O P I N I O N S

EDITORIALS

Why pillory the man?
MPs also need to exercise restraint
THERE was no need for a seasoned diplomat like Indian Ambassador to the US Ronen Sen for making the headless-chicken statement in an interview to a news portal. He ought to have known that, given the Opposition’s antagonism to the 123 Agreement, it would have only added fuel to fire.

Power board is broke
When will government set it right?
REPORTS that the Punjab State Electricity Board is on the verge of financial collapse no longer surprise anyone. In fact, these appear to be motivated. By sounding alarmist, the power board management wants to extract Rs 1,000 crore from the state government and collect another Rs 1,000 crore by raising the power tariff.

• Thought for the day

ARTICLE

A radioactive crisis
Congress-Left standoff irreconcilable
by Inder Malhotra
BY now it is clear enough that the huge storm caused by the Left Front - which supports the ruling United Progressive Alliance from “outside” - over the undoubtedly controversial Indo-US civilian nuclear deal would not blow over, notwithstanding the Prime Minister’s imagery of spring inevitably following the winter.

MIDDLE

Lost & found
by Satish K. Sharma
Lost articles. They tell something about, sorry, the loser. For example, those who keep losing their hearts to others are, by far, the gentler souls than those who lose their heads. Poor things, they torment only themselves.

OPED

Aini Aapa, a defender of composite culture
by Kashmiri Lal Zakir
All lovers of Urdu would feel devastated by the death of Qurratulain Haider, affectionately called ‘Aini’ by her friends and admirers. Born in Aligarh on January 20, 1927, Aini was a child prodigy. Her father Sajjad Haider Yaldram was also a great writer and remained associated with Aligarh University through out his life. She had her education in Aligarh and Lucknow.

Delhi Durbar
Lalu’s academia
Rashtriya Janata Dal president and Railway Minister Lalu Prasad’s over-rated experiments with academics might have been inspired by the enlightened company he keeps. Lalu’s party boasts of good academic talent. While the popular Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh is on leave from Bihar University, where he teaches mathematics, RJD Lok Sabha MP from Motihari and Minister of State for Agriculture Akhilesh Prasad Singh is Professor of Zoology in the Science College, Patna

Democracy activists stage rare protest in Burma
by Andrew Buncombe
Hundreds of demonstrators have defied the military junta in Burma to stage a rare protest march despite the arrests of 13 leading pro-democracy activists. According to witnesses, around 300 people staged an hour-long march before being dispersed by gangs of unidentified men -- believed to be members of the regime-created Union Solidarity and Development Association.

EDITORIALS

Why pillory the man?
MPs also need to exercise restraint

THERE was no need for a seasoned diplomat like Indian Ambassador to the US Ronen Sen for making the headless-chicken statement in an interview to a news portal. He ought to have known that, given the Opposition’s antagonism to the 123 Agreement, it would have only added fuel to fire. To be fair to the Ambassador, when his comments evoked bitter criticism, he took the first available opportunity to clarify that he did not mean parliamentarians but journalists when he referred to “headless chickens” looking for quotes here and there. Whatever be the truth, the point is that he has apologised to all those who could have felt hurt by his statement. Ordinarily, this should have been the end of the matter. Unfortunately, some political leaders have been going for the jugular demanding his immediate recall.

Mr Sen is undoubtedly one of the most distinguished diplomats India has produced. His appointment as Ambassador to the US after his retirement from the Foreign Service is a measure of the esteem in which the government holds him. He played a major role in the years-long negotiations that led to the clinching of the India-US nuclear deal. If he is passionate about the deal and believes that it is one of the best things to have happened to India, he is entitled to such an opinion. But to pillory him for his comments on the deal is to go too far. Unfortunately, Mr Sen has become a pawn in the chess game the Left and the UPA government have been playing with regard to the 123 Agreement.

As we have stressed in these columns, the nuclear deal opens a window of opportunity to the country as it will end the nuclear apartheid India has been experiencing ever since it tested a nuclear device in 1974. Not only that, it will also help meet the growing need for power besides making available to the country cutting-edge technology. It is against this backdrop that we have been arguing that the Left and the BJP should not oppose operationalising of the deal. Their stance will only serve the interests of countries, which are not overtly friendly to India. And it is a pity that Mr Ronen Sen’s statement has come in handy for the Opposition to beat the government with.

