The Tribune...Editorial

	P E R S P E C T I V E	Sunday, July 5, 1998
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RANDOM JOTTINGS

Unethical but not unthinkable
“COGITO ergo sum,” runs Descartes’s famous adage — “I think, therefore I am.” There are a couple of men in Delhi who are taking that saying a bit too literally.

ANALYSIS

$ 5.8 trillion spent on US N-arms
IN the decades since the USA began to develop the atomic bomb in 1940, the Washington government has spent $ 5,800,000,000,000 on nuclear arms and $ 19 trillion on defence , a new study has calculated. ..

PROFILE

Hottest player in World Cup ’98
“WHO is the Prime Minister of your country?” Ask this question to any school-going kid of any town in Italy and he will invariably draw a blank and pause for an answer. ...

75 YEARS AGO
Continuous obstruction in councils
Mr C. R. Das on the Swaraj Party’s policy
PRESIDING over a meeting at Mirzapur Park, Mr C.R. Das said...

Chandra Shekhar firmly believes he is the Prime Minister that India awaits. Subramaniam Swamy is equally unshaken in his conviction that he is the ideal Finance Minister. Both men airily brush aside anything remotely linked to reality.
At the risk of sounding terribly old-fashioned, it would be damnably unethical if either the premiership or the top economic job fell to a one-man party. Parliament is supposed to represent India at large. If a party can’t get enough candidates elected, that is, by definition, proof of its being unrepresentative.
Unethical definitely, but not, unfortunately, unthinkable. How many “third front” Prime Ministers in the 1990s have come to office with a clear majority, not supported from outside or by tactical withdrawals by the Opposition?
When Vishwanath Pratap Singh took oath in 1989, he did so when his party, the Janata Dal, struggled to cross the 150-mark in the Lok Sabha. Chandra Shekhar became Prime Minister eleven months later with almost a hundred less. Deve Gowda went to Race Course Road with just 46 Janata Dal members in the lower house, and Gujral made do with a paltry 29.
None of those regimes lasted very long, with V.P. Singh holding the record at eleven months. Given that unhappy history, I am not sure why Chandra Shekhar and his Sancho Panza want the chance to repeat that scenario. Marx famously said that history repeats itself; first as tragedy, then as farce. But even he surely didn’t anticipate anyone claiming the right to make a fifth mistake at the voters’ expense.

Of course, tilting at windmills is a right they can’t be denied. What is truly shocking is the support they are getting from some of their peers in Parliament and outside. But the political heavyweights backing them have their reasons.
Jayalalitha may believe that Chandra Shekhar won’t find any principles coming in the way of dismissing the Karunanidhi Ministry. After all, didn’t he do just that in his earlier stint as Prime Minister? (It is a little weird to hear the same Chandra Shekhar preach the virtues of federalism today!)
The Congress may have equally good reasons to think that a Chandra Shekhar regime shall be “cooperative” on charges of corruption. Didn’t he declare that the Bofors investigation was the concern of a sub-inspector, not a Prime Minister? (As he may recall, toppling governments can be done by mere constables, not even sub-inspectors.)
And what of the Communists, those self-appointed conscience-keepers of the nation? Jyoti Basu and Harkishen Singh Surjeet have been blowing hot and cold about backing a Congress-led ministry, but neither man has any problem if the Prime Minister comes from a one-man party. Not even if that man is Chandra Shekhar, whom they criticised so bitterly when he split the Janata Dal in 1990.
Is Jyoti Basu afraid of the skeletons in his cupboard tumbling out if the BJP Government takes the reins off the investigating agencies — skeletons such as the multi-crore ledger scam? Or did Surjeet become so enamoured of having the Prime Minister’s ear that he can’t bear being left out in the cold? Or is it simply a case of two old men striking out for supreme power before the shadows fall forever?
Whatever the reason, I am delighted to see the way in which Basu and Surjeet are celebrating the sesquicentennial of the publication of ‘The Communist Manifesto’. In backing Chandra Shekhar, they support Chandraswamy’s favourite candidate. To coin a phrase, Comrades, there is a spectre haunting the CPM, the spectre of the BJP!

