and economic failure. Equally dangerous, far from leading to greater equality, special privileges like job reservations in the Civil Services and admission to engineering and medical courses have led to the rise of the creamy layer which enjoys more benefits than others in the OBC lists.

It is worth recalling that when in the early years of Singapore’s independence, leaders of the local Indian community sought special protection, Mr Lee Kuan Yew asked them whether they saw themselves as the equivalent of India’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, to be fobbed off with quotas instead of being absorbed in the egalitarian mainstream that defines a meritocracy. The liberal White leadership of the US felt the need for positive discrimination so that African-Americans could be enfranchised in the true sense of the term. That was a transitory requirement. And so was reservation in India. But our leaders do not learn from others. The most effective remedy lies in generating more employment rather than reserving jobs that do not exist in large numbers. 

Thought for the day

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes illness worthwhile. 

— George Bernard Shaw

ARTICLE

Peace initiative is fine
But Musharraf must rein in jihadis and ISI
by G. Parthasarathy

THE resumption of overflights is merely a small step in a long journey for peace and good neighbourly relations. The litmus test of General Musharraf’s sincerity would be determined on whether he, the ISI and their favourite jihadi outfits continue using terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere in India as an instrument of state policy. Thus, even as Prime Minister Vajpayee gets ready to pack his bags for the Islamabad SAARC summit, we will have to carefully analyse recent developments within Pakistan and the impact of international pressures on Pakistan’s support for terrorism in Afghanistan, India and elsewhere in the world.

There is no dearth of evidence about the assistance that the Taliban is receiving in Pakistan, where Taliban leaders freely travel and collect funds in cities like Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi. The alliance of religious parties, the MMA, that now rules the NWFP and Baluchistan, makes no secret of its sympathy and support for the Taliban. The Afghan government has publicly alleged that Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who is on the most-wanted list of global terrorists, was recently sighted in a mosque in Quetta. The well-armed Taliban are staging regular attacks on American and Karzai government forces within Afghanistan. President Karzai has repeatedly accused Pakistan of providing support to the Taliban. His accusations have been endorsed by the Bush Administration’s envoy to Afghanistan Mr Zalmay Khalilzad. American commanders in Afghanistan make no secret of their anger at Pakistani duplicity. Pakistani experts like Ahmed Rashid acknowledge that there is incontrovertible evidence about the support that the Taliban now receives on Pakistani soil. General Musharraf has not abandoned the Pakistan Army’s cherished belief that Afghanistan has to be an ISI-controlled client state, providing “strategic depth” to Pakistan, by allowing its territory to be used to wage a low-intensity war against India.

Pakistan is obviously facing tremendous American pressure to end its support for cross-border terrorism in Afghanistan. Given the mutually reinforcing links that exist between the Taliban, the ISI and the jihadi groups operating in Jammu and Kashmir, the Americans have concluded that they can no longer pretend that the dangers that cross-border terrorism in J and K poses can be separated from their battle against the Taliban and Al-Qaida. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s blunt statement in the presence of President Bush about support to terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir was a warning to Pakistan to mend its ways. Similarly, General Musharraf had to face some blunt talking on the support being rendered to Islamic separatists in Xingiang province during his recent visit to China. The international community will no longer accept the charade of jihadi groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammad being “banned” by the Musharraf dispensation and re-emerging immediately thereafter with new names like the Khudamul Islam. Such groups are, after all, bent on killing Americans in Pakistan and attacking them not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq.

Responding to American pressures, General Musharraf banned a few jihadi and sectarian organisations like the Jaish-e-Mohammad that have posed problems for the Americans. He pointedly exempted others involved in terrorism in J and K like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (now renamed Markaz-ud-Dawa) or Al-Badr from such bans. He thus sent a clear signal to these groups that he intended to treat them with kid gloves and let them continue with terrorist activities in J and K and elsewhere in India. According to Karachi-based Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, General Musharraf met jihadi leaders recently and assured them that he supported “jihad in Kashmir” with his “heart and soul”. Following this meeting, the Lashkar organised a massive meeting in Muridke where thousands of jihadis vowed to “liberate Kashmir”. The redoubtable Maulana Masood Azhar, who was “visibly protected by the local police”, held a similar meeting of about 7000 people in Karachi’s Batha Mosque. Reports from Pakistan suggest that General Musharraf is on the verge of striking a deal with the MMA, which would lead to political accommodation with the religious parties. He has thus chosen to be even more beholden in the coming months to the Islamic parties supporting the jihadis.

