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Guillotine
at work Cost of
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Mid-year
show
Tactics
of blackmail
Merry
Christmas
Musafir: Politician
on wings of poesy The higher they are,
the harder they fall In Kabul education
under attack
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Cost of security
TUESDAY’S ruling by the Punjab and Haryana High Court restricting the use of escort and pilot vehicles to chief ministers, speakers and the high court chief justice is in the fitness of things. It has deplored the “feudal mindset” of the powers that be and directed the Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh UT authorities to regulate the security cover given to some VIPs after reviewing their threat perception. Police security and red beacons for vehicles have become status symbols for most of them who do not even deserve them. Why should ministers, legislators, zilla panchayat members and even bureaucrats need police security and red lights atop their cars? This false demonstration of social status makes a mockery of democracy and eats into public finances. It is also anachronistic and militates against the egalitarian ethos of the Republic. Undoubtedly, VIP security has become a menace, being over-defensive in approach, excessive in content and obtrusive in nature. There has hardly been any serious effort by the Centre and the states to rationalise the security system. After the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram has taken the initiative to review VIP security. The Punjab government, too, has taken some steps to regulate the deployment of policemen for those called VIPs. Yet, this is not enough. A lot more needs to be done to instil confidence in the people that the Centre and the states do show care and concern for the safety of the common people. The police is meant to check crime, maintain law and order, regulate traffic, investigate cases and so on. But deployment of a large segment of the force for the security of politicians and bureaucrats is depleting its strength for real policing work. The increase in the crime rate in all the states, including Delhi, is attributed to the paucity of police personnel who are diverted to VIP security at the cost of maintaining law and order and public safety. Clearly, security may be given to those on the basis of their genuine threat perception, but even such cases should be the exception rather than the rule.
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Mid-year show
THE mid-year review of the economy, tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, sums up the present economic mood in the country as “cautious optimism”. Projecting a GDP growth rate of 7 to 8 per cent for the current fiscal, the official assessment is in line with what most Indian research organisations and government agencies think of the economy. Some foreign analysts and the World Bank do see the glass half empty and expect the slowdown in India to drag the growth rate to 6.3 per cent. Given the global financial turmoil and reports of deepening recession in the US and Europe, even that much growth for India should be reassuring. Government analysts pin their hopes on the service sector to pull the economy through the difficult times. The government response to the shrinking of the economy as also the recommendations of the mid-year review are on the expected lines. The widely accepted way out of trouble is to raise public spending, cut interest rates and carry forward the reforms agenda. Last week Parliament authorised the government to spend Rs 1,40,000 crore more than the budgeted amount to stimulate the economy. Though this will push the fiscal deficit to an unacceptably high 5 per cent of the GDP, no better alternative is available. After cutting excise and customs duties as part of a package, the government is expected to do more for troubled sectors of the economy, especially exports. With the Prime Minister’s high-level committee, too, joining the chorus for cuts in the reverse repo and repo rates, it is only a matter of time before the RBI further loosens the monetary policy. Part of corporate pain has emanated from the RBI’s liquidity-tightening measures. They expect relief now. With inflation plummeting to almost the acceptable levels and the global oil prices, too, slumping to about $40 a barrel, the optimists on the Indian economy are more likely to be proved right.