Power board is broke
When will government set it right?

REPORTS that the Punjab State Electricity Board is on the verge of financial collapse no longer surprise anyone. In fact, these appear to be motivated. By sounding alarmist, the power board management wants to extract Rs 1,000 crore from the state government and collect another Rs 1,000 crore by raising the power tariff. The state government itself is in a tight corner and may not have spare cash for the board. The board itself has to take some hard decisions to introduce financial discipline. Though it recently raised Rs 64 crore through fines for power theft, no serious effort has been made to stop transmission losses.

The easiest option the board likes to exercise is to raise power tariff by 15 to 20 per cent and borrow more from banks to meet its financial commitments. However, the power regulator has allowed a tariff hike of 4 per cent only for 2007-08. Borrowing money from banks is also not easy. The board incurred a loss of Rs 1,624 crore in purchasing power during 2006-07. With an accumulated loss of Rs 5,978 crore, banks would be reluctant to advance more money to the board. Already the board’s interest outgo amounts to Rs 1,335 crore a year and more loans means higher interest repayments. The financial picture is as dismal as the power supply scenario in the state.

Normally, such a state of near bankruptcy would have driven any state government to sack the management. But the Badal government cannot do so because it too has partly contributed to the board’s precarious financial condition by providing free power to farmers and sections of the poor without compensating the board for the loss. The only saving grace is that of late there has been a talk of unbundling the power board and the political leadership has cleared the proposal. But does it have the political will and courage of conviction to implement the power reforms?

The plot thickens
Chicken and seasonal flavours

WHEN all the sound and fury over the nuclear deal and its political consequences are behind us and some writer wants to come up with a bad book, a good title for it may be ‘Tale of a Headless Chicken’. Over the cocktails that would predictably follow the book launch, when wordsmiths look back upon the many metaphors, including the mixed ones, that marked this momentous passage in history, chicken is bound to be on top of the menu. Even without so much as a sneeze by our man in Washington, the anti-American class has been seized with bird ‘flu, albeit of a different variety from the epidemic that has taken a toll of our feathered friends.

Chicken broth may not be everyone’s idea of a treat, but that is no reason why those who don’t want to partake of it should cry “fowl” over the bird being, metaphorically, decapitated. It is no more possible to make chicken broth without beheading the bird than it is possible to make an omlette without breaking eggs. What’s wrong with “headless chicken”? Tactless it may be, but tasteless it is not if seasoned with the appropriate flavours and served right.

The problem arises when we fail to not only get the seasons but also their sequence right. Of course, it is important to know which is the current season to pick the flavour of the season. Thus we have talk of “turbulence” amidst promise of winter being followed by spring (or, is it summer?). And this at a time when autumn is yet to come followed by the winter assault. This, as Indians say, is the rainy season when it never rains but pours. Hence that sinking feeling and not just in the UPA but in the camps of its opponents, too, with none of them having a clue to whether and how they can stay afloat now that the boat has been well and truly rocked. It remains to be seen who chickens out and which chickens come home to roost.

Thought for the day

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,/Are of imagination all compact. — William Shakespeare

ARTICLE

A radioactive crisis
Congress-Left standoff irreconcilable
by Inder Malhotra

BY now it is clear enough that the huge storm caused by the Left Front - which supports the ruling United Progressive Alliance from “outside” - over the undoubtedly controversial Indo-US civilian nuclear deal would not blow over, notwithstanding the Prime Minister’s imagery of spring inevitably following the winter. Differences between the Leftists, headed by the CPM, and the Manmohan Singh government are too deep to be reconciled by any smart “face-saving” formula. A spring general election, therefore, seems more likely.

At a meeting of the CPM’s Central Committee, still on at the time of writing, two-thirds of the delegates are reported to be in favour of the party general secretary Prakash Karat’s hard line. So much so that at a time when the Prime Minister speaks of the matter being taken to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Left leaders declaim that if the Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Commission, due to meet in Vienna next month, so much as “mentions the 123 treaty with the US”, the Left Front would withdraw its support to the UPA government, reducing the ruling coalition to a minority.

