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Chautala & Sons Wasted yatras |
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Struggle for justice PM’s promise should reassure Bhopal victims PRIME Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurance to a delegation of Bhopal gas victims of his government’s willingness to provide clean drinking water and remove the toxic waste in and around the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal is welcome.
TV for your vote
Reference to the context
Challenges before women in combat Growing invasion of peace and privacy New Western aid plans are
recycling old failures
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Chautala & Sons FOR mere mortals, Rs 1,467 crore is an astronomical sum. Most may not even know how much it really mean in effect. But for those of O.P. Chautala ilk, even that may be only small change, collected casually while “serving” the public. That is why it is necessary to take the CBI enquiry to its logical conclusion by combing the entire glacier instead of just the tip. That will not be any witch-hunt as the former Chief Minister has tried to claim, but a public-spirited endeavour to make him accountable for the wealth he has piled up by means known to him and his sons and their victims. Mr Om Prakash Chautala and his family members owe an answer to the voters who elected them as to how they came into this kind of money. As far as the present means of farming are concerned, it is not possible to grow so much of money on trees and a Chief Minister’s salary is not phenomenal enough to accumulate so much so soon. Law must take its own course, and unravel what the man on the street in
Haryana already knows: the wealth was gotten by terrorising helpless citizens through an odious regime of loot, extortion and worse. Surely, Mr Chautala cannot claim that the long list of properties that he and his family members own – in their name or benami — is the figment of his opponents’ imagination. The list may not be complete. So far, CBI’s have confined themselves to India alone. There is need for casting the net wider because knowledgeable persons have been crying themselves hoarse that even more property has been made on other continents. Just because Mr Chautala happens to be a politician does not mean that he should be exempted from an international investigation. Most of it is public money and must be returned to the rightful owners: the people of Haryana. And why stop at Mr Chautala and his sons? There are many other politicians and bureaucrats in several states who too have scripted similar rags-to-riches stories while in power. If they have penned them legally, they must share the magical secret with the taxpayers. If not, they are liable for punishment like everyone else. Wads of notes tumbling out of the bedroom of a union minister and from the locker of a discredited public service commission chief make an ugly sight but are a badly needed reassurance that such open loot cannot go on forever. No mercy should be shown to those who thrive at the cost of the people.
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Wasted yatras THE BJP’s decision to cancel the remaining part of the Bharat Suraksha Yatras of former Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani and party chief Rajnath Singh is the most sensible it has taken in recent months. The unnatural death of party leader Pramod Mahajan provided a face-saver for it to terminate them. In any case, few will miss the yatras. Reports suggest that the response they evoked from places they passed through was hardly enthusiastic. Too many yatras in too few years, mostly led by Mr Advani, have deprived them of all novelty. In the instant case, the two leaders had often been abandoning the raths in order to address election meetings in places like Kerala or inquiring about the health of Mr Mahajan in Mumbai. All this has been upsetting the few yatra enthusiasts in the BJP. As had been pointed out in this column, the yatras were the result of the bankruptcy of ideas in the BJP. If in 1990 when Mr Advani mounted the first rath, he had the divisive Ayodhya issue as his leitmotif, this time the aim was to cash in on the revulsion the recent attack on the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi had caused among the Hindus. Unfortunately for Mr Advani and the party, the people of Varanasi did not see the attack purely on communal terms. In fact, the Hindus and the Muslims of the town joined hands to fight the enemies of society, for whom religion is just a fig leaf to cover their hatred for peace. This itself was a setback for the party. Had it been sensible, it would have given up the yatra idea then and there itself. But Mr Advani, who is now in the outhouse on account of his own political blunders, saw in the yatra an opportunity to refurbish his image. The people could see through the game and they stood at a distance as the two leaders wound their way through town after town and village after village. In retrospect, Mr Advani cannot escape responsibility for the discomfiture the yatras have caused to the party and also the general public. The BJP is the preeminent opposition party which is entrusted with the responsibility of providing an alternative if the coalition government collapses at the Centre. It cannot remain a prisoner of the past and flog Hindutva when the people are more concerned with bread and butter issues. The people want the BJP leaders to lead them, rather than see them as comical figures riding on chariots of fantasy.