Just a day before Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali made his offer of a ceasefire along the LoC, the head of the Indian Army’s Northern Command, Lt-Gen Hari Prasad, announced that Pakistan had shifted its terrorist training camps closer to the Line of Control and set up new ones from where it could easily push in its jihadis. Referring to Pakistani assertions that it was doing everything possible to end cross-border terrorism, General Hari Prasad noted: “I have every reason to believe that there is no truth in the Pakistani claims. The Pakistan Army and the ISI have been continuously pushing in militants.” There are now indications that infiltration will be increased from the Sind border also, to strike at “soft targets’ in India. In these circumstances, one would be not merely gullible and naive but downright foolish to believe that there is going to be any let-up in cross-border terrorism in the near future.

Prime Minister Vajpayee has rightly embarked on a process of “engagement” with Pakistan, through a series of imaginative confidence-building measures, to create a climate for normalisation of relations. While some of Mr Vajpayee’s statements on the possibility of dialogue with Pakistan during the SAARC summit have been somewhat ambivalent, his Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal and his own spokesman Ashok Tandon have clarified that there can be no resumption of the dialogue process with Pakistan till Indian concerns about cross-border terrorism are effectively addressed. At the same time, while the Pakistanis are praising Mr Vajpayee as an apostle of peace, they are not too subtly suggesting that others like Mr L.K. Advani and Mr Yashwant Sinha are hawks. It is a pity that on vital national security issues like talks with Pakistan and the need for a continuing dialogue with the Hurriyat Conference, an impression is gaining ground that there are differences between North and South Blocks — apparent differences that outsiders are gleefully exploiting.

The forthcoming SAARC summit in Islamabad should be utilised predominantly to promote regional economic integration. It should not degenerate into a comical Indo-Pakistan soap opera. It is only appropriate for exchanges to take place between Prime Ministers Vajpayee and Jamali on the sidelines of the summit, during events like the “retreat” of the leaders. But there are indications that Pakistan looks forward to seeing things move from where they were at the aborted Agra summit, in the course of meetings during the Islamabad summit. New Delhi should make it unambiguously clear that it has no intention of getting into any new framework for a dialogue with Pakistan, other than what has been provided for in the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration.

The Agra summit was a diplomatic disaster marked by wishful thinking, inept negotiating tactics by Indian negotiators led by the then External Affairs Minister and massive media mismanagement. It was followed by the December 13 attack on India’s Parliament. The nation does not need a repetition of what transpired at Agra.

MIDDLE

Sixtythree years ago
by Amreeta Sen

THE wedding took place on a crisp November morning, sixtythree years ago. The bridegroom was a dashing young police officer, the bride, a beautiful girl, clad in a simple benarasi sari with the minimum of jewellery and the minimum of fuss.

“Never had I seen a more beautiful bride”, reminisced a guest fondly. She had been a guest at the wedding, sixtythree years ago. A mere child, a sister of the bride, but she remembered. “Trends”, she mused, “of you young people setting trends today — but they set the trends then.

Sixtythree years ago, weddings were affairs of pomp and ceremony but not for this young couple. He had met here at her maternal uncle’s house and they had liked each other immediately. So on that wintry day in the November of 1940, he drove up to his wedding in a battered old car. No decorations, no flowers bedecked that car but a glow of simplicity prevailed. The bridegroom jumped out from the driver’s seat, to be greeted by a slightly amazed and amused mother-in-law.

His best friend and his wife came with him, as did a favourite cousin and his wife. They had persuaded him to buy a new dhoti for the marriage. “Why”, he had asked, honestly puzzled, “I return to work the following day, and I don’t wear dhotis...”. The ladies had looked at each other and sighed. They patiently persuaded him to buy a new set of clothes for the wedding anyway.

It cannot be denied that the dashing young officer’s friends also had a sense of humour. On the morning of the wedding he was playing tennis with his immediate superior. A few minutes into the game, and his opponent noticeably faltered. Then he abandoned all pretence of playing and came up to the would-be bridegroom. “I say”, he asked his junior, “Aren’t you getting married today?” “Yes”, said the officer, a trifle impatiently. “But dash it all,” protested his boss, “you haven’t applied for leave and you are playing tennis in the morning”. “Yes”, queried the most promising young officer in the department. His senior lost his cool, “You are on leave from this moment for a week”, he announced. “Now stop playing tennis, go and do something for the wedding, buy something for that poor girl you are going to marry”.

