What has Delhi got
from Verma?
by T.V.R. Shenoy
SAHIB SINGH VERMA does not wear stiff petticoats and hooped skirts. Nor does the Chief Minister of Delhi possess enough hair to pile it up in an artistically arranged chignon.

75 Years Ago

Lala Lajpat Rai’s
latest publication
HISTORY of Ancient India in Hindi. Price Rs 2-4, cloth-bound Rs 2-12.
The Tribune reviewer writes: It is a deplorable fact that our young men are quite ignorant of their past history.

Cobras being charmed out of existence From Jan Khaskheli KARACHI: Snakes are falling prey to smuggling, pesticides and deforestation in Pakistan, raising concern that the days of certain species could be numbered.

By Harihar Swarup
Fighting injustice, inequality
IS $ 2,000, or in term of Bangladesh currency two lakh “takas” (rupees), the price for renowned feminist writer Taslima Nasreen’s head? Is it the cost of the life of “the daughter of freedom”, to quote Mulk Raj Anand, and that too in the land of Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul Islam?

What has Delhi got from Verma?
by T.V.R. Shenoy

SAHIB SINGH VERMA does not wear stiff petticoats and hooped skirts. Nor does the Chief Minister of Delhi possess enough hair to pile it up in an artistically arranged chignon. He cannot dance the minuet, nor can he converse in French and German. But in the two centuries since that unfortunate woman lost her head nobody has done a better imitation of Marie Antoinette. (Mr Verma resigned as Chief Minister on Saturday).

What is the best-remembered fact about the French queen? Not her portraits by the likes of Greuze and Vigee-Lebrun. No, she has gone down in history for a masterpiece of insensitivity. Informed that Parisians were howling for bread, she allegedly replied: “Let them eat cake!”

Please note I said it is an allegation; historians are veering to the view that it was a cooked-up tale. But there is little doubt on the authenticity of a pearl of wisdom from that latter-day Antoinette, the Chief Minister of Delhi.

Onion prices have zoomed from Rs 5 a kg one year ago to anything up to Rs 60 a kg today. Verma was asked how the poor could afford to buy it any longer. “The poor don’t buy onion!” was the response.

There is a sterling imbecility about such a statement that confers a kind of grandeur. But let us give Verma his due. He used the simple present tense, carefully staying away from saying the poor have never bought onions. And if he sticks to present circumstances, the Chief Minister is absolutely correct. Of course, the poor don’t eat that humble vegetable; given the current prices even middle class households think twice before buying it.

However, I am surprised that Verma stopped at onions. Why didn’t he tell us about all the other things that the poor can do without, luxuries such as clean air for instance?

Fuddy-duddy biologists insist air, food and water are pre-requisites of existence. Sahib Singh Verma knows better. Hasn’t he seen fellow citizens thrive on some of the most noxious air in the world? That proves the poor can handle themselves perfectly well even in the fourth most polluted city on earth.

How about water? Well, six months ago the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences performed a sample test of the supposedly filtered water imbibed by Delhiites. It turned out that typhoid is the least of the risks we run.

But fear not, citizens of Delhi, your Chief Minister is always looking after you! Most of Delhi doesn’t get more than a couple of hours of water. That automatically reduces the risk of exposure to all the water-borne horrors. And as for the poor — well they don’t have access to any filtered water anyway which means they aren’t at risk at all.

So what has the Capital got out of this Chief Minister’s administration if clean air, safe water, and affordable food are off the menu? Jobs.

If we can’t have unpolluted air, somebody has to make gas-masks, filters, air-conditioners and all the rest. If we can’t drink water straight from the tap, some others have to work in the factories that make water-purifying equipment for domestic purposes. And still more have to make mosquito nets, special creams and coils, and ultra-sonic buzzers to keep insects away because Verma can’t handle the sanitation department. And yet more to roll candles because there is no electricity either...

That is why Sahib Singh Verma doesn’t understand why people abuse him so much. With all those people working in all those factories, surely they should be earning enough to afford an onion peel or two.