Moreover, the Leftists are opposed to the “entire gamut of the strategic relationship with the US” and are organising two cross-country marches to Vishakhapatnam - from Kalkotata and Chennai - to protest against the naval exercises together with the navies of the US, Japan, Australia and Singapore in the Bay of Bengal from September 4.

Ever since the nuclear crisis erupted here with the force of a mini-nuke there has been much talk of marriage, divorce and even honeymoon. Using the same imagery, the scenario seems to be that the loveless marriage cannot endure much longer through it might not fall apart immediately. Both the estranged marriage partners want to wait until after the Gujarat assembly election, due early next year, before the divorce. Come to think of it, there was nothing natural about an alliance between the Congress-led UPA and the Left parties. It is indeed remarkable that their “marriage of inconvenience” has lasted three and a half years. However, one can never be certain because politics in India, like Bollywood films, is prone to taking utterly bizarre twists and turns.

While waiting for future developments, one cannot overlook the implications of what has happened so far. In the confabulations that started immediately after it became known that there was no meeting ground between the two sides, the main anxiety of the Congress’ allies has been that under no circumstances should the country be plunged into a mid-term election. This obviously was the genesis of the proposal that a committee should discuss the Left Front’s objections. But the Front has reaffirmed that it would discuss the role of the proposed mechanism only after the government had committed not to hold any negotiations with the IAEA and the NSG.

At the same time, there obviously are shades of differences within the Left Front and even among CPM leaders. There can be no other explanation for the Marxist patriarch Jyoti Basu’s terse rejection of mid-term polls. Nor was it purely fortuitous that the Prime Minister tried to use the good offices of the relatively moderate West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to “soften” the Leftist approach. This evidently did not have the desired effect. Remarkably, the CPI general secretary, Mr A. B. Bardhan, has adopted an even harsher attitude towards the Congress and the nuclear deal than has Mr Karat.

In this confusion and cacophony, the BJP has thrown another spanner in the works. It has declared that the nuclear deal is a matter of supreme national interest, not a “private affair between the Congress and the Communists”. It is insisting on the appointment of a Joint Parliamentary Committee to examine the deal and the Hyde Act, and sees no role for the informal “mechanism”, headed by the Prime Minister’s special envoy, Mr Shyam Saran. The newly formed United National Progressive Alliance that calls itself the third front has jumped on this bandwagon.

At least two TV news channels have attributed to the Congress president and UPA chairperson, Ms Sonia Gandhi, the remark that there was “no question” of Dr Manmohan Singh’s “replacement”. If the report is true it means that someone within the party or the alliance did raise that question. She is also reported to have remarked that the Congress should neither give the impression of being “power hungry” nor should it carry the controversy with the Leftists “too far”. Different people are bound to interpret her observations differently.

Against this far from reassuring backdrop, the crucial and generally neglected point is that the nuclear deal with the US has become a plaything of ideology and partisan politics instead of being discussed and evaluated purely on the basis of its merit. It is not at all surprising that some Congressmen and others privately, and several analysts publicly, have blamed the CPM for opposing the deal at China’s behest. The Chinese who had until recently maintained an ambivalent attitude to the deal are now making no secret of their dislike for it.

Mr B. Raman, a former deputy chief of the external intelligence agency RAW and an eminent analyst, has written that the Marxists today seem to be acting on the basis of the slogan “China’s interest is our interest”, just as the Naxalites of the sixties used to say, “China’s Chairman is Our Chairman”. Beijing has in any case decided to have a nuclear cooperation agreement with Pakistan, its all-weather friend that China uses as a counterpoise to India.

Any dispassionate study of the deal would show that it is not perfect but it serves our essential purposes. It satisfactorily addresses most of our important concerns, though not all of them. The bottom line is that this is the best we could get, and it is necessary because it liberates India from the nuclear and technology apartheid to which we have been subjected since the 1974 underground nuclear detonation. Russia and France, best friends of this country, are anxious to have nuclear commerce with it, but have stated that without an agreement with the US and a change in the NSG guidelines, they cannot do so.

