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Return of aged & angry
Culture of bans |
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Beyond the moon
Silence over the Emergency
The sting operation
The Osama bin Laden files
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Return of aged & angry
The
UPA government's promulgation of the food security ordinance has prompted the BJP to prepare for early Lok Sabha elections. The party is trying to win over those living with hurt and grievances. After the Goa conclave exposed a conflict of ambitions nursed by some of the top leaders, Monday's parliamentary board meeting saw L.K. Advani sitting close to the Gujarat Chief Minister. How genuine is the coming together of the patriarch and the emerging national leader will be clear only after a formal announcement about Narendra Modi. But it is a fact that intra-party opposition to Modi's choice as the party's prime-ministerial candidate is wearing out. The BJP leadership is trying to build bridges and the reaching out is not confined to Advani. Another leader who was drifting towards the margins, Murli Manohar Joshi, has been brought back to the centre stage. The party has decided that all senior leaders will be made part of decision-making and poll campaigning. In Punjab the BJP is a divided house but it is bringing down the walls. When party chief Rajnath Singh attended the state executive meeting in Amritsar on Sunday, MP Navjot Singh Sidhu stayed away. His wife, also an MLA, had alleged that he was being sidelined by the party leadership. His rehabilitation is expected. Fading veteran leader Balramji Das Tandon has been asked to head the party's election committee in Punjab. In Karnataka efforts are on to bring back former chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa. His departure had led to the party's humiliating defeat in the assembly elections. Although BJP spokespersons have distanced the party from the emotive temple issue, Amit Shah, a confidant of Narendra Modi, keeps talking about it in Uttar Pradesh, where it matters. Although at the national level Hindutava issues may have limited appeal, in relevant pockets the BJP would squeeze them for political benefit. What defies sense is: should the party turn to divisive issues or politicise terror attacks when the UPA can be confronted on so many other fronts: price rise, scams, poor governance, an indecisive leadership?
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Culture of bans
The
curiosity to know the opposite sex is natural among the young. This natural instinct has been treated as 'trouble' perennially, by the elderly. In the age of technology the young make use of their phones to get to know each other well. Does that mean cell phones should be banned, as is proposed by some educationists in Maharashtra? By this logic, in the age of penning love-letters someone should have banned paper and pen! An sms is not necessarily a love letter thrown clandestinely into a girl's courtyard. It has multiple functions. But, in the minds fixated in the by-gone era, a cellular-phone device -- capable of assisting one's life in hundred different ways -- can be reduced to a tool that sends only vulgar messages and clips. In this context, the proposal of mandatory installation of jammers and decoders on campuses in Maharashtra sounds ridiculous. If the plan of the Joint Director of Higher Education, who had sought views of college heads and teachers on the proposal seeking A ban on the use of camera mobile phones in colleges and universities across the state to prevent "cyber crimes" is implemented, it would mean that scholastic activity dependent on the communication technology will also be stalled! If the think-tanks of this exalted class could look around, they will find countries where these technologies were used intelligently did far better than us, even in academics. The culture of bans is a product of a lazy mind, it shows inability to discriminate. People have adapted well to technological interventions in the private sphere. Why should it be banned in academic arena, which would mean eliminating the benefits it brings along? There are laws that can deal with cyber crimes. The Maharashtra government should show some confidence in its law-enforcing agencies as well as in the discerning abilities of its young.
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Beyond the moon
The
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) wants to join the elite club of nations that has explored beyond the moon. It has, naturally, picked up its sturdy stead, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle to take the probe to the Red planet. By fortuitous timing, it will be the PSLV's silver jubilee flight that will allow the nation to join the select band comprising the US, Russia, Europe, Japan and China. The planet Mars will be the closest to earth in November and the launch is designed to take advantage of the fact. This has been a busy year for ISRO with a number of important launches, including the launch of India's first navigation satellite, the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System-1A. The Mars mission, however, will be the crowning glory for the Indian space agency. The Indian Deep Space Network, located at Byalalu, shows how the ISRO has been preparing for inter-planetary spacecraft missions since the launch of the first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 in 2008. Even though many other missions had preceded it, Chandrayaan-1 became famous since it detected water particles on the moon's soil. The mission to Mars, besides being a technology demonstrator, will also enable scientists to get a closer look at the Red Planet through the 15 kg scientific payload comprising five instruments: Methane Sensor for Mars, Mars Colour Camera, Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser, TIR Spectrometer and Lyman-Alpha Photometer. The methane sensors are significant since the mission would be the first ever to scour its atmosphere and surface for methane gas, a sign of life that may have existed on the planet. The instruments will map the Martian terrain and seek to identify the minerals on the surface of Mars, which the payload will orbit following an elliptical path that will take it to as near as 372 km from the planet. Now ISRO is truly reaching for the stars.