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I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. — Nathan Hale
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Tactics of blackmail During
the over five-year period when I lived in Pakistan, a constant feature was the ever-present ISI minders, who followed me wherever I went. Their surveillance was crude. On one occasion they seated themselves next to a table at which I was hosting Ms Maleeha Lodhi, (later Pakistan’s envoy in Washington) at the height of the Kargil conflict. Nervous and rattled by the proximity of the ISI goons, she even declined to accept from me a copy of the infamous Musharraf-Aziz conversation that had been taped by RAW during the Kargil conflict. It was, therefore, not difficult to spot the ISI goons swarming over Faridkot village to intimidate ordinary citizens and erase all evidence that the captured terrorist, Ajmal Amin Qasab, and his parents lived there. In urban centres, ranging from Sialkot and Multan to Dera Ismail Khan, the ISI has endeavoured to erase evidence of the other terrorists being Pakistani nationals. Thus, despite professions of readiness to cooperate, Pakistan is erasing all evidence of its involvement in the Mumbai carnage. Sadly, the Manmohan Singh government has bungled badly by stating there was no evidence of ISI involvement in the Mumbai terrorist attack. During a recent meeting in Washington, former Commander-in-Chief of India’s Eastern Fleet Vice-Admiral Premvir Das explained the immense complexity of the operations undertaken by the terrorists who boarded a Pakistani ship in Karachi, hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, navigated using a global positioning system and transferred weapons, ammunition, explosives, a satellite phone and an outboard motor to a small boat in turbulent waters. Admiral Das averred: “It is just not possible for ordinary jihadis, trained in camps in Muridhke, to do this. Only people with rigorous military training could have done what these people did.” In short, the entire commando-style operation had the backing of elements from the Pakistan Army and Navy. Despite this, it is inexplicable why the Manmohan Singh government does not publicly speak of circumstantial evidence of ISI/Pakistan military involvement. New Delhi’s pusillanimity on this score has inevitably led to foreign leaders like Senator John Kerry giving the Pakistan military establishment a clean chit on the Mumbai carnage. While there is sympathy in Western capitals for India after the Mumbai attack, Western chanceries now appear to believe that India is acting like a supplicant in pleading for them to act against Pakistan. Given the Western and particularly American reliance on Pakistan for logistical support in the war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the Americans now believe that expressions of sympathy and understanding alone will deter New Delhi from taking any action that adversely affects their operations in Afghanistan. Sensing this, Pakistan regularly threatens them that it will move its troops to the Indian border unless they “restrain” India. Is it not, therefore, time for India to tell its friends that they should reduce their dependence on Pakistan and that they should hold out the threat of economic and military sanctions against Pakistan, if the latter continues to stonewall on dismantling the infrastructure of ISI-sponsored terrorism? Ever since the NATO summit was held in Bucharest in April 2008, NATO officials have been working on alternate routes bypassing Pakistan for supplying their forces in Afghanistan, as “the situation is unstable in Pakistan”. During the summit Russia agreed to facilitate a land transport corridor to Afghanistan. Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have been approached for the same purpose, and Azerbaijan and Georgia have been sounded out for a Caucasian corridor to Afghanistan through Turkmenistan via the Caspian Sea. Such moves will reduce Western dependence on Pakistan and effectively undermine Pakistan’s efforts to blackmail its American allies. Recent attacks on NATO supply convoys near Peshawar appear to be part of a calculated Pakistani effort to force the US to plead for more Pakistani military support. India should now let it be known that it feels the US should not be deterred from imposing sanctions on Pakistan if Islamabad persists in its refusal to act against terrorism emanating from its soil, and that the US should actively reduce its dependence on Pakistan for its operations in Afghanistan. Indian security will, after all, not be as seriously affected as American security interests if Pakistan chooses to move elements of its four divisions, now on its western borders, to its borders with India. If Pakistan continues to blackmail the US with threats of pulling out troops from its western borders to deploy them at its eastern borders, India can justifiably say that Pakistan’s threats will not deter it from acting to protect its interests if the US and other countries beyond paying mere lip service to Indian forbearance. There are no doubts that some will claim that this will lead to growing Talibanistion of Pakistan. But would a spread of Taliban control towards the capital, Islamabad, also not lead to the weakening of the Pakistan Army, which is, after all, the lead player in sponsoring terrorism against both Afghanistan and India? Further, can the Pakistan Army afford to create a situation that would inevitably lead to NATO airstrikes deeper into Pakistan territory? In the present power structure of Pakistan, President Zardari and his government play second fiddle to the army establishment. This will not change unless the army is isolated and forced to make hard choices and give up its favourite pastime of “bleeding” India. These are policy options that New Delhi must adopt and articulate before the Obama Administration assumes office. President-elect Obama has on more than one occasion endorsed India’s right to “self-defence” The incoming US Administration is also more open to ideas, like widening the dialogue on Afghanistan by bringing in not only the country’s Central Asian neighbours but also Russia, Iran and India. It is true that China, which in a way was responsible for the Mumbai carnage by blocking moves in the UN Security Council to get the Jamaat-ud-Dawa declared a terrorist organisation, will continue to stand by its “all-weather friend”, Pakistan. But once the US and its NATO allies decide to call Pakistan’s bluff, work on alternative supply routes to Afghanistan and threaten Pakistan with sanctions if it does not dismantle the infrastructure of ISI-sponsored terrorism, Pakistan and China will be more amenable to complying with the demands of the international community than they are at present. The leverage that India has to make the US and its NATO allies act on these lines lies is its ability to compel the Pakistan Army to move four divisions from its western to eastern borders, should it be compelled to force the
issue.
