P A G E
Monday, April 12, 1999
today's calendar
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E D I T O R I A L P A G E |
Monday, April 12, 1999 |
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Not
in good taste
RESTRUCTURING
OIL SECTORS |
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NATO
breaks western law
Arafat
on canvassing mission
To
be fair to fair sex
Kerala caste struggle: statement
of accused |
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Not in good taste BY his ill-conceived responses, Defence Minister George Fernandes has both personalised and trivialised certain crucial facets of the Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat affair. Apart from the basic issue of the propriety or otherwise of the unceremonious sacking of the Navy chief, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat and Mr Fernandes have been hurling charges and counter-charges at each other, courtesy the media. The Defence Minister was initially discreet and rightly avoided joining issues with the sacked Navy chief. For the past several days, however, he seems to have thrown every ministerial norm to the wind, first by holding a press conference and later by giving a spate of interviews to the electronic and print media. Mr Fernandes may have his own reasons to feel hurt at the nature of charges flung at him, but in the process he seems to have gone berserk in his reaction. The Defence Minister’s position is sensitive. He is expected to maintain the decorum and dignity of the office he is holding. He should, therefore, choose his words carefully and not reduce himself to the level of a taxi drivers’ union leader that he once was in Mumbai. Mr Fernandes on television gives the impression of having lost his sense of proportion while replying to the points raised by Admiral Bhagwat, including the leakage of the details of the Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) project. Mr Fernandes’s one charge against the former Navy chief was that he had endangered “national security” by leaking to the media top secret projects. To this, Admiral Bhagwat’s counter-point is: who leaked it first. The sacked Admiral claims that the information on the projects was available on the Internet and that details had first appeared in a Delhi-based government-friendly daily quoting Defence Ministry sources nearly 25 days before he gave an interview to a Chennai-based daily. This and other controversial matters do not add to the dignity of the persons holding high positions. Be that as it may. The best course for the Defence Minister was to give a statement in Parliament, which was earlier scheduled to meet on April 12, and now on April 15, instead of indulging in wordy guerrilla fights through a series of organised interviews. Some of his responses are either amateurish or misplaced which do not reflect well on his political maturity. What is particularly pitiable is that Mr Fernandes, howsoever well-intentioned he might be, has not been able to draw a line between a ministerial office and a trade union office. Considerable damage has
already been done not only to the reputation of the armed
forces but also to the prestige of the Defence Minister
and his ministry. The entire handling of the Admiral
Bhagwat affair, including the sacking, has done the
government no credit. Nor has it enhanced the reputation
this country has enjoyed for professional conduct of
defence matters. The Bhagwat affair has exposed certain
critical weaknesses of the Vajpayee government. The Prime
Minister has failed to guide his coalition partners
properly and to make them behave as responsible members
of the Union Cabinet. Defence matters, after all, cannot
be reduced to the level of street brawls as has been
done. We hope Parliament through a fair and dispassionate
debate on the subject will help restore the lost prestige
and not further expose sensitive defence matters to the
hostile world. |
The wooing game IT is wooing time in Delhi and as it comes naturally to them, the political parties are extra ardent and vigorous. Often this produces weird turns. A day after the Prime Minister sent a personal (as against a political) emissary to soften the lady in Chennai, Union Minister Murli Manohar Joshi stepped in to redouble the effort. The AIADMK, mighty pleased at the return of the suiter, went to town with the news, adding a dash of sarcasm for taste. The BJP disowned the solo flight of Mr Joshi, but handsomely admitted that it was the kind of situation when every party worker had to pitch in and do his best, and that was what Mr Joshi was doing. And also what the Prime Minister and earlier Home Minister Advani were doing at about the same time. But then they were in touch with the arch enemy of the AIADMK, the DMK leader, Mr Karunanidhi. Talking to these two parties at the same time is a political taboo in the land of the idli and vada, and these are abnormal times and the BJP’s double-act is being looked upon with deep suspicion. If Mr Joshi had succeeded in bringing Ms Jayalalitha around, he would have been the hero. But failure offers no solace. Ironically, he is the authorised interlocutor with the BSP and here too he has come up against a wall. With two Muslims among her five MPs, Ms Mayawati cannot offer open and advance support to the BJP. Without the support of the DMK (six MPs), BSP and Mr Chautala’s INLD (four MPs), the alliance government will find it difficult to survive and that explains the heightened efforts to win friends and influence people. The Congress is being