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Struggle for justice PRIME Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurance to a delegation of Bhopal gas victims of his government’s willingness to provide clean drinking water and remove the toxic waste in and around the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal is welcome. Unfortunately, even 22 years after the world’s worst industrial disaster, the gas survivors continue to run from pillar to post for justice. Following Dr Singh’s assurance, they have withdrawn their indefinite dharna in New Delhi. Significantly, both sides agreed to a “time-bound” action plan for the delivery of safe drinking water to communities affected by water contamination, scientific assessment of toxic contamination around the factory and release of funds to address all health issues related to contamination. The gas leakage has not only claimed hundreds of lives but also affected over 1.5 lakh persons with various ailments. About 5,000 tonnes of toxic waste is still lying around the factory, causing soil and groundwater contamination. This has adversely affected around 20,000 persons, most of whom were already suffering from the effect of the 1984 holocaust. Essentially, the issue of clean water is linked to the need for the factory site to be cleansed of the toxic waste. The Madhya Pradesh government has backtracked from its promise of bearing Rs 9 crore towards the cost of piping in the clean water project. This is still a meagre sum compared to the cost of cleaning up the factory and remediating the contaminated soil and groundwater. The problem is that the Dow Chemicals, which took over the Union Carbide in 2001, refuses to clean up the site, maintaining that all liabilities were met when the Union Carbide paid a $ 470-million settlement. Meanwhile, there is a stalemate over bringing Warren Anderson, former Union Carbide Chairman, to book. He retired from the company in 1986 and has been declared a fugitive by the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal. The Bhopal survivors are demanding Anderson’s extradition, but there are hurdles. Criminal cases are pending against other Carbide officials too. It remains to be seen what “legal options” would the Prime Minister explore to make the culprits accountable for their lapses.
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Any woodsman can tell you that in a broken and sundered nest, one can hardly find more than a precious few whole eggs. So it is with the family. — Thomas Jefferson
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TV for your vote MR Muthuvel Karunanidhi, patriarch of ‘Dravidian’ politics, of course, does not bear the palest resemblance to Marie Antoinette. But he has come out with a message to the electorate that his critics can make sound remarkably like the reported observation of the French queen, addressed to a people in revolt. In its election manifesto, Mr Karunanidhi’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) does not, of course, say: “If the people of Tamil Nadu can’t have the Cauvery, let them have colour television sets.” Even J. Jayalalithaa and her AIADMK, taunting him about the absence of the riparian dispute from the manifesto, have not trashed the promise in these terms. The DMK has offered the TV sets only as a poll gift to women voters more used to more modest presents like saris. Mr Karunanidhi does not even seem aware that he has made electoral history of sorts. His, perhaps, is the most extravagant electoral promise made ever since India’s democratic exercise began half a century ago. Electoral populism has thus far meant promises to provide for the needs of the poor. This, perhaps, is the first time that the entertainment needs of the people have earned the pride of place in a party’s manifesto. The true significance of the promise does not lie in the place of entertainment, especially the cinematic kind, in Tamil Nadu politics. Nor is the significance the same as its cynical interpretation by the DMK’s opponents. Mr V. Gopalasamy alias Vaiko of the Marumalarchi DMK (MDMK), who has turned the staunchest supporter of his erstwhile jailor Jayalalithaa, is projecting the promise as a ploy to help the “family business” (cable television channels and a cable network) of Union Minister Dayanidhi Maran. The insinuation has even provoked Karunanidhi to offer cable connections too, “if necessary”, along with the idiot box. Much more than mere nepotism, however, should be read into the most expensive electoral pledge ever made. Nor is the main question about it one of economics. Mr Karunanidhi, who made the additional promise of an explanation about how the promise will be kept, may not have satisfied many. According to his calculations, it will cost about Rs 1,060 crore to redeem the pledge on the assumption of a price of Rs 2, 000 for a colour TV set each for the state’s ration-card holders alone. No one has so far challenged him to produce so cheap a telly and his critics compute that the cost of the project will exceed Rs. 17,000 crore. Figures, however, are not the main political flaw that the promise points to. Mr Karunanidhi has not ignored the issue of “bread” for the people, as Marie is said to have done in her remark (now considered apocryphal by kindly chroniclers). He has also promised ration rice at Rs 2 per kilogram and two acres of land for every landless farmer. Spoilsports have scoffed at these baits for ballots as well. They recall that the DMK came to power for the first time in 1967 on promises including three (local) measures of rice at Re 1 per kilo and could not keep the pledge. They also suggest that much of the 55 lakh acres of land the DMK proposes to distribute thus is uncultivably fallow. It is not, however, as if the DMK is the only party to have made such populist promises — or its main foe in the State had a far more serious manifesto. The “achievements” the ruling AIADMK is advertising are also mostly doles of different categories for the underprivileged masses. The significance of the DMK’s strikingly