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The way to love anything is to realise that it may be lost. —Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Silence over the Emergency
Nations
which do not remember their tragic past are in danger of repeating the tragedy. This thought came to me on June 26, 2013, (the day the Emergency was declared in 1975) when a random questioning of youth aged up to 35 (who are said to make up about half the population of the country) revealed that an overwhelmingly number of them did not know any particular significance of the day, and more tragically, a fairly large number of people above the age of 35 fared no better. The reason was obvious. Most in this hyped age group get their information from newspapers, which having a commercial angle in view, never fail to remind us of the Valentine's Day. But on 26th June, newspapers did not even carry a small news item about the Emergency on an inside page -- leave apart on the front page. Even many opposition parties which were the victims of the Emergency chose to keep a low key. Even though the PUCL and other civil liberties organisations, as usual, held protest meetings, TV channels and newspapers viciously avoided any mention, overwhelmed as they are with the government's neo-liberal policies. Or is it a sense of fear because the perpetrator of the Emergency is the ruling party --- so much for freedom of the Press. And yet tragically it was the day when India lost its democracy and the US President sarcastically boasted that the US was now the largest democracy. It is a different matter that thankfully because of the sacrifices made by Indian people under the inspiring leadership of Jayaprakash Narain (JP), the boast of the US President was to end, but only after 18 months. But the wounds have remained - the danger of it being repeated in the same manner may have been eliminated but the government's use of the various security laws against human rights activists and trade unionists continue to haunt us. A question often asked is: How come the Emergency could happen despite our Constitution giving us all the fundamental rights and democracy being a basic feature of the Constitution as was so refreshingly held in the Kesavananda Bharati case as far back in 1973 by our Supreme Court? It is not that there was no resistance to the Emergency. Thousands went to jail, including former Central ministers, ex-Chief Ministers, Governors, lawyers, legislators and a few brave journalists. Many human rights activists went underground but there was a limit for unarmed people to fight an intolerant and a near fascist State which India had become those days. A total fear had enveloped the country. And all this because the rule of law had completely been eliminated by the Supreme Court ruling in ADM Jabalpur case (April 1976), which overruled the view of nine High Courts that the legality of a detaining order passed by the governments could still be examined - in fact in some cases the High Courts had ordered the release of detainees. Had this view been upheld, the Emergency would have collapsed. But to our shame the Supreme Court by a majority of four judges against one honourable exception (Khanna J.) laid down a proposition of law, which will remain forever a hallmark of shame, thus: "In view of the Presidential Order dated June 27, 1975, no person has any locus standi to move any writ petition under Article 226 before a High Court for habeas corpus or any other writ or order or direction to challenge the legality of an order of detention on the round that the order is not under or in compliance with the Act or is illegal or is vitiated by mala fides factual or legal or is based on extraneous considerations." Is it not obvious that the Emergency could not be fought in a legal and democratic manner because the Supreme Court accepted the Attorney General's argument that if a policeman under orders of his superior was to shoot a person or even arrest a Supreme Court judge, it would be legal and no relief available. Naturally in this situation, no peaceful opposition to the Emergency could continue. I am shocked how the majority decision could rely on Liversidge vs Anderson decided during war time in 1942 by the House of Lords, but with a memorable dissent by Lord Atkin. English courts subsequently felt so ashamed of that decision that a conscious effort was made to throw that decision into a dung heap. Lord Akin caustically remarked about judges who "show themselves more executive minded than the executive" and commented that such arguments might have been addressed acceptably to the Court of King's Bench in the time of Charies-I. In fact, Justice Stable, a Judge of the High Court of London, was so upset that he was constrained to say that the status of the judiciary had been reduced "to mice squeaking under a chair in the Home office". In 1963 Lord Radcliff (HL) referred dismissively to the very peculiar case in Liversidge Vs. Anderson and said: "It should be confined apparently to a war time context and that it is already clear that the decision was regarded as an aberration". All this trenchant criticism of the Liversidge judgment was available in various law quarterly