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The raids
on Marans Roaming
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Time to
heal
India
explores options abroad
The
unforgettable
Bold
intervention
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Roaming free
Telecom
Minister Kapil Sibal has sallied forth where angels fear to tread. At a time when scandals in the telecom sector have become a headline staple, he has dared to air the proposals of the Draft New Telecom Policy (NTP) 2011. While not path-breaking, these proposals have spelled the direction which he wants to take. The grant of infrastructure status to the sector, a certain degree of rationalisation of taxes and levies, and allowing sharing of allocated spectrum will provide relief to the industry; the consumers will be happy that roaming charges are set to be abolished. Telecom operators are bound to protest as national roaming charges garner as much as $ 600 million for them annually. It is expected that some of them might raise their charges to offset this loss, and it remains to be seen what view TRAI will take of that move. There is some truth in the criticism that the minister has not been specific on spectrum sharing and renewal charges, etc, but there is no doubt that the Telecom Minister has taken a step in the right direction with this new policy. As in any course correction, there are bound to be challenges that such a course will entail, and the key would be in negotiating a compromise that would enable Indian telecom users to benefit even as it allows telecom operators to run their business profitably. Indian telecom industry has changed the way in which millions of Indians communicate with each other, it has opened new vistas for people and empowered its users. As the world moves to adopting smart-phones, data forms a significant part of the telecommunicating experience, and thus greater bandwidth will have to be allocated to providing better services. The minister has clarified the direction for telecom, now it is for the industry to respond.
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Time to heal
The
Punjab government has been swift in appointing as its new Advocate-General, Ashok Aggarwal, who held a similar position in Haryana earlier. The appointment, however, comes in the wake of the resignation by the former AG, Baldev Singh, who was appointed only four months ago. His resignation was a blow not only to the state government but also the dignity of the office he held, since he publicly stated that he had put in his papers because he was unwilling to succumb to the pressure that was being brought to bear on him. It stands to reason that the Advocate-General, who is a professional, should be allowed to function independently without any political interference. The former Advocate-General said he was being pressurised to allow a particular lawyer to handle the cases of the Punjab State Electricity Board (PSEB) rather than handle them himself. The issue that this brought up, the appointment of standing counsels in the government’s corporations and boards, is a contentious one. It is sometimes alleged that these appointments are made on considerations other than merit and that political interference hobbles the work of the Advocate-General. This is not the first time that an Advocate-General has resigned, alleging political interference. GS Grewal had resigned as Advocate-General of an Akali government in 1998. He too had gone public on his differences with the government and levelled serious charges against it. The government must accept that while the appointment of the Advocate-General is a political prerogative, the incumbent must be allowed to function independently. Baldev Singh’s resignation has damaged the reputation of the government in legal and judicial circles. Having being singed by the reaction to its earlier conduct, the political leadership of Punjab would be expected to be extra careful in not interfering with the professional work of the Advocate-General and his team. In doing so it would help the new Advocate-General, who has a tough task ahead of him in leading his team and in delivering the desired results.
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When we hold back on life, life holds us back. — Mary Manin Boggs
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India explores options abroad
India
has been batting on the back foot in handling its affairs at home, but on issues of foreign policy it has lately been looking for new openings, showing greater confidence in itself. In at least four areas it has made moves which befit a nation of billion-plus people keen to emerge as a major power of the 21st century. The country has chosen to explore oil and gas in the South China Sea; abstained on the vote on the Syrian resolution in the Security Council; the Prime Minister has met President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the sidelines at the United Nations to promote better ties with Iran; and, most significantly, signed a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan. All these initiatives are aimed at making the point that a country like India cannot but follow a foreign policy that is independent in nature and is aimed at protecting its national interest, without meaning to harm the interest of any other nation, in the region or beyond. It is possible the Chinese are going to feel upset with India about its decision to explore oil and gas in the South China Sea — which, in Beijing’s reckoning, belongs to its area of influence. The abstention on the vote on the Syrian situation and the Prime Minister’s meeting the Iranian President in New York may have made Washington unhappy; but India has its reasons and the right to pursue a policy that advances its interests without