E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

Ruffled feathers
IT is unfortunate that an unsavoury element has been introduced in the traditionally warm ties between India and the Arab world following the recent visits by Home Minister L.K.Advani and Minister of External Affairs Jaswant Singh to Israel. Things have come to such a pass that the Arab ambassadors based in Delhi have had a meeting on the subject and sought certain clarifications from the officials of the External Affairs Ministry. While India's foreign policy cannot be predicated on the perceptions of any other country, the fact remains that this controversy is disturbing and also eminently avoidable.

OPINION

Factors behind unending poverty
by Anurag
POVERTY has been abused as a major plank (or prank!) to win votes of gullible voters by politicians of all hues ever since the dawn of Independence. And yet poverty perpetuates, despite the political class and its pious promises to eradicate it. In fact, to expect them to banish poverty appears antithetical inasmuch as the existence of poverty per se provides them a platform to fight elections on. Who will preside over his or her tribe’s extinction?

MIDDLE

POINT OF LAW

DIVERSITIES — DELHI LETTER

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

Cheaper trunk telephone 

STD calls will cost a lot less from Independence Day if the DoT (Department of Telecommunications) carries out the Prime Minister’s orders. He has thrown open this promising business to private telecom operators. Now they will be able to set up their own lines and offer the service to subscribers at a fee determined by the regulator (TRAI or Telecom Regulatory Authority of India). The great monopoly of the DoT is about to fade into history. More dramatic is the privatisation of the underwater fibreoptic cables for connection to Internet. That was a monopoly with VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited) which too faces a closure threat. The VSNL is an unreformed spoilsport and has so far throttled healthy development of underwater cable capacity. What it is doing now is to drastically reduce the availability, ration the supply and earn huge profit. One report says that its agreement with an organisation called FLAG (fibre link across the globe) is a classic case of restrictive trade practice. It leases out just 150 mbps (million bytes per second) to private Internet service providers (ISP) at Rs 42 lakh for every 2 mbps a year. The scale of extortion is evident from what a Chennai-based ISP now promises. Once its fibreoptic cable to Singapore is in place, it plans to offer for lease 2 mbps for as low as Rs 2 lakh! Now all ISPs can hire cable facilities either individually or in a group and also set up facilities to receive the cable connection. Once things settle down, Internet connection should be available at a fraction (yes, a fraction) of the present rates. As it is, ISPs are engaged in a keen rate war and the announcement has come at the right time. That will trigger a boom in the sale of computers as a recent study has revealed. Slightly more than half of the buyers of computers also subscribed to Internet. Internet is obviously giving a big push to computer sales and an easily affordable Internet should cause a minor explosion in computer demand.

The Prime Minister announced this at a meeting of state Information Technology Ministers, together with a scheme to double the education of IT professionals in the coming year and triple it the next year. This is phenomenal expansion and a ministerial group is studying its viability. The idea is to encourage the five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and also engineering colleges to increase the intake of students. There is one problem though. The proposed arrangement will need more teachers and perhaps new premises too. The IITs are islands of excellence and they are sure to resist any attempt at unplanned growth which may affect the quality of education and hence their image. An IIT student is a much sought after commodity and that brand equity is too precious to be compromised. Resistance will also come from entrenched officialdom. In fact it is to pre-empt further delay in privatising the long distance operations and cable leasing that the Prime Minister announced the decision and set a deadline. As he freely admitted, a group of Ministers is working out the details, meaning that the Cabinet has not cleared it. Opposition will be fierce since the STD policy change will reduce the DoT to being one player among many. Its strong point is that it owns the vast network of telephone lines but a dramatic technological breakthrough can take away that advantage. Of course, it will receive a fee and later a share in the revenue. Even so, it is a major dimunition of power of an agency that once lorded it over.