Hottest player in World Cup '98
“WHO is the Prime Minister of your country?” Ask this question to any school-going kid of any town in Italy and he will invariably draw a blank and pause for an answer. Put another question: “Do you know who is Ronaldo?” His face will brighten up and pat will come the reply: “Oh yes, the great football player ....who doesn’t know him”.
Brazilian born 21-year-old shaven-headed Ronaldo has moved to Italy only a year back to play for Serie A (first division league) and, within a short span, rose to dizzy heights of glory. His contract with Inter Milan — $ 4.2 million a season — has made him the highest paid footballer in the world. He has come to be known as “the phenomenon”. Understandably, Ronaldo is more known than a Prime Minister; in Italy the head of government is more frequently changed than a football player. Like Brazil, soccer is a passion in Italy too.

Ronaldo, according to the Time magazine, is the greatest player at the moment, having been declared twice by FIFA (football’s international governing body) as player of the year. He is, no doubt, the most sought after and hottest player in World Cup ‘98 entering the final stage in France. Pele, the greatest footballer ever and now the Brazilian Minister of Sport says: “Ronaldo is great but first he will have to win a World Cup and then compare him to me”. The 21-year-old footballer may surpass Pele whom he adores.
The original name of Ronaldo is Luis Nazario de Lima and he belongs to a very poor family of Brazil having grown in the narrow lanes of a shanty slum of Rio de Janeiro. Youngest of three brothers, the great football player of the future never took seriously to studies; he, in fact, disliked school and preferred to kick around the grand round ball. He broke the glass panes and windows of his neighbours with powerful kicks but there was nothing to shatter in his own house; it had no windows. His ideal was his elder brother, who incidentally also became a professional footballer.
Ronaldo’s father was an alcoholic and when he was 14 his parents separated. He was brought up by his mother who worked at an ice cream parlour to eke out a living.
The star footballer is very attached to his mother, Dona Sonia. As he made strides and football earned him more and more money, he went to the ice cream parlour one fine morning and told Sonia’s employers: “My mother will not be working anymore. I am going to pay her more to stay at home”, Ronaldo bought a five-star apartment for his mother in a posh area of Rio and put a BMW at his disposal. He also purchased flats for his brothers and other close family members.

Ronaldo does not have the personality of attracting women but he fell in love at 13 with a girl named Veronica. This led him to another affair and to a third one which turned out to be a serious matter. Truth is still not known but his third girl friend, Nadia Franka, pressed him to tie the nuptial knot, saying that she was pregnant. Whose baby was that? Was the child Ronaldo’s? He wanted to have a DNA test to be sure that the baby was his, apparently having doubt about the paternity of the child. Nadia, in the meanwhile, disappeared and the affairs ended there. As he rose from strength to strength and was playing for Barcelona, Ronaldo fell in love with a model, Susana Werner, who also played football. The romance attracted media attention in Spain. They do not wish to marry, saying that it is too early.
So precious Ronaldo is in the soccer world that his powerful legs have been insured for a fabulous sum of $ 26 million and Inter Milan sells 200 “Ronaldo shirts” every day. The ruling politicians in Brazil hired him for their election campaign in 1994 hoping that he would be able to woo youngsters. They proved correct; the charm of the master footballer did work in the soccer-crazy nation.
Success has not always smiled on Ronaldo. There were moments of disappointment and frustration initially. The biggest disappointment was when the renowned football club Flamengo did not allow him to play for the club. “The biggest disappointment I ever had was when Flamengo turned me down. They assured me that they will include me in the team and later excluded me. They did not give me money for the bus fare to return home”. Apparently, the would-be star footballer did not have money to buy a bus ticket.
It was a Brazilian sport lover, Jairzinho, who discovered the talent in Ronaldo and assessed the power behind the young boy’s legs. The first club which hired the footballer was founded by Jairzinho who ultimately became his agent, introducing him to big-time Brazilian clubs.
A club known as Cruzerio entered into a contract with Ronaldo and he excelled. Two years later playing in the Brazilian first division, Ronaldo hit the headlines having scored 54 goals in 54 games, bypassing the legendary Pele who could not perform a feat of this magnitude at the start of his career. Since then there has been no looking back for Ronaldo.

