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Understanding on nukes Bihar not for burning |
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Tame the tanneries
The fall of Mr Advani
Withdrawal symptoms
Terror in Bangalore Commercials dumb down
TV viewers Some New Year resolutions
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Understanding on nukes India and Pakistan have shown admirable understanding on their nuclear installations and facilities ever since they signed an agreement to this effect on December 31, 1988. To express their commitment on not attacking each other’s nuclear assets, they exchanged the required information on Sunday again. This annual exercise, which was not missed even when the armed forces of the two countries were in an eyeball-to-eyeball
position, has helped in removing any suspicion on their nuclear capabilities. It is, however, a different matter that weapons of mass destruction have ceased to be weapons of war, more so when both sides have stacks of nukes. They have only a deterrence value. So, what is of crucial importance so far as India-Pakistan relations are concerned is the question of eliminating terrorism. It is capable of nullifying all the gains made as a result of the composite dialogue process so far. How can India go on talking peace when terrorist outfits having their bases in Pakistan, or the areas under its control, continue to attack targets in India? Terrorism with its umbilical cord in Pakistan is the biggest threat to the peace in the entire South Asian region. Pakistan, though committed to destroying it root and branch, does not seem to be as serious as it ought to be. Its casual approach to implementing a commitment given to not only India but also to the world community (read the US) is reflected in Pakistan allowing terrorist outfits to keep their training camps and other kinds of infrastructure facilities intact. Terrorist attacks like the one in Bangalore last week may affect the remaining rounds of talks between India and Pakistan. It is time Pakistan realises the danger ahead. If anything untoward happens and the two countries fail to take the dialogue process to its logical conclusion, it will be a victory for the terrorists and their mentors. The peace constituency in the entire region will blame only Pakistan for such a painful turn of events.
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Bihar not for burning Nothing seems to change in good old Bihar. Till recently, even the
Lalu-Rabri duo was a permanent fixture. It has made way for Mr Nitish Kumar at long last but the situation in the state refuses to change for the better. A burning reminder of this harsh fact came from a village in Vaishali district on Sunday where a woman and her five children were burnt alive. The village happens to fall in the assembly constituency of former Chief Minister Rabri Devi. The grisly crime allegedly took place because the victims refused to withdraw a complaint of theft against the perpetrators. Even if it has nothing to do with caste rivalry, as has been reported, it puts a big question mark on the law and order situation in the state. Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav has typically tried to blame Mr Nitish Kumar for this, as if the administration that he (as the remote holder) had handed over to the Chief Minister was in a functional state. Bihar happens to be one of the sickest states in the country. State machinery has become ineffective. The vacuum thus created has been filled by antisocial elements merrily. Crime and corruption are having a free run. Mr Nitish Kumar will have to make the warlords feel the fear of law. That is not the only front on which he will have to concentrate. There are also social, political and economic dimensions to the problem. But the fountainhead lies in the criminalisation of politics. A criminal neta only uses the state power to further his personal agenda. Mr Nitish Kumar will have to assiduously weed out such elements, at least from his own team. He made a good beginning by making a minister with questionable credentials to resign within hours of taking oath. He will have to use power to curb the lawless elements and restore a measure of normalcy in the state.
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Tame the tanneries Off and on media reports do highlight the contamination of drinking water sources, rivers and other water bodies by the discharge of industrial effluents and the authorities do take some action, but then the issue is soon forgotten. A comprehensive action plan to fight the menace is still awaited. While the Punjab Pollution Control Board has been taking note of pollution caused by industrial waste, the problem seems to be too formidable for it to handle single-handed. When the pollution levels assume deadly dimensions, residents approach the media and even move the Punjab and Haryana High Court, but the authorities concerned come up with only ad-hoc solutions, which provide only temporary respite. An alarming dimension of the industrial waste pollution projected by the front-page report in The Tribune on Monday is that water treatment plants set up on the orders of the High Court by tanneries are no longer functional and the monitoring agency, if any, has not bothered to ensure that such plants remain in order. There has been no comprehensive study to assess the loss of human life and the damage caused to the environment by water pollution. The treatment of toxic water is expensive and tanneries and industries, particularly small units in villages, tend to take it easy in the absence of an effective supervisory mechanism. Water availability in Punjab has been on the decline in the recent years as is clear from the falling water table. What is worse, the quality of water is deteriorating. The cost of extracting underground water is rising steeply as the shallow water is becoming unfit for human consumption. A study by the Punjab Pollution Control Board has revealed that 95 per cent of the underground water in Nangal village near Ludhiana has become contaminated. This is not an isolated case. Industrial units in Ludhiana dig up pits to dump toxic waste. It is an alarming situation that requires drastic remedial action without delay.