Ruffled feathers

IT is unfortunate that an unsavoury element has been introduced in the traditionally warm ties between India and the Arab world following the recent visits by Home Minister L.K.Advani and Minister of External Affairs Jaswant Singh to Israel. Things have come to such a pass that the Arab ambassadors based in Delhi have had a meeting on the subject and sought certain clarifications from the officials of the External Affairs Ministry. While India's foreign policy cannot be predicated on the perceptions of any other country, the fact remains that this controversy is disturbing and also eminently avoidable. At the centre of it are certain remarks by the visiting Ministers which have ruffled Arab feathers. The Arab League countries have mainly taken objection to the reported statement of Mr Advani that India is considering cooperation with Israel in the nuclear field. This statement has been denied by New Delhi but the Arab nations are not convinced. The Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs in the Arab League recently summoned India's Ambassador to Egypt, Mr Shiv Mukherjee, asking for an explanation in this regard. While it is for the government to clarify the matter, such a cooperation seems highly improbable for several reasons. It is an open secret that Israel already has a fairly large nuclear arsenal. It will be foolhardy on its part to cooperate with India, thereby inviting international safeguards. Similarly, India is already under considerable pressure after its May,1998, nuclear explosions and would not like to sully its immaculate record on nuclear exports in any way.

Mr Advani's remarks on cross-border terrorism seem to have been misunderstood. While he obviously referred to the Pakistani mischief, some of the Arab nations have misconstrued these to have meant that they are terror-exporting States. Arab countries have been India's long-trusted friends. Many of them are themselves victims of terrorism, remote-controlled from abroad. The real situation needs to be explained to them in a cool and calm manner. The mischief that Pakistan has been playing in such delicate matters should also be highlighted. It would be well to remember that it had raised the bogey of an impending attack by India and Israel on its nuclear installations after the May, 1998, explosions.

However, not all the statements made by the Indian leaders in Jerusalem can be explained away as "misunderstood". For instance, Mr Jaswant Singh's reported remark that India and Israel could not come closer earlier because of the Muslim vote-bank at home was uncalled for. He was apparently having a dig at the Congress when he reportedly said that soon after partition, India's Israel policy became captive to domestic policy and therefore the unstated veto. If at all he has made this remark, it smacks of insensitivity and rashness. The global scenario is changing rapidly and Israel is no longer a pariah. Egypt made peace with it long ago and Palestine may follow suit soon enough. There is no reason why India should shun it. But this friendship should not be at the cost of the friendship with the Arab world. Cartwheeling in the economic matters may pass muster. The foreign policy has to have a smoother ride on a more stable platform.

CENTRE-STATE RELATIONS
Federal talk unwarranted
by Inder Jit

CRASS insensitivity, even ignorance, among our top leaders at the Centre and in the states about the basic philosophy of India’s Constitution and its background may well end up before very long in playing havoc with the country’s unity and integrity. More and more of these leaders are increasingly talking of India as a “federal” polity and “a federation” to demand greater and greater autonomy. Yet few have cared to give the slightest thought to the long-term consequences of their unwarranted demands in the name of “federalism”.

Such talk has already emboldened Dr Farooq Abdullah to get the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly to adopt on June 26 a resolution seeking a return to the pre-1953 position and giving his state the separatist status of “a federal unit”. In fact, Dr Abdullah has not stopped at that, despite a firm rejection of his demand by the Centre. His sights now appear fixed on something bigger: “Restructuring Indian Federalism”, the title of a two-day conference, convened by the state’s Regional Autonomy Implemen-tation Committee and inaugurated by him in Srinagar on July 8.

Dr Abdullah’s self-serving rhetoric has, meanwhile, spread like wildfire. The Chief Minister of Punjab, Mr Parkash Singh Badal, has spoken again of the Anandpur Sahib resolution and demanded “a truly federal structure”. This resolution wanted the Centre’s powers to be limited to defence, foreign affairs, communications and currency. Strong support for the restructuring of “the federal structure” has also come from Assam’s Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, Karnataka’s S. M. Krishna and top leaders of Tamil Nadu. Remember, the DMK, too, demanded in 1974 that the Centre should have control over only three subjects: defence, foreign affairs and communications. Mr Vaiko, the firebrand MDMK leader, who stands for Eelam, attended the Srinagar meeting and declared: “I have come here to express solidarity with and support to the people of Kashmir at this crucial hour.... We are for a real federation.”