The bridegroom shared his famous “cool” temperament with another member of his family — his mother. When he announced that he was determined to marry a girl of a different religious sect, she did not falter. “We are not coming to the wedding, of course”, she told her son, serenely. “Naturally” he responded, then a thought struck him, “But how will you treat my wife after we are married?”. His mother was folding clothes and she did not pause in her work at this question. She looked up, a trifle surprised, “As my daughter-in-law, of course. Why do you ask? How will she be different from the others?” “I thought so, too”, smiled her son, as he left the room.

So took place this glowing wedding, sixtythree years ago. The glow remains, though my grandfather is now confined to bed, and my grandmother, still a steadfast companion, by his side. “I wish we had taken pictures of the wedding. It was the most beautiful one I had ever seen.”, sighed my great-aunt, the other day. It does not matter. The glory of that simple wedding day has come down over the years, to us, the descendants of that dashing young officer and his beautiful bride. We need no pictures. We have the radiance and the glow.

OPED

Cheap imports drive farmers to suicide
Making a living becoming more and more difficult
by Arun Chacko

STARK, rocky, infertile land, regularly punctuated by hillocks for hundreds of kilometres — an archetypal bandit country on the silver screen — greets the visitor in a good part of Ananthapur district of Andhra Pradesh. The population is sparse, and farming is limited. With one crop per year, it’s totally dependent on the erratic monsoon. That’s not saying very much, considering the place gets less annual rainfall than Jaisalmer.

There are no tubewells, or half-decent farming land. Occasional fields seem covered by unhealthy scrub. In actual fact, these pathetic looking shrubs are groundnut plants. This, the Rayalseema area of Andhra Pradesh, is one of the country’s premier groundnut producers.

Making a living here was a tough business at the best of times. Today it is getting to be next to impossible. Cheap Malaysian palmolein imports, following trade liberalisation and reduced import traffs, have led to the crashing of groundnut prices — and starvation. in the last three years, 243 farmers have committed suicide in Ananthapur district alone. Of these 55 were women and five girls, depressed at their pathetic condition and lack of future.

There is also an alarming rise in prostitution and the trafficking of young girls. As many as 78 women from Kadiri were identified in a single place. Many of them have been infected with HIV. Children are being forced to quit school.

Jayalakshmi, aged 14, was a very good student and well appreciated by her teachers and village folk. But she couldn’t take the pain of the family suffering, and the father having to migrate to earn a living. So she took her life.

Fifty-year-old K Leelavatamma’s husband had six acres of land in Chowkuntappali village. He took loans from moneylenders some years ago. But between an indifferent crop and crashing groundnut prices, he realised there was no way he could repay his loan. On March 4, 2003, the day of the Mahashivaratri festival, he took his life. His widow sold half her landholding to repay her debt, was left with no family income, and now works as agricultural labour.

Twentyfive-year-old Manjula’s story is even more tragic. Her husband, 30 year old Ramanna, farmed two acres, and borrowed a total of Rs 70,000 from several money lenders to treat he health problem. For four years he could not repay, so one of his creditors beat him up.

The shame of creditors constantly banging on his door, and hopelessness of the situation forced him to take his life.

Manjula is left with two small boys, aged six and three, her health problem and no income. She is barely surviving as a farm labourer, unsure how long her ailment will permit even that.

Basically, given the international trade situation, it is not a great time to be in the groundnut farming business. According to Narasimhalu, President of the Oilfed Society of Dunikota village, “The groundnut crop became uneconomical once the central government started importing palmolein at twenty rupees per kilo. Today palmolein is available in the market at Rs 40-52 per kilo.

The retail price for groundnut oil is Rs 52-56. Predictably groundnut oil is not selling very well. “The Ananthapur farmer needs a return of Rs 40 per kilo for his groundnut crop,” he continued. “Currently, he only gets about Rs 20 per kilo. With no other crop with the potential to replace groundnut, the situation is truly desperate. Rural indebtedness is rife.”

Adding to the misery of these poor cultivators from the Rayalseema area Andhra Pradesh are the severe drought conditions. There is no irrigation worth the name. The area is completely dependent on the monsoon for its sole kharif crop. With rains in June, the fields are prepared for sowing in July. Bits of rain in August and September provide the moisture for the ground nuts to form. But for the last five years there has been no rain in August and September, causing the crop to fail.

This has led to a vicious downward spiral of poverty. Farmers are not able to sell their groundnuts at a reasonable price because of cheap palmolein imports.

They also have a reduced crop because of failure of the monsoon. This means they don’t have enough money to repay their creditors, buy seeds for next year’s crops, not to mention various inputs like fertilizer and pesticides.

Meanwhile, pests have infested the groundnut crops in the area. With government subsidy for both seeds and pesticides not really reaching the farmers on the scale promised or required, there has been a significant reduction in the yield per hectare. Productivity per hectare today is as low as ten percent of normal levels.