In short, the Indo-US deal is not a mere bilateral agreement but would entail a global end to the 33-year-old sanctions on India. If, in spite of this, the country wants to reject it, let it do so after a reasoned debate, not as a result of a thoughtless ideological clash.

MIDDLE

Lost & found
by Satish K. Sharma

Lost articles. They tell something about, sorry, the loser. For example, those who keep losing their hearts to others are, by far, the gentler souls than those who lose their heads. Poor things, they torment only themselves.

They speak about the profession of, sorry again, the loser, too. No wonder surgeons keep losing scalpels or scissor inside the patients! But if you thought writers forget to pick up only their pens, or glasses, hold. Sometimes they lose manuscripts too. Col. T.E. Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia, lost the original copy of his masterly “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” at Paris railway station. He had to recreate it almost entirely from memory.

Missing articles change with times. Didn’t people lose cigarette cases or lighters when smoking was a style statement, or children, when families were large? But children go missing for another reason too. They have legs.

LK, my younger brother, was one such child. He was barely five when he got foot-loose outside the Jwalamukhi temple in H.P. Mother had her heart in the mouth till he was found an hour later.

But the message he got from all the tearful hugs, perhaps, was, ‘Hey, getting lost is cool!’ So, he did an encore. Now, at the Old Delhi railway station. Luckily, a cop spotted him. Well, the cop was a good soul, as they are. With ice-cream he treated my brother. But father thought the adventure merited a bigger reward — a whack. That made LK truly rediscover himself. He was never lost again.

It seems some articles are made for losing. A new golf ball, for example. Fellow golfer would agree. The other such thing is a loose ring. Kalidas scripted “Abhagyan Shakuntalam” around it. I had a similar one — a gift from father-in-law. But after I lost and, mercifully, found it a few times, I gave up. The ring lies safely now, in the family safe.

Ring, one could do without. But losing footwear can be mighty embarrassing — a hazard for temple-goers. But don’t worry. If the tragedy strikes you, here is the remedy suggested by a wise devotee: slip your feet into someone else’s shoes and walk away coolly.

Not all losses are regretted. Take weight loss, for example. But the darn thing — this body weight fluctuation — is a mystery in asymmetry. One gains it by kilos but loses only by grams.

Earlier, men and women lost different articles. But the oft-lost article today is pretty gender neutral — the mobile phone. Recently, mother-in-law wanted to buy one. When brother-in-law suggested a cheap model, she didn’t like. But his logic was clinching, “Mummy, the first mobile phone one loses anyway!”

OPED

Aini Aapa, a defender of composite culture
by Kashmiri Lal Zakir

Qurratulain Haider

All lovers of Urdu would feel devastated by the death of Qurratulain Haider, affectionately called ‘Aini’ by her friends and admirers. Born in Aligarh on January 20, 1927, Aini was a child prodigy. Her father Sajjad Haider Yaldram was also a great writer and remained associated with Aligarh University through out his life. She had her education in Aligarh and Lucknow.

Aini was a lady with grit. She was very outspoken and did not compromise on her principles. She wrote fine prose in her unique style. She had a great sense of history and felt proud of the cultural heritage of India. She was a lady of extreme likes and dislikes. If she liked a person she would do anything for him or her.

When she was working in the Illustrated Weekly with Khushwant Singh she did a wonderful job. But at times both of them differed from each other’s ideas. Even then, Khushwant Singh has been her great admirer.

I remember when my cousin, the late Sabir Dutt, shifted to Bombay and started a very prestigious magazine titled Fun Aur Shakshiyat, he got full support and patronage of Qurratulain Haider, simply because both of them did not believe in compromises. Even after she shifted to Delhi, Sabir continued to get her guidance and support.

When my publisher was thinking of printing the fourth edition of my novel Sindoor Ki Raakh, he was keen to get a few words from Qurratulain about the novel, but he did not have the courage to ask for this favour. He came to me and I telephone Aini Aapa, asking her to write a few words about my novel. She told me that due to her failing health, she was unable to write fluently, and therefore, needed someone to take dictation from her. I told my publisher Prem Gopal Mittal to go to her and record her comments, which I feel proud to quote to this day.