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Merry Christmas The
church bells conjure up visions of past Christmases. Friends, some old, some newly acquired with whom they were shared. Time and distance are unable to stem the flow of memory as it engulfs one in a warmth that lingers long after the yule-log has burnt itself out into ashes. One moment I see a lonely boy counting the days when the large, sprawling house in which he lives with his parents will begin to fill up with close friends and relatives. They will stay a week or so, eating, drinking, exchanging anecdotes, basking in the sun or gathering close to the log fire that burns at all hours in an enormous grate. There will be picnics at the Qutab, visits to the circus at Tis Hazari tonga rides on chilly evenings to the Mughal gardens, Qudsia and Roshanara, cups of steaming coffee and rich fruit cake served to carol singers asked in from the cold night, charades after dinner and no bedtime, no lessons in the morning, only a mounting excitement that reaches fever heat on Christmas Eve when the drawing room doors are closed to young intruders while their elders hang up presents on the candle-lit, gaily festooned fir tree that had been brought down earlier from the hills. The years roll on. The boy who used to peep in through the sky-light on the roof is now busy tying up gifts in coloured paper wrappers. The locale changes from year to year. It may be a trim cantonment close to the northern border, a metropolitan town by the sea or an industrial township far inland. New faces, new friends, new interests, new ambitions. The scene shifts but life goes on and beneath it all is that essential oneness that one is apt to forget till the postman brings a bit of pasteboard that says “Merry Christmas”. It may be from a friend for whom the greeting has a religious significance. It may be from one — a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim, a Parsi — in whose eyes Christmas, like Divali, is a national festival. Or it may be a spoken greeting in a land across the seas where distance separates one from the loved ones at home where the soft, white snow that clings to the mullioned windows will be fashioned into human shapes, with black buttons for eyes, by children wearing furlined boots and woollen caps. Inside where one sits warming one’s hands before a log fire there is that euphoric feeling that comes from being welcomed by strangers. And when someone switches off the lights there will come, floating through the darkness, in orange and blue flames of burning brandy that flicker on happy, expectant faces, an immense round plum pudding decorated with the green sprig that is the symbol of Christmas, carrying its message of peace and goodwill to millions of homes in many lands, regardless of colour and climate, religious belief and political dogma. It is the message that the carol singers will give all over the free world when the say, ‘Peace on earth and mercy mild/God and sinners reconciled/Joyful all ye nations, rise/join the triumph of the
skies.’