Tragically, the words “federal”, “federalism” and “federation” are loosely bandied about even by well-read and thinking people without the slightest regard to basic facts. India is an independent sovereign republic and a Union of States, not a federal republic like Germany or a federal state like the USA. In fact, the words “federal” or “federation” do not occur even once in India’s Constitution. Indeed, not many today are aware that the Constituent Assembly rejected during the concluding stages a motion seeking to designate India as a “Federation of States”. The reason? The Indian Union is indestructible but not its constituent states; their identity can be altered and even obliterated. This is a crucial departure from a federal feature, which obtains in a classical federation like the USA.

India’s largely uninformed leaders (and their advisers too) do not seem to understand a basic difference between a classical federal set-up and one that is not. The word “federal” implies a polity in which sovereign independent states voluntarily surrender a defined part of their sovereignty to forge a federation for larger collective good, even as they retain control over their own affairs and their political identity and integrity through a perpetual covenant. Moreover, the constituent states often retain constitution-making rights of their own.

This is simply not the case with India, which was one whole under the British Raj. True, there were 500 and more princely states. But, as we all know, they were indirectly ruled by the British under the overall umbrella of paramountcy. Thus, what we witnessed in India was not a case of sovereign states coming together to form a federation. But just the obverse. We were one country, the Union of India, dividing its vast territory into provinces, redesignated as states.

True, India’s Constitution has some federal features as it is largely based on the Government of India Act of 1935, which prescribed a federation, taking the provinces and the Indian states as units. But by no stretch of the imagination can it be called “federal” in the classical sense or as it is being interpreted by Dr Farooq Abdullah and his likes elsewhere. The 1935 Act, for instance, talked of a “Federal List” over which the “Federal Legislature” had exclusive powers of legislation. Instead, our Constitution talks of a “Union List” and the legislature at the Centre as the House of the people.

India’s Constitution is also not purely unitary. It is both unitary and federal with a strong over-arching bias towards unitary, as reflected in the various emergency powers given to the Centre in accordance with the principle of union supremacy.

Some confusion is caused superficially by Article 1 (1) of the Constitution which says: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” But this gets cleared once you look at what Dr Ambedkar had to say as the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, while submitting the Draft Constitution. He pointed out that “although its Constitution may be federal in structure”, the committee had used the term “Union” because of certain advantages. These advantages were to indicate two things: (a) that the Indian federation is not the result of an agreement by the units and (b) that the component units have no freedom to secede from it. The word “Union” does not necessarily indicate a federation as, according to experts, it was also used in the preamble to the Union of South Africa Act, 1909, patently set-up as a unitary constitution.

Undoubtedly, there is need to take a good fresh look at Centre-state relations, especially the Sarkaria Commission Report which did not receive the attention it deserved from either Parliament or the government (the Rajya Sabha, as the Council of States, should have devoted a special session to it). Almost all the states have grievances galore against the Centre. Many justifiably feel that they have been reduced to mere administrative agencies of the Centre, even “beggars”, as stated by Chief Minister Badal. Simultaneously, our people need to be effectively empowered at the grassroots level. However, we must firmly resist any step that undermines India’s unity and integrity. Devolution and decentralisation yes — and in a big way. But federal units and federalism a big no.

We must stop talking mindlessly of India as a federal polity and federalism, even though these words were used by Dr Ambedkar in the context of the Government of India Act of 1935 and for want of a better expression.

In fact, three former Chief Justices of the Supreme Court hailing from three different regions of India —Mehr Chand Mahajan, S.R. Das and M. Hidayatullah —favoured a stronger Centre. Indeed, Hidayatullah declared in his ‘Feroze Gandhi Memorial Lecture: “A unitary form of government at the Centre is essential to prevent disintegration and balkanisation of our country through regional pulls and pressures.” It is thus time to take heed. Enough of reckless populism.