In my capacity as the secretary of the Haryana Urdu Akademi, I organised a seminar, in which I had invited Qurratulain and Mulk Raj Anand. There were a number of people who thought that I was bluffing the audience and these two great writers of the day would not come to participate in the seminar. They were really shocked when both of them came and spoke in the seminar and gave a message of friendship, peace and national integration to the country.

Qurratulain had a great sense of the past. In fact, she always thought that the present was closely knit with the past. This is very clear in her novel Aag Ka Dariya (River of Fire), which will be remembered for ages by lovers of literature in Urdu, and English, into which the novel was translated. Even if one were to ignore the other novels, Aag Ka Dariya alone would keep her among the top Indian writers.

Her sense of history was so acute that when she came for the seminar I mentioned, she made a visit to Kaithal, a town in Haryana associated with Razia Sultana. There is a view that Sultana’s tomb still exists in Kaithal.

When Aini Aapa shifted to a Noida flat, she lived alone along with her maid servant and her daughter. She was a very superstitious lady and believed in spirits. Once, when I went to her residence, she told me always had very bad dreams at night and could not sleep peacefully. I saw the position of her palang and got the bed shifted from north to southward position, because, if your head is towards the south you are always uncomfortable. After two days, she informed me on telephone that she was feeling much relieved.

She was a highly decorated writer. She won the Sahitya Academy Award for her collection of short stories Patjhar Ki Awaz (Sound of falling leaves) in 1969. She won the Padmashree and Ghalib Awards in 1984. The Urdu Academy in Delhi conferred upon her the Bahadur Shah Zafar Award in 2000.

After Partition, Qurratulain shifted to Pakistan for some time. But she did not feel well-adjusted and returned to India. Along with other writers like Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat Chughtai, Manto, and Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, she also remained obsessed with the great historical event of Partition and wrote short stories and novels about it.

She was a defender of composite culture and always worked for the protection of basic human values.

When I met her six months ago, at a seminar in Jamia Millia Islamia, we spent some time over a cup of coffee, and discussed about her future literary plans. I felt that she was feeling very tired and depressed. She told me that now she did not have the physical capacity to write novels or short stories. She was thinking of collecting her scattered ideas and writings and getting them printed in the form of a book. I am not aware if she was able to complete this project.

Delhi Durbar
Lalu’s academia

Rashtriya Janata Dal president and Railway Minister Lalu Prasad’s over-rated experiments with academics might have been inspired by the enlightened company he keeps. Lalu’s party boasts of good academic talent. While the popular Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh is on leave from Bihar University, where he teaches mathematics, RJD Lok Sabha MP from Motihari and Minister of State for Agriculture Akhilesh Prasad Singh is Professor of Zoology in the Science College, Patna.

Prof Ramdeo Bhandari and Prof Jabir Hussain, both Rajya Sabha MPs, have retired as Professors of mathematics and English from Mithila and Magadh Universities respectively. Dr Sachidanand Singh, party MLA, teaches economics in Bihar University. The party’s national Returning Officer for three terms, Ramchandra Poorve, retired as Professor of Mathematics from Bihar University. Ratan Lal, former General Secretary of the Delhi unit of the party, is a senior lecturer of Ancient History in Hindu College.

Academicians-turned-politicians in the RJD insist that Lalu was always inclined to academics and point out that he was a member of the Syndicate in Patna University in the seventies.

Left MPs’ agony

With the furore over the Indo-US nuclear deal appearing to be reach a point of no return, Lok Sabha MPs are keeping their fingers crossed. There seems to be an undercurrent of envy towards their colleagues in the Rajya Sabha, who enjoy a fixed tenure. Even Left parliamentarians are a worried lot with one member observing, “what can we do if the coalition government chooses a collision course?”

MPs from Kerala are worrying about the infighting in the state unit of the CPM, which is likely to affect the party’s electoral prospects. Although they cannot go against the decision of the politburo, several members expressed their anguish with the turn of events, in private conversation. A parliamentarian from the southern state said none in the party is prepared for polls.