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Musafir: Politician on wings of poesy
Poet, teacher and politician, Giani Gurmukh Singh Musafir was all that and more. He epitomised a generation of leaders who came into the world of politics as a logical extension of the task they had undertaken when they joined the freedom struggle. Musafir was Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht for a brief period and also General Secretary of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, Amritsar. Later, along with a number of Akali leaders, he joined the Congress party and was President of the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee, a member of the Congress Working Committee, Chief Minister of Punjab and a Member of Parliament. Gurmukh Singh was the son of Sujan Singh. He was born on January 15, 1899 at Adhval, in Campbellpore district, now in Pakistan. He became a teacher at the age of 19, he passed Honours in Punjabi while in service, and this earned him the title Giani. ‘Musafir’ was a takhallus, nom-de-plume. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the Nankana Sahib incident in which many Sikh pilgrims were killed left a deep impact on the young man and he got so involved in the gurdwara reform movement that he gave up teaching. He recited patriotic poems that he had composed at Sikh gatherings. He was imprisoned for his role in the Guru-ka-Bagh agitation in 1922. Later that year, he was appointed Jathedar of Sri Akal Takht, (March 12, 1930 to March 5, 1931). He also briefly held the post of Secretary, SGPC, and General Secretary, Shiromani Akali Dal. While we focus on the activist, we must not forget the writer, and as Principal Teja Singh once wrote: “With his vast experience, Gurmukh Singh Musafir draws his stories from life itself. He tells about suffering with a pen dipped in blood. And the paper on which he inscribes his tale gets lacerated.” The experience included much incarceration. Musafir also courted arrest in the Civil Disobedience programme that the Indian National Congress started in 1930. Musafir was imprisoned from 1939-41 and 1942-45 for his involvement in the Satyagrah and Quit India agitations. The imprisonments took their toll. Musafir’s father died when he was in prison. He could not even attend the last rites of an infant son, his grief at the death of Rajinder Kaur, his 19-year-old daughter, came out in the form of a poignant short story, Baghi di dhee which was later made into a film. In his book on Musafir, the eminent writer Kartar Singh Duggal, says: “Gianiji’s greatest support in life was his wife (Ranjit Kaur) — a lady cast in a heroic mould.” Musafir had five sons—Mandev, Parmdev, Sachdev live abroad. Jaidev and Jatinder Dev have passed away. In 1947, he became president of the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee and was made member of the All-India Congress Working Committee, a position he retained for 12 years. He was elected a member of the Lok Sabha successively in 1952, 1957 and 1962. He did not complete his last term in the Lok Sabha and resigned in 1966 to take over as Chief Minister of the reorganised state of Punjab on November 1, 1966 for a short while. Musafir re-entered Parliament, this time as a member of the Rajya Sabha 68-74, and for the second term thereafter. All through his life, he continued writing and his published works are extensive. Giani Gurmukh Singh Musafir died in Delhi on January 18, 1976. He was posthumously decorated with Padma Vibhushan, and his book of short stories, Urwar – Par won the Sahit Akademy Award, again posthumously. A trust, named after him, was set up in his memory that very year and it has a memorial in Sector 24, Chandigarh. The trust also published all his literary works in four volumes in 1999. A commemorative stamp was issued in 2002. His only surviving daughter, Mrs Joginder Sant, lives in Chandigarh. She is General Secretary of the trust. She has kept the flame of Musafir’s memory alive, and had sent a proposal to the Speaker, Lok Sabha for the installation of portrait of Musafir in Parliament in 2003. In time, the well-known artist Rahi Mohinder (R M) Singh was commissioned and he “captured the essence of my father’s personality,” says Mrs Sant. The Rahi who painted Musafir has a special affinity for his subject—both have adopted a takhallus that has the same meaning—traveller. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh unveiled the portrait, along with those of Biplabi Leela Roy, Babu Veer Kunwar Singh, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Swaran Singh and Shaheed Jayee Rajguru in Central Hall, Parliament House, in New Delhi on December 22.