Nibbling at Kashmir
by V. N. Kakkar

“YOUR Martial Majesty,” said the Chief of the Intelligence Agency (CIA), “we can’t bring the Taj here.”

“Why? asked Martial Majesty (MM).

“The people of Agra,”said CIA, “will not be willing to part with their most precious possession. They held a big meeting in the big hall of the Subhan Allah Restaurant and decided that they would fight for the Taj to the last and our intelligence says that all of them were Muslims.”

“If not the Taj,” said MM, “why not the Jama Masjid of Delhi? That is where my grandfather used to pray.”

“Not possible, MM,” said CIA, “your grandfather’s cousins and sons and nephews continue to pray there. And they will never, never allow anyone to desecrate the place of their worship.”

“O.K.,” said MM“bring the Red Fort. From its ramparts, I want to fly our national flag on our next national day.”

“Not possible, that too, MM,” said CIA, “the Red Fort is highly fortified, made of steel. It is easier to move a mountain than the Red Fort.”

“Can you bring the Imambara of Lucknow to Islamabad?” asked MM, “that is what Asaf-ud-Daula got built for his deprived riyaya. The riyaya having shifted to Pakistan, the Imambara must also shift here.”

“Out of the question, MM,” murmured CIA, “intelligence tells us that in the process of shifting, Imambara may collapse completely. It may remain neither here nor there and even if your dream of conquering Lucknow materialises we may not be able to see the Imambarah there.”

“I see,” said MM, “forget about the Imambara. What about the dargah of Moin-ud-Din Chishty? It is there where Humayun prayed for a son and got Akbar from Allah.”“But,” submitted CIA, “the people of Ajmer will not allow us to do that. Our agency tells us that the only way we can shift the dargah from there is through prayer. But the agency also tells us that if we pray, the people of Ajmer can indulge in counter-prayer. And they are larger in number.”

“How”asked MM.

“They have," submitted CIA, ‘All the Muslims of India to back them. And the Muslims of India outnumber the Muslims of Pakistan.”

“What about Nizam-ud-Din Aulia’s dargah in Delhi?" asked MM.

“The same holds good,” said CIA," for Nizam-ud-Din Aulia’s dargah, too. There we may have to encounter greater difficulties.”

“Why?”

“The Muslims of Delhi outnumber the Muslims of most towns in Pakistan. And all our towns may not fight for a mere dargah. It will take a long, long time to make them aware of its importance to Islam.”

“Can’t we ask,” said MM, “the Muslims of India to cooperate with us in this matter? After all, they are our co-religionists.”

“True, ”submitted CIA, “but Muslims of India are Muslims of India and not Muslims of Pakistan. Just as Muslims of Iran are Muslims of Iran and not Muslims of Pakistan.

“What do we do in the circumstances?” asked MM.

“I can’t say for certain," submitted CIA, “but in my humble opinion, the best thing for us in the circumstances will be to go on nibbling at Kashmir.”

Factors behind unending poverty
by Anurag

POVERTY has been abused as a major plank (or prank!) to win votes of gullible voters by politicians of all hues ever since the dawn of Independence. And yet poverty perpetuates, despite the political class and its pious promises to eradicate it. In fact, to expect them to banish poverty appears antithetical inasmuch as the existence of poverty per se provides them a platform to fight elections on. Who will preside over his or her tribe’s extinction?

So far so good. Why are most of the Indians poor? Is it because we have been ballooning and ballooning to become a billion strong? There are countries more populous, and yet more prosperous than India. That Indians do well but India does not, is an oft-repeated refrain.

This is because we as a nation are poor in the management of our resources which we have aplenty. Be it natural resources or human resources. It is the poverty of governance which is responsible for the messy state of affairs. It is the poverty of ideas at the helm of affairs. And more than that, it is the poverty of will and determination to implement those actionable ideas which would benefit the citizens at large.