actively wooed but it is torn by doubts. It wants power
but not a messy coalition. On this point all opposition
parties, barring the Left, differ with the Congress. The
AIADMK wants to be a leading player in the new
arrangement. At one time, Mr Subramanian Swamy suggested
that Ms Jayalalitha should head the government! Waiting
to stitch together a credible ruling group, every party
is trotting out tired explanations. The BJP-led coalition
“is collapsing under its own weight”, seems to
be a favourite hope-filled diagnosis. From here onwards,
the response differs. The Congress says it is ready to
discharge its constitutional responsibility. Some members
of the erstwhile UF, now calling themselves the third
force, are confident of forming a secular government and
the Left has asked to be left alone. The Left is a
match-maker, outside the charmed circle of the wooers and
the wooed. |
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BABA AMTE and Ms Medha Patkar have teamed up again to provide focus to the campaign for the protection of the rights of the tribal communities displaced or are about to be displaced from the villages which come in the path of the upcoming Narmada Dam. There are two aspects of the current round of their agitation which need to be highlighted. One concerns the reported discourtesy to the agitation leaders, including Baba Amte, shown by Ms Maneka Gandhi, the reportedly haughty Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment. They had turned up at Shastri Bhavan along with other members of the Narmada Bachao Andolan only after Ms Maneka Gandhi had agreed to meet them for hearing their side of the story. A story she should otherwise, be familiar with as a former sympathiser of the rights of the tribal communities. Neither did she come out to address the gathering nor did her staff let the leaders meet the Minister in her office. Instead Baba Amte, Ms Patkar and other Narmada Bachao activists were ill-treated by the security staff. In fact, the ailing Baba Amte was put in an ambulance and dumped in the verandah of Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital with only his personal attendant to look after him. Those who know Ms Maneka Gandhi from the Sanjay Gandhi era and her spat with Indira Gandhi thereafter would be willing to take this story without the usual pinch of salt. However, the issue which
brought Baba Amte and Ms Patkar to Delhi along with their
supporters is the continued indifference of the
Governments of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh to the
rehabilitation of the oustees. The Supreme Court, which
allowed the height of the dam to be increased, has
specifically instructed the beneficiary states to give
the highest priority to the rehabilitation of the
uprooted people. The Narmada leaders say that most of the
rehabilitation work remains on paper only while the
uprooted tribals are left to fend for themselves in alien
surroundings. There may be an element of exaggeration in
the Narmada leaders’ claim, but those who are
familiar with the plight of the Pong Dam oustees of
Himachal Pradesh would still buy the story. Just because
the tribal communities are made up of illiterate and poor
people does not give the authorities the right to push
them around without making a serious effort to help them
strike roots in the new surroundings. Reports from
Rajasthan suggest that the Pong Dams oustees have lost
the will to live because the local communities still
treat them as outsiders. Dam may serve the larger purpose
of bringing the fruits of development to the otherwise
neglected and backward regions of the country. However,
if the construction of dams (or any other project which
involves displacement of valuable human resource) causes
pain and suffering to the local people, the concept of
welfare state will have to be redefined. |
RESTRUCTURING OIL SECTORS IT would perhaps be uncharitable to attribute motives to the members of the Nitish Sengupta Committee which has recently submitted its recommendations on how to restructure the downstream petroleum sector. But for all practical purposes its suggestions amount to winding up the public sector refining companies. Coming as they do, virtually on the heels of a suggestion to get Hindustan Petroleum to transfer one of its existing refineries to the global oil giant Shell-Aramco, one can’t but get the feeling that there is a grandiose plan to open up the sector to foreign majors. And while there is nothing wrong with allowing global majors in the sector, this cannot obviously be done by weakening the existing local players. What should also be kept in mind by those — such as Petroleum Minister Vazhappady Ramamurthy — who are at the helm of affairs nowadays, is that when the Indo-Pak war broke out, some global oil majors operating in India declared that their oil stocks would not be made available for our armed forces. That, incidentally, was