tripping on other countries’ toes. The most important, perhaps a departure, is India’s decision to go in for a strategic partnership with Afghanistan. The strategic partnership agreement, signed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Hamid Karzai, provides for India to train the Afghanistan National Army and the supply of military equipment to enable it to do its job better against the security threats the country is facing. Many in Pakistan are bound to feel disturbed by India and Afghanistan signing the strategic partnership agreement. Islamabad has always been living with the self-cultivated belief that Afghanistan is a part of its strategic depth it has been seeking to achieve. The Afghans, irrespective of their dispensation, have never liked the notions of strategic depth which smack of Pakistan’s extra-territorial ambitions, or, at least, a keenness to have a quisling rule in Kabul to govern Afghanistan — for Islamabad. The strategic partnership agreement between India and Afghanistan cuts into Pakistan’s plans to acquire this strategic depth in Afghanistan and, as such, is certainly bound to be unpopular with the Pakistan Army. Essentially, Pakistan has been wanting to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan, first left by the Soviet withdrawal and now after the US has pulled out its troops in 2014. After the Soviet withdrawal two decades ago it sustained the Taliban regime in the 1990s until it was replaced by US-NATO troops in the wake of 9/11. The induction of US-NATO troops aimed at fighting Al-Qaida terrorists operating from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border was never liked by Pakistan. It followed a strange two-track approach which ostensibly was meant to support the US war on terrorists and at the same time backing the Taliban groups in Afghanistan on the sly was a part of Pakistan’s ground plans. This kind of a two-faced policy followed by Pakistan was bound to lead to a fractured relationship between the US and Pakistan one day. The Haqqani group’s attack on the US-NATO interests in Afghanistan has made mending the US-Pak relations extremely difficult. It looks like Islamabad may soon have to choose between Haqqani and the US. For years, India has been kept at bay by Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Indian Embassy and other interests in Afghanistan have been attacked by the ISI-backed Taliban. Even if the level of India’s training to Afghan National Army and the supply of equipment to it to augment its capability under the new agreement remains low, any Indian interest in Afghanistan is bound to get under Pakistan’s skin, although it is the sovereign right of Afghanistan to enter into an arrangement with another country, particularly when it wants to equip itself to deal with the threat to its security. It is not that Indian presence in Afghanistan is going to be massive in size that should cause fear in Islamabad. A few Afghan army personnel have already been getting training in India. The new agreement may eventually lead to training in Afghanistan itself and supply of some basic military equipment. A day after signing the agreement for strategic partnership, Dr Karzai in a keynote lecture in New Delhi felt it necessary to assure Pakistan, which he described as “a twin brother” and India “a great friend”. It is unlikely that his assurance and any that India might convey are likely to be taken at face value by Islamabad, judging from the reports that Pakistan’s top generals are already discussing the new situation. India also does not want to be sucked into any internal Afghan conflicts as it knows about the fate that other powers — the Soviet Union or the US-NATO and others have met after getting into the country’s internal power struggles. India does not want to be a part of any game, great or otherwise — often played by international powers in the past. New Delhi’s only strategic interest is that Afghanistan should emerge from its continuing travails and grow according to its own genius, as an independent country, free from any foreign interference. India has already been favouring the idea that an international conference should be called to work out the future of Afghanistan after the US-NATO troops have pulled out from the war-torn country. Participants in this conference should be the permanent members of the UN Security Council, the European Union and regional nations like India, Pakistan, Iran and Central Asian neighbours of Afghanistan. This conference should guarantee a kind of international status that ensures Afghanistan’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-interference into its affairs by any outside power, among other things. The idea for such a conference has always been looked at with scorn by Pakistan, which has considered Afghanistan to be its redoubt and a part of strategic depth. The US has so far been lukewarm to the idea of such a conference, mainly because it did not want to hurt Pakistan’s sensitivities. However, owing to the kind of problems that are now dogging the US-Pakistan relationship, it may come to accept the idea of the post-pullout guarantees for Afghanistan. Several other Western countries are increasingly accepting the need for such a conference. Much depends on how the Pakistan Army top brass reacts to the present situation in the region. There is a possibility that it may misunderstand Indian intentions. Rightly considered, India and Pakistan should think of ways for how they can cooperate with each other in the economic development of Afghanistan. This will require statesmanship of a high order and an element of mutual trust, which in turn will help resolve India-Pakistan problems and ensure durable peace in the
region. The writer is a senior journalist and now a Member of Parliament.