Disease of defection

How fast legislators in Goa change their loyalty and put the government on tenterhooks was evident in the Supreme Court when one of the six MLAs of the Goa Democratic Alliance made a volte face. He had challenged the state assembly Speaker’s decision declaring the victory of Chief Minister Digambar Kamat in the July 30 controversial trust vote, but his lawyer informed the court that the MLA was now supporting the government.

This prompted a bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan to comment that the disease of “aya Ram, gaya Ram” seems to have infected the apex court because a petitioner does not know which side he is to stand. This sent the entire court room in peels of laughter and the young lawyer representing the MLA was desperately looking for cover.

Contributed by Tripti Nath, R. Suryamurthy and S.S. Negi

Democracy activists stage rare protest in Burma
by Andrew Buncombe

Hundreds of demonstrators have defied the military junta in Burma to stage a rare protest march despite the arrests of 13 leading pro-democracy activists.

According to witnesses, around 300 people staged an hour-long march before being dispersed by gangs of unidentified men -- believed to be members of the regime-created Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA).

The march followed a series of midnight raids aimed at confronting growing protests over rising fuel prices. Among those arrested were some of the country’s most important dissidents.

In a rare public announcement the regime revealed in state-controlled newspapers that the activists had been arrested in Rangoon, now named Yangon, for seeking to cause “civil unrest and undermining the peace and security of the state”. The charges could see the dissidents jailed for up to 20 years.

Campaigners and relatives said that among those arrested were Min Ko Naing, Ko Ko Gyi, Ko Mya Aye, Ko Yin Htun and Ko Jimmy, leaders of a 1988 democracy movement that was lethally crushed by the regime. Min Ko Naing, whose name means “Conqueror of Kings” and who was released from jail last year by the authorities after spending more than 15 years in jail, is probably the best-known activist in the country after Aung San Suu Kyi. She remains under house arrest, having spent the best part of 17 years imprisoned.

“Military intelligence and government intelligence seized their houses and searched their houses,” another dissident, Htay Kywe, who managed to escape arrest, told Reuters in a message passed to the news agency from Burmese groups in neighbouring Thailand.

Despite the series of arrests, reports from Burma said campaigners still took to the streets yesterday to protest against the government’s recent increase in prices of fuel. Some onlookers applauded the marchers. Other reports said six campaigners were dragged away by members of the USDA, which is often used by the government to intimidate its opponents.

“We are marching to highlight the economic hardship that Burmese people are facing now, which has been exacerbated by the fuel price hike,” a protester who identified herself only as Mimi told onlookers at yesterday’s march.

Campaigners said the arrest of the activists displayed the regime’s true colours. “The regime has been trying to persuade the international community that it has a roadmap to democracy and will reform, but this exposes the raw truth, the regime will tolerate no dissent, not even peaceful protest,” said Mark Farmaner, acting director of the Burma Campaign UK.

“The United Nations must set a deadline for genuine reform, including the release of all political prisoners. We have had 19 years of regime lies and 19 years of the international community dithering while thousands of Burmese people are arrested, tortured and killed.” In Washington, the US Campaign for Burma said in a statement that it was concerned that those arrested could be tortured. It said: “Min Ko Naing and the other leaders arrested have all been severely tortured during previous incarcerations and we are gravely concerned for their immediate well-being.”

Min Ko Naing’s organisation, 88 Generation Students Group, led a march last Sunday which sought to connect with public anger about soaring inflation and a government-mandated 500 per cent increase in the price of compressed natural gas. The price rise was introduced without warning and brought Yangon’s bus service to a halt. Burma has some of Asia’s biggest reserves of natural gas.

The arrests came just weeks before the UN Envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, is due to visit the country. He is expected to report back to the United Nations Security Council following his visit.

Last month a group of British MPs visited Burmese refugees in Thailand and demanded that the UK government increase fourfold its aid budget to the country to help those forced from their homes by the regime. Writing in The Independent John Bercow MP, said: “Burma suffers a political, human rights and humanitarian situation as grim as any in the world today. The country is run by an utterly illegitimate government that spends 50 per cent of its budget on the military and less than a 50p per head on the health and education of its own citizens.”

By arrangement with The Independent