one of the factors behind asking these companies to leave the country at that point of time by Indira Gandhi. The Sengupta Committee, for example, has recommended that the biggest public sector giant, the IOC, be asked to give up its seven piplines to an independent company such as Petronet. Why? One doesn’t know, but IOC officials cannot be blamed if they feel that the idea is simply a precursor to dismantling it, part by part. After all, if the IOC can be asked to give up one division for no justifiable reason today, tomorrow it can be asked to give up a refinery or some part of the dealer netwrok it has so assiduously created. Needless to say, it is this formidable network that the IOC has built that, more than anything else, acts as a barrier to global majors who want to enter India. If, on the other hand, they know that the IOC will be cut to size through helpful government policy, they can go ahead and formalise plans to enter the Indian market. It can be argued, for example, that the IOC is simply too large — it controls over 55 per cent of the market today — and that this is bad for competition. It can then be recommended, in the name of furthering competition, that the IOC should have a market share of only, say, 25 per cent, and the way to do this is to force it to give up half of its petrol pump outlets. And if you think this sounds far-fetched, consider the rationale for Mr Sengupta asking the IOC to give up its pipeline network, currently valued at upwards of Rs 20,000 crore. Ostensibly, the nationale for this is to ensure that all players get equal access to the cross-country pipelines, for carrying crude oil to their refineries as well as their products from the refineries of the final storage points and customer outlets. The fear here is that when one company, such as the IOC, owns and operates a pipeline, it will not allow its competitors this access, or what in the trade is called the “common carrier principle”. Frankly, while the argument sounds appealing, it’s a complete distortion. The world over, pipelines are owned by refining companies and you have independent regulatory authorities who enforce this “common carrier principle”. And if the Sengupta Committee believes that the IOC will not enforce this “common carrier principle” or that the oil sector regulator in India will not be able to force it to do so, then the same should apply to the so-called independent companies like Petronet which are to be given the IOC’s pipelines. That is, the new company can be coerced by other oil majors to deny the IOC access to the pipelines that it has transferred. What makes the recommendations of the Sengupta Committee even more suspect, is the fact that the one on pipelines, for instance, was not even part of its original terms of reference. Its terms were, very clearly, to study what would happen to the petroleum market once it was completely deregulated in 2002, and to suggest ways to ensure that the existing small and independent players didn’t get wiped out completely. There are, for example, companies such as the IBP which have retail outlets but have no refinery of their own, and refineries such as that at Cochin and Madras which do not have any marketing network. Once the sector is deregulated and the Oil Coordination Committee is not there to ensure that these companies survive, something obviously needs to be done. It was for this reason that, after studying things, the Sengupta Committee has suggested that the Cochin and Madras refineries should be given to Bharat Petroleum, and so on. Here, too, its recommendations do look a bit suspicious. If you go through what has appeared in various newspapers (the report itself remains a tightly-guarded secret, within the Ministry of Petroleum), the committee has recommended that the BPCL should be strengthened by giving it the government’s equity share in the Cochin and Madras refineries, and that the stand-alone marketing company, IBP, go in for an alliance with BPCL. In that sense, BPCL’s interests seem to have been taken care of adequately by giving it additional refining capacity of around 20 million tonnes (both CRL and MRL have expansion plans to take their capacity to this level), as well as an existing marketing network (through an alliance with IBP). No such recommendation, on the other hand, has been made for HPCL, apart from a general one that HPCL and BPCL should enter into a strategic alliance. After all, if the Sengupta Committee feels that the IOC has a dominant position and that BPCL will get wiped out if it is not given some help right now, that should also hold for HPCL whose current market share is roughly equal to BPCL’s. Now one doesn’t really know, but it is possible that one reason why Mr Sengupta’s wise men were not too concerned about HPCL was that they knew of the proposal to transfer some or all of HPCL’s assets to Shell-Aramco, that a joint venture company would be formed by wiping out HPCL’s independent corporate identity. It is not my case that HPCL should not be allowed to get into such a strategic alliance. If extinguishing its independent identity can help it grow into a major player, it should be encouraged — globally, oil majors have merged just recently to