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The unforgettable It
feels so cold today; looks like the sun has finally set. Suddenly the world seems brute and shorn of love, like it’s the end of time, of life, of all that made it worthy of being. Deep in my heart I can sense an abyss, the kind I had sensed when I had first felt the pain of loss. The pain is back, that very pain I had learnt well to endure with Jagjit Singh’s music by my side. In his ever so deep voice, I had drowned my fears. His cadences had blessed and redeemed my soul. I had died a million deaths only to live again through his works. Silk -- that’s what they called his voice. And in my memory I can still point to the day I had just started to feel it. It was a long time back when my heart was weak, my friends far, few and that much more precious; when Facebook was not even the stuff for dreams. Those were plain, simple days when you would mostly be by yourself, free to see life the way you wanted, free to give your own meaning to it. There was no TV around to tell you what to make of which feeling; no Internet guides to reveal the secrets of life to you or offer you tips on how to fix broken hearts. You were on your own, free like a bird on an unchartered course. In those precious early years of my life, I had Jagjit Singh’s silken voice for constant company. It would sing to me in a million ways - bringing me joy when my heart was light, reflecting my pain when my days were dull. Like a friend, it would show me the wonders of life, make me live the feelings of being betrayed and loved; held and hurt; lost and found. The rainbow of emotion came to life in his works. That’s how I still remember the joy of coming home to his voice, of how it lit up my life and gave me wings to fly. At school, I was one of Jagjit Singh’s many fans. But at home I was the loudest and staunchest, never letting a month go by without collecting his latest music. Even today I can feel the rush of melodies streaming past the recesses of my mind, as though flowing freshly from the old sturdy gramophone that once sat proudly in one corner of our living room, warming our worlds with Jagjit’s music. My best still is his eternal tribute to poet Shiv Batalvi; the ever-so-haunting, the ever so classic, “Mai ni mai, mein ek shikra yaar banaya…” Those were the golden days of the maestro’s life. Those days his music was even fuller as it had Chitra Singh for company. Then came the humungous loss of their children, a loss so huge it could never be borne. So it made a permanent home in their hearts, trickling down drop by drop into their unforgettable musical pieces. As Jagjit Singh himself was to tell me in an interview many years later, “Pain adorns the melody, lends it class. Music is both body and soul. You will know when one is there and the other is not.” I now know though the master is no longer there to rest his pain behind the veil of rhythm. The void he leaves is huge; its pain virgin….feels like the loss of that hearth where we fondly cooked meals for our famished
hearts.
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Bold intervention
In
August 1976, British troops had been deployed in Northern Ireland for exactly seven years. There seemed no prospect of any resolution to what had taken place. British forces shot at an IRA fugitive called Danny Lennon in his car, and killed him. The car drove off the road, and killed three children. Their mother, Anne Maguire, survived. The horrifying accident was witnessed by Betty Williams, driving in her car.
She went to help, but could do nothing.
The Nobel Peace Prize As many as 15 women have been the recipients of the peace prize. 43 women in all have been awarded the Nobel Prize between 1901 and 2011
2011: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Out of line? This year’s Nobel Peace Prize to three women from Liberia and Yemen extends the illustrious award’s tradition since the 1960s of honouring human rights and democracy activists as well as more conventional peacemakers. Giving the award for human rights and pro-democracy activism naturally expands the concept of peace, according to the Nobel committee, but critics say it strays from the intention of Alfred Nobel, who created the prize in his 1895 will. Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, her compatriot Leymah Gbowee and Arab activist Tawakul Karman won the prize for “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said. Fredrik Heffermehl, an author who argues that the five-member committee has ignored Nobel’s intention time and again, said the committee failed to explain how this year’s prizes fulfilled the will. Nobel stipulated that the prize should go to those “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” “The Nobel committee has disrespected this for at least 60 years,” Heffermehl, an attorney and peace activist, said. “I am not evaluating the winners, I am evaluating the committee.” Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said the 2011 award was well within the spirit of Nobel’s will. If the peace prize were primarily given to peace mediators or signatories to peace treaties, as in the prize’s early decades, women would have little chance of joining the honour roll of laureates, according to Nobel experts. “There are very few female peace mediators in the world, very few women who sign peace treaties, but a full role for women would include involvement in those activities as well,” Geir Lundestad, secretary to the committee, told Reuters. He said human rights had to include women’s