$ 5.8 trillion spent on US N-arms
From Martin Kette in Washington
IN the decades since the USA began to develop the atomic bomb in 1940, the Washington government has spent $ 5,800,000,000,000 on nuclear arms and $ 19 trillion on defence , a new study has calculated.
The study, published on Wednesday by the Brookings Institution, reports that the USA has spent more on its nuclear weapons programmes that on any other single public spending programme with the exceptions of pensions ($7.9 trillion) and non-nuclear defence ($ 13.2 trillion).
Federal spending on nuclear weapons has exceeded spending on welfare payments, state medical insurance, health and education, the report shows.
The sum spent on nuclear weapons is equivalent to 162 times annual spending on Britain’s National Health Service. $ 5.8 trillion would be enough to provide every household in Britain with a new, top-of-the-range Rolls-Royce.
The study shows that only 7 per cent of the cost of the US nuclear programme went on development and manufacture of warheads. Deployment, including bombers and missiles, and other infratructure costs took up 86 per cent of spending. The rest was spent on clean-up programmes.

It also shows that US stockpiles have been far larger that what the public thought. When the then Defence Secretary, Mr Robert McNamara, stated in 1964 that a nuclear force equipment to 400 megatons would be enough to cause mutually assured destruction with the Soviet Union, the US stockpile already totalled 17,000 megatons.
Although the USA and Russia now maintain smaller stockpiles, each still, has some 10,000 nuclear warheads. The costs of nuclear arms will continue “for the foreseeable future”, the report argues.
The Brookings study underlines how the sheer scale of expenditure was central to the resolution of the cold war and supports a view held increasingly by historians that the USA spent to USSR into defeat, especially during the Reagan presidency.
The study was not undertaken to see whether US nuclear expenditure was worth the money, said Stephen Schwartz, chairman of the four-year research project. But it was intended to set the stage for an”honest and fully informed debate”.
“The USA spent vast amounts on nuclear weapons without the careful and sustained debate or oversight that are essential both to democratic practice and to sound public policy,” Mr Schwartz said. “In most cases, even rudimentary standards of government policymaking and accountability were lacking.”
The Brookings President, Mr Michael Armcost, said a central conclusion was that “government officials made little effort to ensure that limited economic resources were used as efficiently as possible so that nuclear deterrence could be achieved at least cost to taxpayers”.
“The near total absence of data documenting either annual or cumulative costs of the overall effort made effective democratic debate and oversight all but impossible,” said Mr Armacost.
During the cold war, said Mr Schwartz, the development and deployment of nuclear weapons was frequently justified on the grounds that they were less expensive than conventional forces, when the reverse was true.@Had the facts been knwon, “there almost certainly would have been a debate about the wisdom,” Mr Schwartz said.
But Paul Warnke, head of the arms control and disarmament agency during the Jimmy Carter presidency, disagreed. “I don’t think it would have made much difference. The people were scared of the Russian threat and would have spent whatever it cook.”— By arrangement with The Guardian, London.

75 YEARS AGO
Continuous obstruction in councils
Mr C. R. Das on the Swaraj Party’s policy
PRESIDING over a meeting at Mirzapur Park, Mr C.R. Das said, there was no fundamental difference between what was called Political Freedom and what was called Spiritual Freedom. The same thing, looked at from different points of view, appeared either as political or spiritual freedom.
Freedom was all-embracing. It included both political and spiritual freedom and more. What was freedom? Was Italy freed? As long as the poor and down-trodden masses in Italy remained in their present miserable condition, Italy could not be said to have realised liberty.

Liberty really meant liberty for the masses. Expulsion of the English from India would not by itself bring freedom to India. Replacing of British officers by Indians would not by itself achieve salvation for India. When real freedom came, British bureaucracy would no longer exist in India.
The national movement had two aspects — construction and destruction. They were on the one hand to destroy what was evil and what retarded progress, on the other hand to create what was good. Had any of them really non-cooperated? As long as all the people of India did not take their hands off the machine which the bureaucracy was running, how could they say they had non-cooperated? Taxes helped to drive the bureaucratic machine and they had not yet resorted to non-payment of taxes.