different promise lies precisely in the fact that it cannot be described as populism aimed at the poor. For, populism of such description, too, indicates an ideology or at least a pretension to it. It signals recognition of a socio-economic issue, even if no real intention to resolve it. The promise of colour TV sets points to an end-of-ideology politics, at least in elections. All the more so for the obvious fact that Mr Karunanidhi expects better ballot-box returns from this than from the traditionally populist promises of his manifesto. It can even mark the beginning of the end of ideology in India’s elections. Anti-populism is an ideology, too. It is an ideology that contraposes “development” to “doles”. Now, colour TV sets may appear very much a symbol and product of “development”, but the ones promised by Mr Karunanidhi fall clearly and incontrovertibly into the category of ‘doles’. They represent neither a ‘poverty alleviation’ measure nor a policy aimed at rooting out poverty. The initiative, simply, ignores the issue of poverty. A manifesto with the primary place for this promise, in effect, ignores all major political issues. Such a manifesto is the logical culmination of a certain political-ideological movement in Tamil Nadu. And similar may be the ultimate sequel to the political courses of parties and forces elsewhere. Issues in general have become irrelevant to Dravidian politics, because the two that sustained it before have proved much more transient than expected. The main issue, which gave birth to Dravidianism and boosted its growth in the late sixties and seventies, was anti-Centre regionalism. It is not only Mr Karunanidhi, with 40 members of his Democratic Progressive Alliance (DPA) in the Lok Sabha and 13 ministers from it in the Manmohan Singh government, who has a problem on this count. Dravidian parties have lost their original plank increasingly ever since the dawn of the coalition age in New Delhi. Anti-Centre-ism became an untenable part of the ‘Dravidian’ platform, once the two major Tamil Nadu parties started teaming up with the Congress by turns. It has become an absurdly redundant part of the ideological baggage, after the DMK and the AIADMK began to vie with each other for an alliance with the BJP during its years of power at the Centre. The second issue that Dravidian politics has been utterly unable to sustain is that of social justice. The social reform movement, which is supposed to be the source of Dravidian politics, has revealed its severe limits and limitations. There is a point beyond which a merely caste-based movement cannot progress, especially in electoral politics. The AIADMK, which has always insisted upon 69 per cent caste-based reservations, has taken up cudgels against Mr Arjun Singh’s move for quotas in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) as an infringement of the code of electoral conduct. Dalit parties, meanwhile, are up in arms against the DMK and its banner of anti-upper-caste unity has not prevented serious cracks in its constituency of Other Backward Classes (OBCs). It is a withering away of issues which has led eventually to the DMK’s promise of colour TV sets. Rapid socio-political changes are reducing issues of erstwhile importance to irrelevance elsewhere as well. We should not be surprised, therefore, if free mobile phones are on offer in a Bihar manifesto tomorrow or if voters are sold iPods for a song by a party trying to win Lok Sabha elections. In other words, the day may not be far off when the people consider entertainment not so false a promise as
empowerment.
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Reference to the context REMEMBER high school literature class and the questions on “Reference to the Context” (RTC)? Well, RTC does have a place outside of literature class. As a young revenue officer, directly after my training at the Direct Taxes Academy in Nagpur, I was posted briefly to Chandigarh . I discovered that the outwardly uniform façade of a suited-booted official does not reveal much. City slickers like myself, with all the arrogance and impatience of youth, urgently needed to develop an empathy. As I grew on the job, I discovered that persons too need to be understood with reference to the context of where they come from and how they have made the journey to where they stand today. There was the efficient Inspector who smelt strongly of dung that I put down to bad hygiene little realising that the young man had to cope with a perennial water shortage in his village and that his early morning duties included cleaning out the cowshed before he started for office on his trusty motorbike — all well before I had even opened sleep-heavy eyes to the new day. And then there was the young UDC whose office notings made me run out of red ink. I was impatient with his grammar until I visited his home in the interiors of Haryana to attend his wedding. After a two-hour drive, the bumpy kutcha road was never ending, his home had just one “pucca” room, his primary school was under a gnarled banyan tree, and he had walked over 10 km, one way, each day to go to high school. I couldn’t help admire the young man’s perseverance and drive in the face of extreme adversity to get himself an education and then a government job. I was gentle in my admonitions thereafter. But the woman who taught me my most valuable “RTC” lesson was my first peon Kamala. Each day she greeted me with the widest smile and left only after I had exhausted my probationary zeal, often well after office hours. I must confess to being judgemental when I saw her accepting “bakhshish” from the tax fraternity or napping on the job. It was when she fell ill and I visited her at home that I discovered that she had a husband who was bedridden after a stroke, a crippled son and two young daughters. Her day started at 4am and ended well past midnight. I wondered then how she kept the home fires burning and still kept that beaming smile on her careworn brow. Thereafter the occasional snore from her only told me that she had been up late, nursing her loved
ones.