rights. (Reuters) Immediately, Betty Williams started a petition with the Maguire childrenis aunt, Mairead Corrigan; shortly afterwards they founded an organisation called Women for Peace, later becoming the Community for Peace People. Marches of tens of thousands of people took place, denounced by the IRA. Who was the petition addressed to? What were the demands of the organisation? Well, to some active participants, their involvement seemed naive. But it came from a belief without which nothing would ever get better; this situation can’t go on. We must do something. We must have peace. And in 1977, Corrigan and Williams were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was an extraordinary thing for the Nobel committee to do. The women were not politicians; they hardly had a programme. They had merely stood up in an entrenched situation and said, Neither this way, nor the other way, but things must change. Only a year after that brave gesture, the Nobel committee members came to the conclusion that that was good enough for them, and that they should bring it to the world’s attention. This year, the Nobel prize went to two Liberian women and a Yemeni woman activist: the elected Liberian president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, and the Yemeni Tawakul Karman, who at 32 is the youngest winner of the prize since Mairead Corrigan. The theme of this year is prize is the non-violent contribution of women to democracy and politics. It is well within the best traditions of the prize. Repeatedly, the Nobel Peace Prize has sought to find a third way between entrenched positions by focusing on the role of women in the political process. The Nobel Prize for peace is often remembered for its occasionally bizarre decisions which subsequent events have not justified. Tom Lehrer said that he gave up the practice of satire on hearing that Henry Kissinger had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The bien-pensant opinion of the moment led the committee, on occasion, to reward President Obama while he was still deciding whether he wanted to keep or change the carpet in the Oval Office; one wonders, too, whether the justification for rewarding Al Gore for climate change activism will really stand up, or whether, in time, it will look as tattered as 1994’s award to Arafat, Peres and Rabin. Still, the Norwegian committee has shown an admirable tendency to avoid the safe option, and to award prizes while the issues involved are still very much alive. It showed itself at its absolute best last year in giving the prize to Liu Xiaobo. It gave Chinese dissidence a face and a cause; it confronted a government that the West is too apt to cower before; and, best of all, it made the Chinese government look incredibly stupid in creating a rival Confucius Peace Prize for politicians that the Chinese government approved of. The committee has shown a robust taste for interfering in national politics when it considers that its values of liberal democracy and freedom could be propagated. Think of the award to Carl von Ossietzky in 1935 for his resistance within Nazi Germany; Andrei Sakharov in 1975; or Lech Walesa in 1983, no more than three years after the founding of Solidarity. Most consistently, however, it has been inclined to award it to women when they can act, as Corrigan and Williams did, as an alternative to a situation of impasse. Aung San Suu Kyi is a genuine alternative to the Burmese generals and offers a future for her country; after the prize, many more people knew of her. The same is true of Shirin Ebadi and Rigoberta Menchu and perhaps, of Mother Teresa too. The significance of the award of the prize to the Yemeni Tawakul Karman is that she stands outside the familiar scenario Western governments work with. In this region, the West has a bad tendency to support dubious governments on the basis that they are, at least, bulwarks against al-Qaiida and other unruly groups - the Roosevelt doctrine, based on the apocryphal statement that the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza (or, in other telling, the Dominican Trujillo) may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch. The Yemeni situation is not currently under consideration by the UN Security Council. It can be thought of as one of those zero-sum analyses governments so enjoy: if not our dictator, then it can only slide into the hands of our enemies. The award of a prize to Karman, who stands for freedom of speech and opposition to President Saleh’s government, presents a difficulty to the Yemeni government and its Western supporters. Suddenly, the situation no longer looks like a zero-sum game; there is another player, and its name, for the moment, is Karman’s Women Journalists without Chains. Some commentators would suggest that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s administration doesn’t deserve this honour; despite statements of the most honourable intentions, Liberian public life remains mired in corruption. In April this year, she rather remarkably told journalists that she was planning to charge an opposition politician with sedition for organising an anti-corruption rally, quickly saying that she had meant it as an April Fool’s joke. More interesting, perhaps, is the remarkable fact that the Norwegian committee is so confident in its values that it is prepared to give the prize to a person currently in the middle of a general election campaign in their own country - at least they waited until Barack Obama was elected before giving him the seal of approval. Johnson Sirleaf’s value, it suggests, is that she is exactly the sort of politician who stands outside the usual choices of warlords. And these bold interventions are very much the style of the Nobel. They have no hesitation in singling out a person at the very beginning of a long road of public dedication, and of infuriating oppressive and powerful governments. In their backing of the powerless, they have often made their best and most resonant awards to women, who can represent an overlooked third way in the blocked paths of national arguments. For these reasons, the committee should perhaps have preferred the Saudi activist Wajeha al-Huwaider, who this year has started small with a conspicuous campaign to allow women in Saudi Arabia to drive. That might have been a subtler intervention than openly backing a national presidential candidate during the election period. To give a brave, suffering voice a platform from which to speak is what the Peace Prize does best, and we will listen to Karman the next time she speaks. Sometime in the next 10 years, the prize will, I believe, go to a gay person in a difficult situation, just as the prize has gone to women who have spoken out. What it celebrates and enables is simply this: someone saying, “This can’t go on. Someone ought to do something, and that someone might as well be me.” —The Independent
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