help better their prospects. But it does appear that the government has already made up its mind in favour of the proposal, that this was the reason why the Sengupta panel made few recommendations for boosting HPCL’s competitiveness. The fact that the government has asked HPCL’s chief H.L. Zutshi to elicit the opinion of other oil companies, also makes it appear that the entire exercise is just aimed at getting the oil majors to sanctify the proposal, to reduce the political furore that it is certain to create. I am quite certain that no great exercise has been done to see if there is any synergy between Shell-Aramco and HPCL, what the exact benefits are likely to be, or if their disparate corporate cultures can live together. To cite just one example, Aramco walked out of a partnership with HPCL just a year ago in its Bhatinda refinery. So, how can one assume, as the government is doing, that when Shell-Aramco bring in funds into the country as their share of equity in the new joint venture with HPCL, this will be used to set up another refinery or two? Clearly, Shell-Aramco is eyeing HPCL’s huge marketing network, and the fact that this arrangement will allow them to get into the lucrative marketing segment at a time when no private player is allowed to do this. Do we want to just hand over marketing rights, and a ready-made network, to Shell-Aramco when no one knows exactly what benefits the country will get? The problem, however, is
that with Petroleum Minister Ramamurthy in a hurry, he
doesn’t seen to be examining these issue deeply
enough, but is simply interested in getting things
hurried through. In the case of the Reliance-IOC
marketing pact, for instance, he was pushing the IOC to
sign a very one-sided agreement but it was people like Mr
Nirmal Singh, a Joint Secretary in the ministry, who
ensured that the final agreement was a more balanced one.
The Prime Minister would do well to ensure that what Mr
Ramamurthy does in a hurry, the country doesn’t have
to repent it at leisure. |
Creating ‘flashpoints’,
US-style AS Belgrade, the once picturesque capital of Tito’s Yugoslavia, continues to bear the brunt of the savage bombing by the American, British and the “Allied” war machine, it’s good to be reminded by Leslie Gelb, President of the US Council on Foreign Relations, that America’s “main strategic challenge” in the world was no longer dealing with Russia or China or Germany or trade or lose nukes. It was managing the “teacup wars” of the world, “wars of national debilitation, a steady run of uncivil wars sundering fragile but functioning nation-state”. Now listen to another voice from America, that of the writer Charles Krauthammer, who says, “From the President’s nation-building escalation in Somalia to the invasion of Haiti, to the diplomatic capital spent on the Irish and Middle-East peace process, to the occupation of Bosnia and now fatefully to the bombing of Serbia in defence of Kosovo, we have the core of how the Clinton Administration sees the world and what the US be doing in it”. To justify bombing Serbia on the issue of Kosovo, Mr Clinton reiterates in every possible variation the imperative for the USA to oppose ethnic cleansing and the slaughter of innocent people. When he speaks of the no-fly zones in Iraq, and the devastation that has been wrought on the country in its wake, he chooses to mention his concern for the Kurds who in any case are spread over three countries — Iran, Turkey and Iraq. He won’t mention his deepest concern for the “threat” Saddam Hussein poses to his access to West Asian oilfields. The problem with Mr Clinton is that for all the ringing moral satisfaction his concern for ethnic minorities gives, it cannot be the policy of the moralistic universality of the Clinton doctrine. The western media, the electronic one in particular, has placed the number of Kosovar Albanian refugees at the last count at a staggering million. But they fail to mention that the Albanians, who form 90 per cent of the population of the Yugoslav province, are running as much to avoid the Allied bombs as they perhaps are running away from Mr Milosevic’s dreaded police. Much as there is universal hatred of the despotic Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia, one cannot understand the wanton destruction of Yugoslavia, even if it be in the name of saving a harassed minority. Thanks to the zealots of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the Bajrang Dal, we may well be in the process of making it to Mr Clinton’s list of “sons of bitches”. And the Indian Christian population, no one need emphasise, is as integral to our civilisation as are the other major religious groups. We in this country have much to worry about, given Mr Clinton’s penchant for bypassing the United Nations and his remarkable ability to find willing collaborators to help him pursue his objectives. If he can choose to back up a separatist province of Yugoslavia he may find a thousand good reasons to turn up in support of secessionists in India. In the two weeks of the NATO invasion of Yugoslavia it is no coincidence that the Pakistani establishment should have rallied unequivocally behind the USA and its allies. There is already talk of increasing