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Challenges before women in combat THE Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC), Pune has recommended women for combat duties in the armed forces. The study carried out over a period of three years has advocated that “Women be considered for combat duties” as Indian women, as else where, are physically, mentally and psychologically fit for the combat role. Women have no doubt acquitted themselves well so far as duties other than combat are concerned. Presently there are 872 women officers in the army, 225 in the Navy, and 703 in the Indian Air Force, of which 45 are engaged in aircrew duties, flying helicopters and the transport aircrafts. The majority serves in education, administration, logistic, legal and technical branches of the armed forces. In the medical branch, they have been serving for decades. The Indian Navy’s experiment of inducting two lady doctors on a war ship in 1998 – 2000 did not quite turn out to be successful. Social inhibitions and practical difficulties like common toilets and the baths etc. made living in close proximity to men on 24 hours basis for months and years on end was problematic. Induction of women in the combat arms of the army and the fighter stream of the air force would be no less problematic. Prowess and hardihood required of them would be rather demanding. Besides, the combat service especially during a war could expose them to extreme physical dangers at the hands of the enemy, that could shatter them psychologically for the rest of their lives. It’s not hard to imagine the consequences of a women soldier or a pilot being captured by enemy soldiers in the field. No body questions women’s ability to serve in peace time even in the icy heights of Siachen or the scorching heat of Rajasthan or for that matter the dense jungles of north east. In fact, they are better equipped to bear the physical and mental hardships than the men folks. But to bear the rigours of combat duties during peace and war is an entirely different ball game. Here it’s not a question of physical fitness but her very womanhood. It seems the AFMC study was carried out on its own staff members and the students (Both MBBS and MD) in the peaceful environment of the college and Pune city. Their mental, physiological and psychological attributes were studied over a period of three years but all without exposing them to the ordeal of an infantry soldier in the field or a sailor on the warship or for that matter the fighter pilot in the cockpit. In the US, the one sided Gulf wars were not quite adequate to draw a proper conclusion in regard to the treatment meted out to the captured American women soldiers by the Iraqi troops. The experience of the few who got captured and later recovered was appalling, to say the least. During these Gulf wars, American women soldiers shared tents with their men and even slept alongside the men beside their trucks. It may however be mentioned here that there were a number of cases of sexual harassment and fraternizing. The US culture seems permissive enough to go along with this sort of aberration as long as the cases are dealt with by the authorities. But can Indian women afford to accept such conduct in the routine? The Indian social milieu from which our women come to the armed forces is bound by age old traditions, customs and morals. Since most of the Indian women in the armed forces come from the middle or lower middle class families, their adherence to these moral values is still very rigid. However, having joined the armed forces, hitherto an exclusive domain of men, the Indian women have begun to get used to their sexuality without being much conscious of it. But we are still far off from the stage where like many western democracies, our women too could be at ease in carrying out the combat duties with associated dangers. The IAF has presently a large number of cockpit vacancies, particularly in the fighter stream. With the migration of pilots to greener pastures, the situation is likely to worsen further. Besides not being desirable, it’s not even cost effective to have short service commission women pilots in the fighter stream. It takes almost a crore a year and a decade or so to make a fighter pilot fully operational. By this time these women pilots would be at the verge of finishing their tenure. In any case, not more than 50 percent or so seek permissible extension of service by another five years. By this time most of these women are ready for marriage and prefer to call it a day. Some of these women pilots who enter matrimony whilst still in service get six months maternity leave followed by another four months after the delivery. She is thus off flying for ten months at a stretch. With a four months baby at home to take care, their interest in flying wanes rather fast and as a fighter pilot she may even be reluctant to resume flying. It’s not the physical attributes as such but the social criteria and the wartime constraints that inhibit induction of women into combat duties. A dispassionate and all pervasive view must be taken before we decide to induct Indian women in combat service in any of the three services.