The coming elections to the Delhi Assembly promise to be a fascinating race. The Congress, nominally the Opposition party, is as intrigued as anyone else over a single question: can Atal Behari Vajpayee’s popularity offset the unpopularity of Sahib Singh Antoinette?

Cobras being charmed out of existence
From Jan Khaskheli

KARACHI: Snakes are falling prey to smuggling, pesticides and deforestation in Pakistan, raising concern that the days of certain species could be numbered.

Pakistan’s Minister of Environment, Makhdoom Ahmed Mehmood, told a recent wildlife conference that the declining numbers had led the government to ban the capture of and trading in reptiles.

Rafiq Ahmed Rajput, Field Officer in the Wildlife Department of Pakistan, says the python, the subcontinent’s biggest snake, has disappeared from the southern province of Sind. “Snake charmers kill it on the spot and sell its skin which is widely used for making bags, suitcases, jackets, and shoes,” he said.

The cobra, too, is targeted by snake charmers, but for a different reason: they consider the species to be the best performer. The reptile is becoming a victim of its own popularity.

Only two species — the Indian desert cobra and the central Asian cobra — remain in the mountain regions, said Munaaf Qaimkhani, an executive for the Wildlife Department in Sind.

Traditional enchanters and charmers are certainly part of the traditional streetscape in Pakistan. But officials say they are proving a danger to the snake population, not least because many are trapped for illegal export to India. Most kept in baskets away from their natural habitat die within three months.

“Artificial food can’t keep the snakes alive,” said Urs Bahrani, who keeps 200 at his farm in Karachi and is known locally as “King of the Cobra”.

Bahrani believes deforestation is also causing a decline in the country’s snake population. “Some species have not been seen for ten years in Sind,” he says.

Not only the charmers and trappers decimate the snake population. Every year, the government’s National Institute of Health (NIH) in Islamabad buys about 3,000 live snakes worth $ 60,000, extract their poison to create snake-bite vaccines, then kill them. It is a practice that bothers Bahrani. He believes it would be better to farm the venom from the snakes on an ongoing basis, rather than destroy the creatures after a single use.

“I was asked to supply the live snakes to NIH, but I suggested supplying the poison instead of snakes”.

Indeed, NIH policy on how to acquire snakebite venom for vaccines appears to contravene the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which Pakistan has signed. Under its terms, snakes are to be kept alive after their poison is taken out.

As if vaccine production and hunting were not enough, the use of pesticides restricted by most of the world is widespread in rural parts of Pakistan, says zoologist Said Hafirzurahman. The insects on which some smaller species rely for food absorb the pesticides, which thus become part of the food chain and ultimately part of the snakes’ diets.

The country’s agro-chemical companies promote the pesticides as safe, but a study by the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council has identified milk samples with persistent organo-chlorine pesticides.

Among the pesticides found in the tests are some which have been de-listed, or pronounced harmful, by government agencies.

— Gemini News

Fighting injustice, inequality
By Harihar Swarup

IS $ 2,000, or in term of Bangladesh currency two lakh “takas” (rupees), the price for renowned feminist writer Taslima Nasreen’s head? Is it the cost of the life of “the daughter of freedom”, to quote Mulk Raj Anand, and that too in the land of Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul Islam? This amount is less than the prize money she received from the French Government —$ 18,550 — way back in 1995. She was honoured with France’s top-most award for human rights when she was a fugitive, having slipped out of her motherland to escape execution by Islamic fundamentalists.

Subsequently, she was honoured with prestigious awards of the European Parliament and Germany’s “Kurt Tuchosky” prize for her writings and her views on religious bigotry. Strangely, none of the countries which thought her worthy of decoration, gave her shelter. Finally, the Swedish Government showed moral courage and granted her indefinite asylum.