movement of foreign mercenaries across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, and as the snows over the mountain passes start melting, this movement is only going to increase. We can trust the Pakistani mentors of the mercenaries to urge them to step up the violence in the whole of Jammu and Kashmir. The muddled Clinton doctrine should create an awareness of the need to urgently put down all secessionist movements. Such movements have already raised their head in several Central Asian States which again could attract foreign intervention, given the mineral riches of most of these nations. Fortunately for China, Mr Clinton has so far avoided fanning the dissidence in the Chinese province of Sinkiang. (Due, perhaps, to the little help he received during his re-election campaign). The Western media, though, has not hesitated to make occasional forays into the region to highlight the tension existing between the Chinese and the largely Muslim population of the province. Tibet, however, continues to be a no, no-land for the Americans. But Kashmir has somehow always interested the Americans right from the days when the then US Ambassador to India, Loy Henderson, threw up some “ideas”, including possible independence for the valley. Any number of think tanks have sprung up in Washington and several other university centres in the USA, and they have been sponsoring a variety of seminars, and some very weird solutions have been thrown up during the discussions. In the Clinton era
policymakers have never hesitated to mention Kashmir as a
potential “flashpoint” in the region. They have
been doing their bit of arm-twisting from time to time.
With two years of the Clinton administration still to go,
you can never tell which way, like the proverbial cat, he
will jump. — ADNI |
To
be fair to fair sex THERE are scarcely any legal disputes that are not started by women. Not I who said that. It was Juvenal. Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky and now Niloufer Bhagwat among contemporaries come to mind. Just two comments from old sea dogs before I leave the unsavoury naval dogfight: It is really washing dirty linen without soap! What an opera. Anyway, we old fogies are too old fashioned. (And another) Whilst Bhagwat has very few friends, the manner of the government’s handling of the issue has made him a hero ... However, as the saying goes, there is no ill wind which does not blow in some good. Bharat Ratna Amartya Sen says that we Indians talk too much. Speaking in London he quoted the Iraqi traveller in India a thousand years ago: “Apart from knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, Alberuni was struck by the fact that Indians could expound extensively on subjects that they knew absolutely nothing about.” Much laughter greeted that sally. A positive hurricane would have swept through the audience had Dr Sen related this gem from the second volume of Rumer Godden’s autobiography. He might have had to clear it first with his wife though — women again! Ms Godden was friendly with the wife of a Master of Trinity, Sir Alan Hodgkin, also a Nobel Prize winner. One day Ms Godden in London wanted to speak to Lady Hodgkin at the college. Now the Hodgkins had inherited a butler called Nightingale from the previous Master. It was he who answered the telephone. “Nightingale, please can I speak to Lady Hodgkin?” The butler’s voice came back, “The Master’s Mistress is not available.” Some readers may not know that there is also a Trinity College at Oxford (as also in Dublin), the one at Cambridge being by far the most famous, and also the only one in Britain where the master is appointed by the Crown. I cannot help wondering who whispered the name of Amartya Sen to Her Majesty. Other snippets about the college: Bacon, Newton and Nehru and Byron were members of the college, the last named having kept a bear as a pet in his rooms. And is there not a scene in the film Chariots of Fire in which the hero attempts to run round Great Court in Trinity while the clock struck midnight?, a feat attempted by many but achieved by few I imagine. I wonder if the present
Master’s Mistress has given up her fellowship at
King’s College, down the road from Trinity, or
whether she is a part-time Mistress of the Master of
Trinity. |
NATO breaks western law
BEARING a close, though partly inverse, parallel to the situation in Kashmir — where ethnic cleansing (of minority Kashmiri Pandits) has been carried out not by the state but by religious terrorists demanding separation from the state — the crisis in Kosovo in the Balkans raises acute problems of international law fraught with implications for India. The US-led NATO aerial invasion of Serbia is, in the words of the Economist published from London, the “world’s first war to stop genocidal violence”. That it has, in fact, accelerated it is a different matter altogether. Nor will I allow myself to be detained by the niceties of what exactly constitutes the crime of “genocide”. People with far greater knowledge of that concept than you and I can ever hope to acquire, people who cannot be suspected of the least sympathy with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, have clarified that the happenings in Kosovo do not yet amount to genocide. Author Elie Wiesel, for instance. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Wiesel is one of the most distinguished living survivors of the Holocaust today. Genocide, he says, writing in the latest issue of the Newsweek, is the “intent and the desire to annihilate a people. That is not the case here”. The Holocaust as conceived by Hitler was aimed at annihilating every Jew on the planet. Does anyone seriously believe, asks Wiesel, that Milosevic and his accomplices plan to “exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?” Massive human rights violations and the murder of political opponents, horrible as they may be, are only “elements of genocide-in-the-making but they do not constitute genocide.” Be that as it may, is humanitarian intervention in a sovereign country by a state or group of states not under attack or even threat of attack by that country, permissible and valid in international law? That is the question. And let us, in all fairness, turn for an answer to international law scholars from the West, whose interests, values and perceptions the NATO represents. The idea of human rights has become a “part of the zeitgeist” (the spirit of the times), says Prof Louis Henkin in his recent book International Law: Politics and Values based on lectures delivered at the Hague Academy of International Law. The idea is lending itself to powerful rhetoric even if with some hypocrisy. It may indeed, he says, serve as a lesson in the “benign consequences of hypocrisy, of the homage that vice pays to virtue”. Human rights is the virtue to which vice is impelled to pay homage. All states are impelled to accept human rights in principle, making promises to their own people as well as to the world. Repressive states are compelled to deny and conceal, but concealment can be uncovered and lies exposed. The system can concentrate on “inducements to comply”. Unilateral intervention to overthrow a government however (Prof Henkin continues), even a tyrannical government, is forbidden by the UN Charter and “should always remain unacceptable”. There are always human rights violations in any country, and gross violations in many countries, that could serve as a pretext for invasion. Entebbe apart, he points out (referring to Israel’s dramatic rescue of hijacked passengers from Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976), “it has been and would be rare in fact for a state to intervene for an authentic humanitarian purpose only. No state did so in Europe in the 19th century, or between the world wars, or since”. Such military intervention, he cautions — almost anticipating the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia — might sometimes result in greater injury to human beings and human rights than do the violations it seeks to terminate. A leading American scholar, Henkin’s views are an obviously important benchmark for adjudging the legality of the US-dominated war in the Balkans. And that is why I am citing him at such great length. Justice, self-determination, socialism, democracy, human rights. Even if the international system (he says) were unanimous in its dedication to these values, even if one could assure that use of force against another state to protect them is in fact “designed to achieve that benign result, will in fact assure that result and will be worth the cost,” the system resists such use of force and does well to resist it. Actually, however (states Prof Henkin) the values claimed to justify the forcible violation of another state’s independence are “difficult to define; the motives and designs of states purporting to further those ends are at best ambiguous, and often specious and hypocritical; the costs to the victim state and its inhabitants, and to the values of the inter-state system, are incalculable and usually exorbitant.” Every word of that remarkable summation fits, and fits fully, the high-profile, high-technology military adventure that NATO has inaugurated in Milosevic’s Yugoslavia in the name of humanity. More on the subject next
week, when we shall consult more western authorities
including the International Court of Justice. |
Arafat on canvassing mission
ON Friday evening just as I settled down to filing this column the Press Attache of the Palestinian Embassy called up: “This is to inform that the PLO President, Mr Yasser Arafat, is reaching New Delhi in a couple of hours.... He is coming from Bangladesh and is on his way to Uzbekistan. Here he will be meeting the President, the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi and just after the afternoon lunch hosted in his honour he leaves for the next destination”. This totally unscheduled visit of Yasser Arafat did come as a surprise. What one first thought to be a brief stopover or call it breaking of the journey was proved wrong when probings revealed that Yasser Arafat is on a canvassing mission. With all his intentions of declaring the sovereign State of Palestine on May 4, he is travelling to the socalled “friendly” countries to build support for the long standing demand of an independent state. Difficult to say, at this stage, what the outcome of his visit will be. And last week the delegation from