reviews since the beginning. Law Quarterly Review (1970) clearly spelled out how embarrassing the decision in Liversidge was becoming for the English judiciary. That is why Lord Diplock (HL) in 1979 was constrained to rule, "For my part, I think the time has come to acknowledge openly that the majority view in Liversidge vs. Anderson was expedient and, at that time, wrong and the dissenting judgment right". And Lord Scarman l caused the final demise by saying that "the ghost of that decision need no longer haunt the law". Some commentators have ironically described the majority decision in the Liversidge case as the court's contribution to the war effort of England. Similarly many in this country are inclined to describe the majority view in the Jabalpur case as the Supreme Court's contribution to the continuance of the 1975 Emergency. Had the Supreme Court taken the same view as the nine High Courts, the Emergency would have collapsed immediately because no court could possibly have upheld the detention of stalwarts and patriots like Jayaprakash Narain, Morarji Desai, Raj Narain, George Fernandes, Madhu Limaye and thousands of others on the ground that they were a danger to the security of the country. The inevitable result would have been the immediate release of these leaders, leading to an overwhelming Opposition movement which would have swept away the Indira Gandhi government by mid-1976. Alas, how sometimes the fate of nations can be influenced by the pusillanimity of a few individuals - in this case embarrassingly by the highest judiciary which it can never live down.n The writer is a former Chief Justice of the High Court of Delhi
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The sting operation Sometimes back I was the subject of a sting operation. Not that I had committed some crime, scam or ghotala, but because I had been a bit too lenient in nipping the evil in the bud. It so happened that the hornets chose the corner of our roof to build their pot-belly shaped nest in cascading colours of different hues. I asked my husband to remove it. But he with a magnanimous heart for the birds, insects and animals declined, saying that unless you meddle with the hornets, they are not going to sting you. So let it be, I thought. Live and let live. One fine day I got up quite early in the morning to grind some batter for the dosa in the mixie grinder. The sound of the grinder irritated the hornets. From my kitchen window I saw them buzzing angrily. Then I saw a few hornets heading straight for my face. The next second I heard a booming buzz and in that spilt second realised that hundreds of hornets had left the nest and were heading straight towards me. Without even looking up, I dashed strait into the adjoining bedroom and shut the door. But with a loose, open hair and a loose gown, scores of hornets had already invaded my hair and body and scores of them had entered the room along with me. I jumped into the bed and pulled the quilt over me. The sting operation was in full swing. Writhing in pain, all I could say was: Rab, Rab kar di, hai O Rabba! hai O Rabba! Suddenly I recalled that sometime back I had heard someone talking about increasing hornets' attacks and the best antidote was the 'bhang' (cannabis) and this grew profusely in my backyard. Like a mad person I ran out, pulled the plants from the roots and ran inside. I started rubbing the leaves, stems, roots et al on my body, literally scrubbing out
the stings. I could feel my face and head swelling like a balloon. But I did not stop rubbing even though I could feel my strength ebbing out. Then from the window I saw my husband leisurely returning from his morning walk and stopping to examine his parked car. I felt like shouting, "Forget the gaddi (car), and attend to your laddi (wife}". On entering the house, my husband was shocked to see me, double the size he had left with. My husband picked up the newspaper and started killing the hornets. I shouted, "Forget the hornets, take me to hospital first". My husband grabbed the car key and I grabbed a water bottle as by now my throat was parched dry. The doctor on arrival promptly pumped three injections into me after a gap of a few minutes between each injection and was surprised not to find a single sting in spite of the numerous sting bites. "Rubbing out the stings has saved you", he said. By evening, the swelling had reduced drastically. Pacing up and down the room, seething in anger, I planned revenge. At night I got a long pole and wrapped a piece of cloth around it and then immersed it in kerosene. The hornets got no chance to escape as we poked the burning pole into the entrance of the nest. The 'sting operation' of hornets was over; now was the turn of my 'burn operation'. This was the height of wickedness! But the evil should be nipped in the bud, I justified
myself.
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The Osama bin Laden files osama
bin Laden was able to hide undetected in Pakistan for years because of a “collective failure” of the country’s “military authorities, the intelligence authorities, the police and the civilian administration,” according to a damning report kept secret by the Pakistani government.