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Growing invasion of peace and privacy CALL it aggressive marketing, call it provision of goods and services, or just call it base corporate competitive persistence, but the daily harassment of citizens who value their quiet and privacy continues unabated. Be it the hawkers, couriers and marriage palaces which assault one’s ears day in and day out, or the mobile phone companies and private banks that pester you with unsolicited calls, there is just no respite. Neither the Municipal Committees nor the administrators nor the police seem to be able to do anything. Can a citizen troubled by these killers of tranquility and peace in an already noisy world, turn to the courts every day for redressal? Since that is not practical, what is the remedy against these greedy servicewallas who have taken over our lives in totality? Is no one in society or governance bothered one bit over this take over of someone’s private mental space and quiet way of living, which, to my way of thinking, is a moral right that needs to be enshrined in the Constitution? At all times of the day they pummel you into submission. Early in the mornings, the vegetable sellers on their rehris and the milk venders on their noisy motor cycles sans silencers take over the streets. Why are hawkers not banned in residential areas and the ban strictly implemented, when we have ‘apni mandis’ and markets in every town? Around 10 am, the bell at your door starts to ring, as it is the time for couriers to announce their presence. Shop and hotel openings, golf club bills, engagement ceremonies, a new clinic in the suburb, last minute invites when the host has suddenly discovered that his table is not full, are all matters of extreme urgency that require a courier service! How did a shop keeper or a dentist even get my name and address? Like parasites they get hold of address books from clubs, and hound you day and night. The courier boys, many uneducated, think they are on Government service, and even insist on your giving your phone number and signatures! How nonsensical can all this get, and where has the good old Post Office gone, whose job it was to deliver letters? The duties of the courier services must be well-defined and only things of some value or needing urgent attention need to be delivered by courier, with the postal department carrying out the other services. In the afternoons, the phone starts to ring and the bank sharks are on the prowl. In the middle of a game of golf, a writing session, or plain simple rest, bank promoters, mostly females, do the hard sell going ga ga over their respective packages and schemes. Right through out the day of course, the mobile operators go about their business, jolting people out of their minds. Spam calls, crank calls, free music tune calls, wrong number calls, and preachy calls that must instantly be passed on to at least 25 others or you could be struck dead, invade your privacy incessantly. At night, the marriage parties in their garish best move into their act. Loudspeakers that are banned after 10 pm, keep one awake the whole night and in many cases early in the morning when the groom returns with his bride. Does India ever sleep, and why should we be proud of our noisy nature? It is time that government pushed through a Citizen Privacy and Noise Control Act, and more importantly, the law enforcers went about their duties more seriously. Otherwise, very soon, the whole country will be stone deaf from all this noise and chatter.