What else can explain our snail-paced economic reforms which we ushered in when faced with Hobson’s choice? And the recurrent dithering and demurring? The search for political consensus remains as elusive as ever. Here politics drives economics. And then hullabaloo is raised over not much dent having been made on the poverty profile, post-reforms. Statistics are bandied about in the blame game to score debating points. The very rationale of reforms is questioned.

Another instance of poverty of our nationalist thinking is the belief that democracy and freedom of expression shall automatically lead to development. Both have been more misused than used, at the expense of the uneducated and hence the gullible masses. Education has ranked so low on our national agenda that a politician worth his salt considers it infra dig to be in charge of the Human Resource Development Ministry. Without a sound education policy and its successful implementation, we are bound to remain backward.

In fact, we are well and truly stuck in a time warp. Our history books invariably conclude with a chapter on the achievement of Independence in 1947 as though nothing eventful or history-worthy happened in the period 1950-2000. As yet there is no authentic and objective documentation of post-Independence history of India. Are we not guilty of keeping our youths in the dark?

So in economics. Our school and college curricula are still stuck in the heyday of Nehruvian socialism, liberalisation and globalisation notwithstanding. How can we expect our youth to distinguish between the demerits and merits of a state-led economy vis-a-vis a market-led economy? They will remain ill-equipped to contribute to society. Is this not the poverty of thought on the part of the powers that be? The poverty of vision on the part of our planners is best illustrated by the lopsided urbanisation, the lack of civic infrastructure, the proliferation of slums, the recurrence of floods, drought and diseases, to name a few. Communalisation, casteisation and lumpenisation of politics and society leading to the degradation of vital institutions are the manifestations of the poverty of a long-term vision.

The poverty of will and determination to enforce the laws has facilitated the operation of “might is right” to the detriment of the rule of law. That the innocent fear the police more than the criminals is no hyperbole. We still work with outdated and outmoded laws and manuals which were bequeathed to us by our colonial masters, who smelt a law and order rat in every problem. Development administration cannot be run with a fire-fighting approach. Who stops us from reforming the system? We and we alone.

Recently, reading a banner headline in a national newspaper amused me no end — the “CBI has reams of information, but no case”. Regarding match-fixing and malpractices in cricket, the officials are not sure what kind of case, if any, could be registered. Whether it constituted gambling or cheating in the eyes of law, is still being debated. A national pastime.

How come, in a refreshing contrast, the South African’s King Commission was double-quick to secure a series of confessions and gather actionable evidence. Quite a few of their players are likely to be put on the chopping block. The Justice Qayoom Commission of Pakistan too indicted some of their cricketing heroes and got them taken to task, howsoever mildly. Not so in India so far. Does this not betray the poverty of conscience and law, in that order?

Poverty, economic or otherwise, demoralises. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. Azim Hasham Premji, who built the massive Wipro Corporation, has proved that honesty, pays, and it is possible to be a clean guy in India and yet build a company of $20 billion. Any takers?

What J&K statute really proclaims
by Anupam Gupta

“THE State of Jammu and Kashmir,” says Section 3 of the J&K Constitution of 1957, “is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India.”

Unknown to the vast majority of Indians outside the State, and quite apart from Article 370 of the Constitution of India, this provision in Kashmir’s own fundamental law, unalterable by amendment, stands as an insuperable barrier to the State’s secession from India.

Unacceptable though it is for other reasons, the autonomy report adopted by the J&K Assembly on June 26 and reaffirmed by the National Conference on July 15 does not (as I wrote last time) reopen the question of accession. But even if it does, as many wrongly suspect, a re-negotiation of that question is beyond the competence of anyone in power in Jammu and Kashmir by virtue of Section 3 read with Section 147 of the J&K Constitution.

Dealing with the subject of amendment of the Constitution, Section 147 explicitly bars any “bill or amendment seeking to make any change” in Section 3, Section 5, Section 147 itself, or in the “provisions of the Constitution of India as applicable in relation to the State” from being introduced or moved in either House of the J&K legislature.