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It is a folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.
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The fall of Mr Advani
There is a Shakespearean dimension to Mr L.K. Advani’s fall from grace in the Bharatiya Janata Party. For a man who, more than any other leader, brought the party from a score of two to 182 in the Lok Sabha in under a score of years, his forced departure from the party presidency is a Shakespearean tragedy. It needed Mr A.B. Vajpayee’s gifts to rule the country for six years with the help of a motley coalition, but Mr Advani had found the key to power. That key, detrimental as it was to the country’s larger interests, was Mr Advani’s rath yatra. He painted the country red as he drove across the country in 1990 in a Toyota van dressed as a chariot matching his unique journey with blood-curdling rhetoric. It was this rhetoric, raising the communal temperature in the country, that led to the demolition of the Babri mosque and the cry of building a Ram temple caught the imagination of the people who, in the end, were willing to give the BJP the votes. But the BJP, which was giddy on achieving power, albeit in a coalition arrangement, was heart-broken on losing it after six years. Part of the BJP’s and Mr Advani’s troubles came from this inability to reconcile themselves to defeat, a normal phenomenon in a democracy. The old adage has it that absolute power corrupts absolutely; in this instance, tasting power once savaged the BJP and made many of its members turn upon one another. To return to Mr Advani’s misfortunes, while Mr Vajpayee was content to play the role of the elder statesman, the former was muscular in his approach to assuming the role of the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. He had made up his mind that, given his senior’s ailments, he was the man to lead the party back to power the next time around. At the same time, he was acutely aware of the fact that while Mr Vajpayee was the acceptable face of the BJP, he was known as the hawk and, in many persons’ mind, complicit in the destruction of the Babri mosque and the consequences of that fateful act. Mr Advani set about conducting a makeover exercise during his emotional journey to Pakistan, particularly to his original home, Karachi. Not believing in half-measures, he lauded no other that the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, for his secularism. He based his new judgement on the strength of one speech made by Jinnah, but he failed to qualify his praise. In the process, he stood the conventional wisdom of the BJP and its mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, on its head. In their book, he was preaching heresy. How can the man most responsible for the subcontinent’s partition be elevated to the ranks of secularists? If Mr Advani was surprised by the storm his Jinnah remarks caused, he refused to take the easy option of disowning them. After all, his very purpose was to reposition himself as a sane, rational leader, not the rabble-rousing votary of Hindutva of popular perception. Thereby, he reversed himself in the eyes of the Sangh Parivar. Despite the yeoman service he had performed for the RSS, the mentor organisation’s verdict was clear: he had to go as party president. When the penny dropped, Mr Advani showed that he would not Looking back, Mr Advani’s was a curious call. The symbiotic relationship between the two has been a fact of life for nearly 60 years. The RSS provides the sinews for the BJP in contesting and winning elections, the Hindutva ideology acting as the cement for strengthening the party. Even for a man of Mr Vajpayee’s astuteness, he had periodically to pay homage to the RSS to remain in power, his dexterity in disowning his own remarks notwithstanding. The rest, as they say, is history. Rumours about Mr Advani’s incapacity to retain his other position as Leader of the Opposition, ascribed to Mr Murli Manohar Joshi, had to be denied by the latter. It is a telling comment on Mr Advani’s new vulnerability that this should be so. It is always rash to predict a politician’s ultimate downfall, but in this instance, there are few indicators about a bright future political career being ahead of him. And the fact that he is disconnected from reality was embarrassingly demonstrated by his reaction to the Lok Sabha resolution expelling 10 tainted members from the Lok Sabha (the bulk from his party), calling their acts of accepting bribes on camera as stupidity, rather than criminal intent. Where does the “party with a difference” go from here? For Mr Advani, his swan song at the Mumbai anniversary meeting was a mournful affair. His successor had been chosen, but not formally announced. Mr Vajpayee largely disowned the populist rhetoric of the party’s resolution on foreign policy. And there was pathos in the leader’s call for probity in conducting the party’s affairs. Mr Advani’s cup of misery was full by the manner his colleague and mentor signed off. Mr Vajpayee announced his retirement from “power politics”, declaring his intention not to contest the next election. Characteristically, he set the cat among the pigeons by seemingly anointing Mr Pramod Mahajan as a favourite contender in the leadership stakes. Mr Vajpayee exited the political stage in an aura of mystery — or did he? The contrast between the Vajpayee and Advani acts could not be greater. How and when the BJP will behave like an opposition party capable of returning to power, instead of tearing itself apart after its defeat, remains to be seen. It is nevertheless sad to see the fall of Mr Advani, the man who brought the BJP to power.