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The higher they are, the harder they fall Let’s say the FBI hears a senior elected official on a tapped telephone line demanding kickbacks in exchange for favors and shaking down donors for campaign contributions in exchange for plum contracts. Does it make a difference if the elected official is a governor, as is said to be the case with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich? What if the wrongdoer were a mayor? What if it were the president? In a rational world, the rank of an official who abuses the public trust should make no difference in how people view the crime. Logically speaking, equivalent crimes deserve equivalent levels of opprobrium and punishment. There is convincing psychological evidence, however, that this is not what happens in white-collar scandals such as the one involving Blagojevich. Controlled experiments show that the status of the lawbreaker makes a huge difference in how we evaluate what happened. The higher the status of the person, the more likely we are to arrive at the most negative conclusions and reach for the most severe punishments. When it comes to white-collar crime, there appears to be an inversion of the discrimination that lower-status groups often face when it comes to violent crime — the people who stand on society’s tallest pedestals face our most vindictive judgments. “People tell themselves different stories about what happened based on the status of the person, so that clashes with the idea that we punish people for crimes regardless of who they are,” said Alison Fragale, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She recently completed a series of experiments that showed that people reach very different conclusions depending on whether a white-collar criminal has high or low status. Fragale’s experiments, which she recently described in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, posed identical fictional scenarios to two groups of volunteers. Both involved a person who commits a crime, and both featured identical crimes. But one group of volunteers was told the criminal had a high status, while the others were told the criminal had a lower status. One scenario featured two women in New York who had underpaid their income taxes and had been caught by the Internal Revenue Service. One was described as Elizabeth McAllister Wallace, a woman with “prominent social and political connections.” The other was called Yolanda Ramirez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. The volunteers concluded that the WASPish tax evader had broken the law deliberately but that the second-generation Mexican American had made an innocent mistake. They recommended a stricter punishment for the high-status woman. In another experiment, Fragale described a new drug that had caused patient deaths. An investigation found that the clinical trial a pharmaceutical company had done on the drug was flawed, she told volunteers. To one group, Fragale said the trial had been designed by a junior scientist; to the other, she said it was a senior scientist. The single word change caused a significant difference in how the study volunteers perceived the situation. The senior scientist was seen as having deliberately designed a bad trial to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration to market a dangerous drug, whereas the junior scientist was seen as having made an
innocent mistake. The reason people draw harsh conclusions about high-status people is that very successful people are generally perceived to be selfish, Fragale said. When bad stuff happens, we fall back on this stereotype and assume that the high-status person deliberately cheated the system. But doesn’t the stereotype about self-interested, ambitious types make intuitive sense? Are people really wrong to conclude that a governor who breaks the law is a worse human being than a county commissioner who commits the same crime? Fragale disagreed: Stereotypes are stereotypes, she said — even when they harm the powerful. One interesting question that springs from the experiments is whether public officials can do something to mitigate the bias against high-status people. In a series of experiments yet to be published, Fragale and her colleague, organizational behavior professor Ben Rosen, asked volunteers to evaluate the culpability of former New York Gov. — By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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In Kabul education under attack Few
things symbolise progress in the fight against poverty better than the face of an educated girl. And I was fortunate enough to see hundreds of them during a trip to Afghanistan in 2006. Those faces, eager and alert, lit up the courtyard of a new school built to educate 1,000 girls in central Afghanistan’s Bamian province. Gone were the days of Taliban rule, when girls were forbidden to study and women weren’t allowed to teach. Afghanistan’s future leaders could learn — out in the open. Perhaps that is why last month’s brutal attack on a group of Afghan schoolgirls in the southern city of Kandahar was so heartbreaking. The students were walking to school in uniforms. Two men wielding water pistols drove by on motorcycles and sprayed battery acid. They took aim at that same symbol of progress, the one that has inspired me and so many others. At least three of the girls were hospitalized for severe burns on their faces, according to media reports. Afghan authorities later reported that they had arrested 10 Taliban militants in connection with the attack. One of the girls spoke courageously from her hospital bed, with yellow ointment covering an eye damaged by the acid. “I will go to my school even if they kill me,” she told reporters. “My message for the enemies is that if they do this 100 times, I am still going to continue my studies.” The world must stand behind her. The people of Afghanistan, if given the proper support, can produce a generation of educated students — boys and girls — capable of lifting their country up again. They overcame so much during the dark period of Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001. Determined Afghans worked alongside humanitarian groups such as CARE to school young girls in homes, community centers and mosques. Now the forces that would deny girls equal access to education are once again testing the country’s resolve. At stake is the momentum built by people working hard to break the cycle of poverty. Girls account for two-thirds of the children denied primary education around the globe. Yet each year of schooling can boost a girl’s future earnings, and that of her family, by 10 to 20 percent. Schooling girls is also a matter of life and death. Children of educated women are 40 percent more likely to live past age 5. Among Afghan girls, there is no lack of desire. Some walk for hours and sit outside makeshift schools, their heads filled with dreams of becoming doctors and engineers. When CARE opened 10 learning centers in Parwan and Kapisa, nearly 2,000 girls enrolled. Teachers, too, were excited at a chance for new training. Parents listened intently to information on the importance of educating their daughters as well as their sons. Some, of course, will choose to fight this kind of change. In fact, while I was in Afghanistan, a nearby school was burned to the ground. — By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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