The former al-Qaida leader was gunned in a US raid on his compound in the garrison city of Abbottabad in May, 2011, prompting Pakistan to set up a special commission to investigate how his presence in the country went undetected for nearly a decade and, later, how US Special Forces pulled off the raid deep inside Pakistan without being detected. The result, a more than 300-page report based on interviews with more than 200 witnesses, including members of the Bin Laden family and four ministers from the federal and provincial governments, accuses Pakistani authorities not just of “negligence and incompetence” in detecting the terrorist leader’s presence, but also leaves open the door to the possibility of connivance, saying the failure to discover him in Abbottabad “may or may not have involved” what the commission called a “grave complicity” at some “undetermined level.” The blistering report calls the night time raid on Abbottabad an “American act of war against Pakistan” and slammed America’s “contemptuous disregard of Pakistan’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity in the arrogant certainty of its unmatched military might”. It also gives a detailed insight into how Bin Laden evaded capture for so many years, and how close he came to being captured during more than nine years he spent on the run. In one extract, the wife of one of Bin Laden’s courier recounts an incident in 2002 in which Bin Laden himself was stopped by a traffic policeman in Pakistan’s Swat Valley for speeding while travelling in a car to the local bazaar. Maryam, who was married to Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti, one of Bin Laden’s most trusted associates and couriers, said her husband “quickly settled the matter”, allowing the former al-Qaida leader to remain under the radar. Apparently aware of the possibility that its findings might be suppressed by Pakistani authorities, the commission in its report called on the government to make the text public. That did not happen. The commission’s critique of Pakistan’s civilian, military and intelligence apparatus has only come to light because of a leaked copy of report obtained by the Al Jazeera television network. Not only was Bin Laden able to hide undetected in his compound, but “to crown it all, the (house) was enumerated in a house survey with the comment that it was ‘be-chiragh’ i.e. uninhabited!” “Since August 2005, there were never less than 25 people living in it! The extent of incompetence, to put it mildly, was astounding, if not unbelievable,” the report says in its findings. Of more than nine years that the former al-Qaida leader was on the run, he was a resident of Abbottabad for six, according to the report. The commission adds, “It is clear that someone from the civil administration, police security and intelligence services should have noticed but did not notice, anything odd about the compound over so many years.” That Bin Laden went undetected in the city of Abbotabad for so long, despite it being home to a large military academy for former army officers led to speculation that he may have been helped by military intelligence. The report does not go so far as to point fingers but does say that “connivance, collaboration and cooperation at some levels cannot be entirely discounted.” Citing testimony gathered from Bin Laden’s wives and other associates, it tells a story of a family living in isolation, taking very few risks. According to the testimony and diaries discovered in the compound, Osama bin Laden entered Pakistan in early 2002, after evading capture by the US in the Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001. Later that year, Bin Laden travelled to Pakistan’s Swat Valley with al-Kuwaiti and his brother Abrar. The two men acted as Bin Laden’s couriers throughout his stay in the country. Maryam described to authorities the presence of a “tall Arab” who, a man she would later identify as Bin Laden. While in Swat, Bin Laden was visited by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who stayed with the group in Swat for two weeks. A month later, a report on Al Jazeera alerted Bin Laden of Mohammad’s arrest by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence in Rawalpindi. He then decided to move to a safer place — Abbottabad — with his couriers and their families. “According to Maryam,(Bin Laden) reposed complete faith in her husband Ibrahim who had been with him ever since he was introduced to him by Khalid Shaikh Muhammad [sic],” the report says. “Ibrahim and Khalid... had practically grown up together in Kuwait and were as close as brothers.” According to testimony from Bin Laden’s wives, the group lived “extremely frugally.” Bin Laden reportedly owned three sets of clothes for summer, three for winter, a single black jacket and a sweater. He also wore what is described in the report as a “cowboy hat” to avoid detection from
above.
HIDE-OUTS The former al-Qaida leader stayed hidden in Pakistan for long. The 336-page report, based on testimony from more than 200 witnesses, official documents and site visits, alleges: nOsama bin Laden wore a cowboy hat when he moved around the
compound to avoid detection from above. nOsama bin Laden came close to capture in 2002 or 2003 when he was living in the north-west Swat Valley, according to the wife of Bin Laden’s courier, Maryam. It occurred after a policeman pulled them over for speeding as they were on their way to a bazaar but Maryam’s husband, Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti, quickly settled the matter before the officer recognised him, she said. nThere was no evidence that current or former Pakistani officials helped Bin Laden hide, although it couldn’t rule it out completely. nThat little was known about any network of support that Bin Laden enjoyed in Pakistan, other than the group of family and backers that lived with him in Abbottabad. nThat all levels of Pakistani government, including the army and intelligence services, failed to detect Bin Laden as he lived in six different places in Pakistan over nine years. The report’s conclusion was scathing. “To summarise, negligence and incompetence to a greater or lesser degree at almost all levels of government are clear,” it said.
— The Independent
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Here is a list of milestones in the life of al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan:
— Reuters
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1957 — Osama bin Mohammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in Riyadh, one of more than 50 children of a millionaire businessman. There are conflicting accounts of his precise date of birth.