Qatar led by the Emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, seemed to get unprecedented importance. There was a banquet hosted in honour of this delegation by President KR Narayanan. And besides the signing of six bilateral agreements the decision to set up a higher joint committee between India and Qatar is seen as a major development and also the fact that India is all set to be the largest purchaser of Qatari fuel (The Indian deal to buy from Qatar 7.2 million tonnes of liquified natural gas valued at $ 1 billion a year over a period of 25 years beginning in 2002 would make India the largest purchaser (so far ). But fitted along with these achievements, the shabby state of affairs in Doordarshan stand out. On April 7 in DD’s afternoon news bulletin not only was the name of the Emir of Qatar wrongly pronounced — Ahmad instead of Hamad — but even a wrong photograph of his was splashed. When probed, DD sources quipped: “But didn’t we make corrections and insert an apology in our evening and night bulletins? “And though so far no heads have rolled on this major faux pas at least the Qatari delegation had a sampling of the working of the official media. For don’t overlook the fact that these two errors — wrong name and wrong photograph of the Emir — were noticed by not only one of the MEA officers but also by one of the Qatari delegates. Probably this delegate spoke to the MEA source, which in turn, whispered it into the ears of I & B Minister Pramod Mahajan. Who in turn, must have excused himself from George Fernandes’s side, to do the needful. A delayed correction, of sorts. Jayalalitha’s visit AIADMK chief J. Jayalalitha’s impending visit to New Delhi is the talk of this weekend. Scheduled to, arrive by April 12 morning the extent of her stay here should largely depend on the political situation. Interestingly, when contacted the reservations manager of Ashoka Hotel, where she usually stays when in the capital, denied that there was any reservation in her name on or around those dates. The same line was repeated by the reservation counter at Taj Mahal Hotel, where she had shifted from the Ashoka Hotel when the lift snagged, on her last visit here. And though rumours hitting the Capital indicate that she is booked at the chain’s other hotel, the Taj Palace, but hotel sources flatly deny this. “ No reservations are in her name” is the patent reply. And if you put in the next obvious query, whether the bookings are done in the name of any of her partymen they quip: “So many Indians come from Chennai, so how can we deny or confirm this ....” Needless to add that if she does come here, the whole of next week should witness some dramas. And though the Taj Palace hotel seems quite apt at handling media glare, for don’t overlook the fact that the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams are lodged in this particular hotel — but with a ‘human earthquake’ things could turn out to be quite different ! Travelling out Till now I’ve just been writing about who’s been coming into town, but now there comes in news that one of the city’s art gallery owners, Dolly Narang of the village Gallery, is all set to travel towards Tokyo. Going there, with the monoprints done by some of the women inmates of Tihar Jail, which are scheduled to be exhibited for two months, from April 23 in Tokyo’s Asia Pacific Dimension gallery and also in Gallery TOM (Tokyo). “In fact these monoprints were done by the women inmates during the course of a workshop, conducted and organised by BulBul Sharma and me around 1994 -1995. We had then exhibited those monoprints at the IIC and later in my gallery ... not only was the response touching but it is during the course of that exhibition that the director of these Tokyo based galleries saw those works and found them so very interesting that she invited us with these works ...” says Narang. But it may sound ironical that not even one of the inmate artists is going along with these works. Yes, not even one. And when asked, she had no update on these artists — inmates — on whether they are still languishing in jail or else are out on bail or are now acquitted. And in the background of the fact that their works are all set to travel to Japan, isn’t their present state relevant ? Really there seems so
much of talent hidden behind those jailed walls. If only
minds and forms are set in the right direction, you can
imagine what distances they can go till if only a chance
comes their way. |
Kerala
caste struggle: statement SATYAGRAH at Vykom was suspended today at the request of the orthodox caste Hindus and a meeting was held on Tuesday to effect a compromise. After four hours’ discussion, the meeting dispersed without arriving at any conclusion. Of the first batch of Satyagrahis who were convicted Bahulayan Tiy, an undergraduate from British Cochin, read his statement before the District Magistrate asserting his right to walk along the temple roads and declining to purchase freedom by submitting to unrighteous laws. The Nair Satyagrahi
affirmed the determination of his community to secure for
their non-caste brethren, all their rights by enduring
the worst suffering if needed. |
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