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Withdrawal symptoms
YES, consciously or otherwise, one does feel the withdrawal symptoms in the New Year. These may be of different kinds with different people. Yet, a feeling of correcting some wrong, of which one is habitual for the past some time, takes the better of him, not only in his actions but the thinking process as well. Most people would continue to write the date as if it belonged to the year gone by. And then with some effort they’d amend it, reassuring themselves of the continuum of existence in the New Year. The correction thus made confirms the hangover of the year that rolled into eternity, never to return. The withdrawal syndrome fills one with a sense of loss in so far as the diaries and calendars are concerned. But this loss is compensated in acquisition of the new ones with uncrumpled and crisp pages with unruffled folds. The contents of the old diaries may still have nostalgic notes stored for posterity but the promise that the blank slots hold balances the psychological depravity. The most obsolete thing and rightly to be treated as such should be the “year’s holiday-list”. I personally am thrilled to have a new one. And since the indolence and lethargy that had been squeezed out to the exuberance of this old list, it deserves to be filled with some alternate and refreshing replenishment. A new holiday-list is the panacea to ward off gone-year withdrawal symptoms found mostly in the Indian babudom. The emotional fools make New Year resolutions to stand by, but in many cases they do not live up to their commitments and promises made to themselves since if they were so strong-willed, they wouldn’t wait for the turn of the year for effecting their resolve. They feel the gone-year withdrawal symptoms more than anyone else. This is so, also because, mostly the New Year resolutions are on giving up vices and less on acquiring virtues. Well, the business types would do stocktaking exactly when the old year ends and new one begins for they generally had had some deity or the other’s blessing for a fixed duration. The fortunetellers also guide the “stars” of their destiny in an already announced time slot. They too need some counselling to overcome the gone year withdrawal symptoms. Call me mad, or even selfish, but this year I have decided on an altogether different way to come out of the gone year withdrawal symptoms and keep feeling elated when friends would call for nearly a week at least to greet and Happy New Year to me. Want to know it? Well, I will not say and thus share; and thus exhaust or empty, my own good wishes but will only receive them for their therapeutic properties. Thank you
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Terror in Bangalore On December 28, 2005, terrorists barged into the auditorium of the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, where an international conference of eminent scientists was going on, opened indiscriminate firing, killing renowned mathematician and injuring a few other scientists. A very bold assault on the security of our nation. Youseff Bodansky, Director of the US Congressional Task Force, has said in his book “Bin Laden: The man who declared war on America” that “Bin Laden and the ISI had struck a deal under which the so-called Mujahideen would carry out spectacular terrorist strikes in India” and that “he has set up major cells in the southern cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad”. According to Rohen Gunaratna, an expert on Asian terrorist groups at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence in the US, “It is only a matter of time before Al-Qaida fully targets India: Right now, a few of their operations in India have been disrupted”. The Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) has been very active for quite some years. When terrorism was at its peak in Punjab, SIMI hideouts in Gujarat were made available to terrorists for the safe storage of weapons and a shelter to those absconding from Punjab. This was revealed in the interrogation of one terrorist, Lal Singh. In Patna and Lucknow, SIMI activists used to circulate poems, eulogising Laden as God’s lion, a hero who will wage war to safeguard Islam and fight the non-believers. After 9/11 posters were circulated in large numbers in Kanpur, Behraich, Gonda, Moradabad etc, projecting Laden as a hero. SIMI functionaries have unabashadely talked about “Gujrat turning into Kashmir”, portrayed medieval invader Mahmood Ghaznavi as a saviour. Since its inception in 1977, its chief mission has been to infuse the spirit of jihad in the war between Islam and Kufr (the unIslamic)- which is claimed to be at the decisive stage. It has been openly espousing the cause of liberation of Kashmir from India. Jaish-e-Mohamed has established its foothold in UP and other places through SIMI. The Hyderabad police arrested in 1998 a Pakistani, Junaid Salim, who was the recruiting agent of Lashkar-e-Toiba. In June 2001 the Delhi Police unearthed a plot to blow up the visa section of the US Embassy, masterminded by a close confidant of Osama. Deen dar Anjuman, which had engineered bomb blasts in churches in Andhra Pradesh, Karnatka and Goa, has links with the ISI. It is now confirmed that the six major fires in the ammunition depots of the Indian Army since April 2000 were all acts of sabotage. One Manoj Srivastava, a Pakistani spy arrested in Kolkata by the security agencies, confessed to the involvement of the ISI in these fires. The I.G.P (economic offences) of Uttar Pradesh has in a report evaluated the smuggling of the Indian fake currency to the tune of staggering Rs 1,500 crore from the Indo-Nepali border in addition to the smuggling of sophisticated firearms. Amir Taheri, Editor of France’s leading journal, Politique Internationale, has said: “Pakistan’s struggle for identity requires in its own analysis of itself, to pursue conflict with India not rapprochement”. The late Mr J.N. Dixit has said in an article “Shock and awe in Kashmir” that the framework of Pakistan’s principles and intentions towards India as reflected in the official stance, are the following:
The Daily Telegraph and the Independent of London carried a news item on May 27 and 28, 1999, sourcing it to Western intelligence contacts, saying that a loose international network coordinated by the ISI embracing a wide range of terrorist organisations from Algeria to Egypt to central Asia and Afghanistan, was behind the Pakistani incursion into Kargil. Stephen Philip Cohen has said in his book “The Idea of
Pakistan" that “a few hardliners even look forward to the day, when India might be broken up, adding to the list of independent South Asian Muslim states”. He has further said “a minority of Pakistani officers went further, arguing that since India was unviable, Pakistan only needed to give a push and this artificial ‘Hindu’ state would implode” “The dominant view in the Pakistan army is that Pakistan can continue to harass soft India” and that “with nuclear weapons, missiles and a tough army, Islamabad can withstand considerable Indian pressure as was proved in the last deployment of the Indian army in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Parliament and will usually find international supporters to back it up”. India as a nation is suffering from a siege mentality. Punjab and the Rajasthan borders with Pakistan have been fenced. The Indo- Bangladesh border is being fenced. Any trouble on the border, fence it and feel secured. We are doing the greatest damage to the nation. We are demolishing the do-or-die instinct of the nation. In such a vast country, how can one keep on providing security to every individual and every establishment? Our national ethos seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to every national security issue. An individual/institution is attacked, enhance the security and go off to deep slumber. This is not the way. What is required is a proactive stance of the nation as a whole. |
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Commercials dumb down
TV viewers Not so long ago, commercials tailored to guys pushed a few predictable buttons—sex, certainly, but also a kind of aggressive and crude frat-house humor. Bud Light—to pick another prominent marketer to the football-watching demographic—ran a series of commercials during Super Bowl 2004 that featured a dog that bit a man’s crotch, a monkey that propositioned a woman, and a horse that passed gas in a couple’s face. Now, the rude menagerie is gone and so, for the most part, is the female skin. You won’t find the Swedish Bikini Team or Coors Light’s winking, rock-and-roll odes to “those twins!” during breaks in the game nowadays. Instead, TV advertising to guys has gone tame. And often lame. Now the prevailing theme of commercials airing in the Sunday-afternoon football ghetto is an old advertising staple: men as the butt of the joke. Men acting silly. Men humiliating themselves or being humiliated by others. Take the commercial for Citibank: A guy undertakes a search for a missing credit-card statement that becomes so frantic and self-absorbed that he falls into a trash can and doesn’t even notice when the can is picked up and carried off by a garbage hauler. In another Citibank commercial a guy chases his statement into an air vent—and gets locked inside. Some guy ads convey an almost hostile attitude toward the people who are presumably the advertiser’s would-be customers. Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning acts like an aggressive fan for MasterCard, bugging a grocery clerk for his autograph, yelling after a group of restaurant workers (“Great shift today, guys! Nice salad bar!”) and chanting “De-caf!” at a waitress in a coffee shop. On one level, it’s an amusing role reversal. But on another, it suggests that fans—the very people MasterCard is advertising to—can be pretty obnoxious people. Advertisers and ad creators say their pullback from sex and raunch was made in the aftermath of Janet Jackson’s infamous display of nudity during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The backlash was aimed not just at Jackson and CBS, which telecast the game, but at advertisers like Anheuser-Busch, which aired the rowdy Bud Light crotch-biting/horny monkey/horse-farting series during the game. In addition to avoiding controversy and complaints, there’s also another, more practical reason to shift gears: The old approaches didn’t work so well. Miller Beer spokesman Pete Marino says his company’s ads have moved away from a “lad-ish lifestyle” sensibility at a time when beer sales are declining industrywide. Miller is trying to “differentiate” itself, he says, not just from other beer brands but also from wine and liquor marketers, many of which use suggestive imagery. Advertisers make fun of men, in part, because they always have, says ad executive Marian Salzman, who points out that the guys have been the butt of the joke in sitcoms and movies for decades. Men don’t seem to mind, she says, and what’s more, who else is there to make fun of? Women and members of minority groups have long reacted with hostility to similar portrayals. Says Salzman, “The only people (advertisers) are still allowed to offend these days are straight white men with a full head of hair.” — LA Times-Washington Post |