A good crop of groundnut should yield 1500 kilos per hectare, while an excellent one gets 2500 kilos. The Ananthapur farmers are only managing 200 kilos per hectare-just enough for sowing. This meant the crop is too uneconomical to harvest, and is left in the field to rot.

Predictably the area under groundnut cultivation is being rapidly reduced. Since there is no viable, alternative crop, things are getting from bad to worse. “Basically there is no money for food for the farmers, or fodder for their cattle,” 48 years old Laksmi narasu Reddy, farmer from Chiruvanalapalli village lamented. “Every year we are spending money on seeds, but are not getting any yield worth the name.

We have pulled our children out of school, don’t have money for doctors or medicines, and often cannot eat. So we are selling our cattle at fire sale prices. We don’t know what to do next. We see no future.”

At this point the future undoubtedly seems bleak. In the early nineties the state government encouraged everyone to concentrate on growing groundnut, and even provided some subsidies, because it then seemed a lucrative cash crop. With the opening up of the economy, and imported palmolein in favour, the bottom has fallen out of that venture. Sadly, despite the groundnut farmers being in such dire straits, little official help seems forthcoming. Grassroots Feature Network.

FROM PAKISTAN
No woman judge in Supreme Court

LAHORE: After India became a nuclear power, Pakistan did not waste much time and immediately responded with its own successful explosion. But it took an awfully long time for Pakistan to be on an even keel with its adversary in the appointment of the first woman judge of a High Court. In 1964, Mrs Anna Chandi from Kerala became India’s first woman judge.

Pakistan remained unmotivated till Majida Razvi was appointed the judge of the Sindh High Court in 1994. It was a personal landmark for Majida Razvi to become Pakistan’s first woman judge of a High Court. But for the judiciary, the milestone in gender equality was behind schedule. That is not the only count on which the judiciary is behind schedule. The highest court of Pakistan, the Supreme Court, does not have a single woman serving as a judge! — The Dawn

Bill on the LFO uniform soon

LAHORE: The government has agreed to table the constitutional Bill in parliament before December 18 and to make a cut-off date for the shedding of uniform by Gen Pervez Musharraf part of the proposed package , claimed a central leader of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA).

“Two major developments have taken place during recent discussions with the government’s negotiation team,” said the MMA’s Deputy Secretary-General Liaquat Baloch while talking to The Dawn.

“The first is that the government has agreed to table the proposed Bill in parliament with the support of the MMA and the second is incorporating of our demand in it that Article 63-D of the Constitution shall become operative by December 31, 2004.” The Article bars a government employee from holding any public office.

Mr Baloch also claimed that government circles had given the indication that General Musharraf was ready to take recourse to the electoral college provided the MMA promised to vote for him.

But the alliance leaders refused this, citing their differences with his foreign, economic and political policies, the MMA leader said. — The Dawn

Tomato sells at Rs 70 a kg

RAWALPINDI: The price of tomatoes has not come down even after the end of Ramzan. Tomatoes continue to be sold between Rs 70 and Rs 80 per kg here — the price of chicken.

Thanks to the indifference of the district administration towards the plight of the common man, most of the families used yoghurt as a substitute for tomatoes to prepare food during Eid.

Mutton is also being sold at Rs. 170 per kg and beef at Rs. 120 per kg, causing great problems to the common man.

The district administration had announced that mutton and beef would be sold at concessional rates at weekly bazaars during Ramzan. But the butchers did not turn up, though counters were established for this purpose.

The officials concerned have failed to check the price hike. — The Nation

Kite-flying banned

LAHORE: Taking serious note of certain incidents of violation of the ban on kite-flying during Eid holidays, District Nazim Mian Amer Mahmood has ordered to reactivate special teams comprising City District Government and police officials for conducting raids and prosecuting persons involved in violating the ban.

In a statement, Mian Amer Mahmood disclosed that since the imposition of the ban on kite-flying, as many as 427 persons had been apprehended under Section 188 and 423 cases had been registered against them at various police stations.

The Nazim informed that the city police had arrested seven persons during Eid holidays under the same charges. The provincial government had yet not taken a final decision to lift the ban on kite-flying during the forthcoming spring festival. Therefore, no one would be spared for committing violation. — The Nation

REFLECTIONS

In the quest for the Lord, if your first attempt to see Him proves fruitless, do not lose heart.

— Sri Ramakrishna

The aim of life is to realise God and remain immersed in contemplation of Him. God alone is real and everything else is false.

— Sarada Devi