Sixteen years, therefore, before the doctrine of an unalterable “basic structure” was evolved by the Supreme Court under Article 368 of the Constitution of India, the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir had not only confirmed the State’s accession to India but put it beyond the reach of any future government or legislature to reopen that question.

The Constituent Assembly which framed the Constitution of India was indirectly elected by the provincial legislatures, which (as per Granville Austin) had themselves been elected by only about 28 per cent of the adult population of the provinces competent to vote under the Government of India Act, 1935. “Economically and socially depressed portions of the population were virtually disenfranchised by the terms of the 1935 Act,” remarks Austin in his celebrated study of the making of India’s Constitution.

Convened in 1951, the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir was, on the other hand, directly elected by the people of the State, Jammu and Ladakh included, on the basis of universal adult franchise.

Even though, therefore, the State Constitution (unlike the Indian Constitution) contains no Bill of Rights, its representative character is not only beyond dispute but exceeds, by far, the representative character of the Constitution of India.

It is a pity, in fact, that while most Indians continue to entertain serious misgivings that the State, unlike any other Indian State, should have a separate Constitution of its own, few — lawyers or laymen — are aware of the actual provisions of that Constitution.

The reason why Jammu and Kashmir has a separate Constitution is rooted in the political history of the State and is beyond the scope of this Article. It is imperative, however, to state that, as the present Chief Justice of India, Justice A.S. Anand, puts it in his book on the subject, last edited and published in 1998, “the Constitution of Kashmir is in no way repugnant to the Constitution of India but is complementary to it.....It is in conformity with the Constitution of India and is so evolved that a clash seems unlikely.”

For all the growing plethora of literature on the Kashmir problem — at least four books of note (by Hashim Qureshi, R.N. Kaul, Manoj Joshi and M.L. Koul) came out in 1999, two in 1998 (M.K. Teng and Hari Om) and another three in 1997 (Victoria Schofield, Sumit Ganguly and Sumantra Bose) — Justice Anand’s book “The Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir” remains perhaps the only work of its kind so far as expert legal treatment of the problem is concerned.

“These two Sections in the Constitution of Kashmir,” writes Justice Anand, referring to Sections 3 and 5, “have, by reason of the legislature’s inability to amend them, sealed the doors to secession by the State from the Union. By no legal or constitutional means can the State secede from the Union. No future legislature of the State can do anything about it.”

A necessary complement to Section 3, Section 5 provides that the executive and legislative power of the State extends to all matters except those with respect to which Parliament has power to make laws for the State under the provisions of the Constitution of India.

No less striking is the preamble to the State Constitution, based on the preambular lyricism of the Constitution of India.

“We, the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir (it reads), having solemnly resolved, in pursuance of accession of this State to India which took place on the twenty-sixth day of October, 1947, to further define the existing relationship of the State with the Union of India as an integral part thereof, and to secure to ourselves (Justice, Liberty, Equality and) Fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity of the Nation .....do hereby adopt, enact and give to ourselves this Constitution.”

A Constitution such as this deserves a better understanding from the people of India even as the need for fuller integration with India deserves a better understanding from the people of Kashmir.

Yet more on Kashmir next week.

From bureaucrat, to author, to publisher
by Humra Quraishi

FOREMOST, this weekend when I heard the 47-year-old bureaucrat- turned- author-turned-publisher Richard Crasta speak, I felt that after years one was listening to a genuine person. A 1975 batch IAS of the Karnataka cadre he quit the administrative service almost a decade back “for I didn’t possess that dual/split personality to continue in the service...my soul is against the establishment, against the imposition of power, against manipulation, against status consciousness, so tell me how could I have survived in the IAS ?” And Crasta took to book writing instead. His very first book — “The Revised Kama Sutra” (Penguin) did stand out with a list of tremendous reviews. However, when several publishers turned down his latest book “Impressing The Whites” he went ahead and published it himself (Invisible Man books, marketed by Variety Book Depot and Vinayaka Book Distributors). He is absolutely forthright: “I write to express myself. I’m driven from within to write what I have to say and what I have to say is very important. In fact some of the best writers of the world have had to publish themselves and this list includes Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway, GB Shaw, Alexander Pope, Lord Byron etc...I did suppress `Impressing The Whites’ for a few years for I knew it could attract hostility but now I had to bring it out, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to respect my own self. This book deals with the integrity and sovereignty of our country.”