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Some New Year resolutions We should take all or some of the following New Year resolutions which are actually simple steps towards an eco-friendly future:
Cut your car use: Transport is responsible for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and the majority of these come from road transport. Emissions are increasing because rising traffic levels are eliminating the small gains being made in fuel efficiency. Switch to a renewable energy supplier: “Green energy comes from a variety of renewable sources, including wind power and hydro power. Regardless of where you live, you can choose any of these,” says Mark Todd, the director of www.firsthelpline.com, which helps people switch to an environmentally friendly energy tariff. Save water: A third of the water that comes into your house gets flushed down the toilet. If you leave the tap running while you brush your teeth, nine litres goes down the drain in a minute. Have a shower instead of a bath. Put a “hippo”, or a full plastic bottle, in your cistern to reduce the water used in each flush. And turn off the tap when you’re brushing your teeth. Recycle: Newspapers, glass, aluminum cans — about 80 per cent of our waste is recyclable. But we’re still not doing enough of it. In the UK, more than five billion aluminum cans are available for recycling each year, but only 1.6 billion are recycled. To find your nearest recycling point, log on to www.wastepoint.co.uk. Buy organic food: Organic food production causes much less environmental damage than conventional agriculture, because it involves the use of less energy and animal-welfare standards are higher. Decline plastic bags: “They’re all sitting in huge landfill sites producing tons of methane gas and take around 500 years to decay,” says Eugenie Harvey, the director of the fashionable green movement We Are What We Do. Reduce waste: Even recycling uses energy, as it involves melting things down, collecting rubbish and trundling it in fuel-guzzling lorries to plants across the country. So, before you think about recycling, think about reducing. Plant a tree: Trees take in CO2 and replace it with oxygen. On average, each one of us creates 11 tons of CO2 a year, which can be offset by planting trees. The good news is that trees aren’t expensive — it would only cost each person around £150 a year to plant the trees needed to absorb their personal CO2. For more information, log on to www.carbonneutral.com. Turn off
unnecessary lights: You should also fit all your light sockets with energy-saving light bulbs. They last 10 times as long as standard light bulbs, but only use a fifth of the energy. Holiday at home: With the average Boeing 747 burning 200 tonnes of fuel in one flight, aviation is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions and is set to be the biggest contributor within 50 years. Get into teleconferencing: Last year, by replacing meetings with teleconferencing, British Telecom prevented 47,000 tonnes of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere. Flying to New York generates half a ton of CO2 and the average vehicle travelling to a meeting generates 32kg, but one conference-call participant makes 0.002kg of CO2 per hour. Use both sides of paper: More than 350 million trees are cut down every year for paper that’s used in UK offices alone. Ever noticed the “use both sides of the paper” button on the photocopier? Press it. — The Independent |
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From the pages of Sastri’s fulsome praise
Mr Sirinivas Sastri’s speech at the Mansion House, after being conferred the “Freedom of City of London”, is replete with fulsome flattery of the Britishers and their rule in India and sings nothing but the glory of the New Reforms. We are sorry to see a leader of Mr Sastri’s standing so losing himself in his immediate surroundings. He had left a faint glimpse of his mission in England but even that faint glimpse faded into nothingness as the temptation of mutual admiration took possession of him by slow degree. He said that he had gone to England to ask that the status of India should be recognised in the Empire but he was under no delusions regarding the difficulties that this recognition had to encounter before it is an accomplished fact. Thus he left the battlefield before joining the battle. He ended his speech by remarking that the City of London had laid the foundations of the glorious Empire in the East. Whose glory, Mr Sastri’s? We wonder if he does not feel the humiliation of being conquered. Can anyone glorify an Empire that makes one a slave?
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As a blind man led by another blind man loses
his way, so does a man led by Priya go astray. — The Upanishadas Yet when, at last, the moment of parting comes, everything is left at an instant.
— Guru Nanak To wear torn clothes is a sign of laziness and, therefore, of shame, but to wear patched clothes proclaims poverty or renunciation, and industry. Intoxicated by Priya's Charms, Man advises others to follow her too. As long as a human being worries about his possessions fearing death, all of his works are useless.
— Kabir
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