Taslima has lived in exile for four years always pining for her country. “I never had a home since I was in the West. The European countries were like bus stops for me.... I was waiting for the bus to come home”, she says. When she flew to Dhaka from New York last month with her 60-year-old mother, suffering from colon cancer, she thought the hostility against her must have become a closed chapter and the unsavoury past forgotten. It was her mother’s desire that she should die in Bangladesh and, as a devoted daughter, 36-year-old Taslima thought she must fulfil her wish.

Despite being repeatedly dissuaded by the Bangladesh Government not to attempt to come back, Taslima says, she was helpless. On one side the imminent demise of her mother was haunting her and, on the other, the dissuasion of the government. “I was desperate because I love my mother very much”, she says. The specialists in New York had told her that her mother, Eid-ul-Ara Begum, had only months left to live.

None of her work was published in Bangladesh for four years and she had not written anything concerning religion. In this backdrop when she landed in Dacca she had least expected that she would be greeted by banners and placards saying “Hang Taslima Nasreen to death”. Worse still was revival by a District Magistrate of an arrest warrant against her issued as far back as 1994. Nobody knows what is in store for her.

Her latest book — “My Girlhood” — will soon hit the stand internationally, except Bangladesh, but it may not mellow the diehard Mullahs. The work is devoted to evolution of her own personality and how she developed pessimistic feelings towards all religions and not only Islam.

Whatever may be Taslima’s traumatic experience when she grew up from a girl to womanhood some of her experiences, although little late in life, have left an indelible impression on her psyche. Taslima is a doctor by profession. She worked in a government hospital in Dacca and the type of women patients who came to her made her a rebel against Islamic fundamentalists.

It is worth reproducing what she said in an interview in April, 1994, when she was running for her life from one country to another: “The rape of small girls between 6-8 years by male family members and in older women frequent rupture of the uterus due to excessive pregnancies was shocking ............ I experienced how husbands pronounced divorce in delivery rooms itself if their wives were to only give births to girls”.

What was the fate of Taslima’s family members when she was condemned to death by the fundamentalists? Was her father, a follower of the late Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and others angry with her? According to her “they were not angry but disturbed. Unknown people severely damaged my father’s drug store. Since my escape, my sister lost her job and could not find any type of employment. Apart from that my father was forced to pay protection money. A group of Muslims came to our house and advised my father to make certain payment for the safety of the family”. Taslima’s mother and three brothers and sisters were living in the house at that time.

Taslima, who took to writing along with her job in Government Hospital in Dacca, had resigned in protest against confiscation of her passport in 1993. Then hell broke loose with the publication of her novel “Lajja” whose theme was intolerance, injustice and inequality.

This “daughter of freedom”, as Mulk Raj Anand had described her, is determined to continue her crusade against injustice, religious bigotry and violation of fundamental human rights and may emerge one day as a great reformer in Bangladesh. Like all reformists, Taslima is also being persecuted.

75 YEARS AGO
Lala Lajpat Rai’s latest publication

HISTORY of Ancient India in Hindi. Price Rs 2-4, cloth-bound Rs 2-12.

The Tribune reviewer writes: It is a deplorable fact that our young men are quite ignorant of their past history. A nation, which feels no interest or delight in the glories of its past, cannot be expected to have a bright future.

Lala Lajpat Rai, in his preface, refers to the apathy of our young men, and it is with a view to providing useful and necessary information regarding that period of Indian history that the book has been written. Lalaji has taken great pains to compile this book. He says that he has gone through almost all books available on the subject.

The book has a further charm of its own on account of its being written within the precincts of the jail. There are four illustrations and three maps in the book. The photo of the author is given in the beginning. There are four very useful appendices attached to the book. They are full of reliable and important information.

We have great pleasure in recommending the book to our young men and also to our nationalist workers because we feel that every Indian must know as to what his ancestors have done in the past to enrich literature, philosophy and other branches of the world’s knowledge.

The work is very useful for women and children, affords an interesting as well as an easy reading and can be introduced as a text book in boys’ and girls’ schools. We trust that Lalaji’s desire in this direction will be adequately appreciated. Can be had from Raj Pal, Manager, Saraswati Ashram, Lahore.