When queried about the practical aspects related to writing fearlessly he quips: “There has to be total freedom. The public has to be mature enough to take it well but the freedom of the writer cannot be curtailed at any cost.” Has he paid the price for writing fearlessly? “Yes, I started paying the price the minute I quit the IAS for you realise that people not only question your decision but even drop you from their social list. And when I decided to shift to the USA I realised that living there is akin to second class citizenship and it’s not too comfortable for me. But on the other hand, no price is too big to pay for bringing out a book.” Space will not permit me to write more on this man but there’s definitely something different about him. And obviously this trickles down to whatever he writes.

Launch of the progress of nations 2000

UNICEF’s report on the state of the child in India was launched on July 12, and as expected our child is in a pathetic state — the most shocking is the finding that in India alone there are 3.5 million people (children and adults) infected with HIV/AIDS. Added to this another shocker — about 50 per cent of all new infections take place among young people below the age of 25 in the country “The government at all levels, the civil society and bilateral and multi-lateral donors must step up their efforts in India if we want to prevent an epidemic similar to the one in Africa where up to 30 per cent of the population is infected” said Dr Erma Manoncourt, Deputy Director, UNICEF India.

And for this launch UNICEF had got hold of the GOI Secretary, Woman and Child, Y N Chaturvedi, but he didn’t seem too well-equipped to answer the many queries — it was as though a formality was being attended to.

And before I take you all elsewhere I do want to ask the organisers of this Press Conference why they chose Kanishka hotel as the venue — a hotel that boasts of very poor parking facilities and to top it all, third rate service where the attendants wouldn’t let you park at any one of the slots.

Behl’s findings and proposal

Benoy K. Behl of the Cultural Documentation and Conservation Foundation (CDCF) has just informed me, that, as consultant for Ministry of Tourism, he has recently sent a proposal to UNESCO to include the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya in its World Heritage Listing.

“The Mahabodhi site and temple, though previously not noticed much are of enormous importance - this is the single most important and revered site for Buddhists the world over. The temple is the only grand free-standing temple structure of the fifth century in India, it is also the only ancient Buddhist temple which stands today, and an exciting heritage city lies buried around this temple site. And we in the CDCF have taken up the scientific investigation towards the idea of excavating this city...”

Award, dinner, qawwali.....

I wish I could fit in the details of the “Honest Man Of The Year” award, presented to Khushwant Singh on July 15. Since I have to file this column a couple of hours before the function, so all those details will be fitted in next week. 

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

Some call on the Lord, ‘Ram, Ram!’ Some cry, ‘Khudai’

— Guru Arjan Dev, Rag Ramkali; Shri Guru Granth Sahib, page 885.

***

He manifests every form and is to be identified

With all nature’s richness.

His manifestation is seen everywhere in creation.

He moves in all forms by His creative charm.

His Divine energy is the life force

Which animates all created things.

— Rig Veda, 6.47.18.

***

He who cooks for himself alone is a thief. If your house has not a bread for a guest or a poor, starving man, are you better than a robber on the high road? You cease to be human when you do not share and do not bear a brother’s burden.

— T. L. Vaswani, Gita — Meditations, Volume One.

***

May your ideas be to serve the poor, the sick and the saints, and the country; to raise the fallen; to lead the blind; to share what you have with others; to bring solace to the afflicted; to cheer up the suffering! May your watchword be to have perfect faith in God; to love your neighbour as your own self.

— Swami Shivananda, Bliss Divine, chapter 57