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New Western aid plans are
recycling old failures FOREIGN aid today perpetrates a cruel hoax on those who wish well for the world’s poor. There is the appearance of action – a doubling of foreign aid to Africa promised at the G-8 summit last July, grand United Nations and World Bank plans to cut world poverty in half by 2015 and visionary statements about prosperity and democracy from George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Bono. The economist Jeffrey Sachs even announced the “end of poverty’” by 2025, which he says will be “much easier than it appears.” No doubt such promises satisfy the desires of altruistic people in rich countries that something be done to alleviate the misery of billions who live in poverty around the world. Alas, upon closer inspection, it turns out to be one big Potemkin village. These grandiose but unreal visions crowd out better alternatives to give real help to real poor people. The new proposals to end world poverty are, for one thing, not new. They are recycled ideas from earlier decades that have failed. There was, for instance, the idea in the 1950s and 1960s that aid is necessary to finance a “Big Push” to allow poor countries to escape a “poverty trap” and climb the ladder toward prosperity. This push has been underway for four decades now — and has resulted in the movement of $568 billion in foreign aid from rich countries to Africa. The result: zero growth in per-capita income, leaving Africa in the same abysmal straits. Meanwhile, a number of poor countries that got next to no aid had no trouble escaping the “poverty trap.” Hence, it is a little surprising to see Sachs, who is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and an influential adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, announcing once again that aid is necessary to finance a “Big Push”. Where did all the aid money go? The $2.3 trillion, that is, sent to all the world’s poor countries over the last five decades? For one thing, it was stuck (and remains stuck) in a “bureaucracy-to-bureaucracy” aid model in which money gets lost along the way. The way it works is that a large aid bureaucracy such as the World Bank (with its 10,000 employees) or the United Nations designs a complicated bureaucratic plan to solve all the problems of the poor at once (for example, the U.N. Millennium Project announced last year laid out 449 steps that had to be implemented to end world poverty). The aid money is then turned over to another bureaucracy in the poor country, which is asked to implement the complicated plan drawn up by out-of-country Westerners. (How complicated? Tanzania – and it’s not an unusual case – is required to issue 2,400 different reports annually to aid donors.) A new initiative by Sachs calls for aid-financed “Millennium Villages” (moving the Potemkin village out of the realm of metaphor into reality.) It envisions a whole package of quick fixes, ranging from fertilizer, grain storage, rainwater harvesting and windmills to Internet connections — which would, supposedly, alleviate poverty in a handful of specifically targeted rural villages around Africa. This much-trumpeted idea once again shows the amazing recycling ability of the aid industry — because a similar package of fixes called ``Integrated Rural Development’’ was tried in the 1970s (minus the Internet connections). It failed. Flying in foreign experts to create a miniature village utopia has little to do with the complex roots of poverty, such as corrupt, autocratic and ethnically polarized politics; absent institutions for efficient markets, and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Millennium Villages are to world poverty what Disney World is to urban blight. Bureaucrats have never achieved the end of poverty and never will; poverty ends (and is already ending in East and South Asia) by individuals operating in free markets, and by the efforts of homegrown political and economic reformers. What are the better alternatives? If the aid agencies passed up the glitzy but unrealistic campaign to end world poverty, perhaps they would spend more time devising specific, definable tasks that could actually help people and for which the public could hold them accountable. Such tasks include getting 12-cent doses of malaria medicines to malaria victims; distributing 10-cent doses of oral rehydration therapy to reduce the 1.8 million infant deaths from dehydration due to diarrheal diseases last year; getting poor people clean water and bed nets to prevent diarrheal diseases and malaria; getting textbooks to schoolchildren, or encouraging gradual changes to business regulations to make it easier to start a business, enforce contracts and create jobs for the poor. True, some of the grand plans include some of these tasks — but to say they have the same goals is like saying that Soviet central planning and American free markets both aimed to produce consumer goods. These tasks cannot be achieved as part of the bureaucratically unaccountable morass we have now, in which dozens of aid agencies are collectively responsible for trying to simultaneously implement 449 separate ``interventions’’ designed in New York and Washington to achieve the overall ``end of poverty.’’ That’s just nuts. The end of poverty will come as a result of homegrown political and economic reforms (already happening in many poor countries), not through outside aid. The biggest hope for the world’s poor nations is not Bono, it is the citizens of poor nations themselves. (Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and author of The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.)
— By arrangement with
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From the pages of Drop I.N.A. trial
The Government’s new statement of policy regarding I.N.A. shows that they have hopelessly failed to gauge the depth of public feeling in the matter. What the people want is not an assurance that the accused would have a fair trial or that they would be dealt with leniently but that not one of the I.N.A. men should be prosecuted and all should be set free. Mr Fenner Brockway characterised the staging of the trials as a great blunder. The Government even now do not see their error and appear to be determined to pursue a course of conduct which cannot command the approval of same elements either in this country or in Britain. “Until all investigations are complete, it is not possible to state”, the Government says, “the number of men who will be brought to trial. The trial will be limited to those against whom brutality is alleged.” If the Government think that by making this statement they would either pacify the people or convince them of the justification of their action, they are thoroughly mistaken. The public will be satisfied with nothing less than the release of all men, one and all, without exception.
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There is no greater evil that hatred. There is no pain greater than bodily existence. There is no fire greater than searing passion. There is no happiness higher than peace. — The Buddha The creator, abiding in the universe, keeps all creation in his sight and delights to see it. — Guru Nanak Marriage is a natural thing in life and to consider it derogatory in any sense is wholly wrong. — Mahatma Gandhi
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