The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Mori and CTBT

US President Bill Clinton wants India and Pakistan to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. So do other members of the nuclear club. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori said the same thing while speaking on “India-Japan Global Partnership for the 21st Century” in Delhi on Thursday. When America speaks about a nuclear weapons-free world, it is like the devil quoting the scripture. But when Japan speaks on the same subject the global community’s response should be more positive. After all, Nagasaki and Hiroshima are abiding symbols of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. Mr Mori sounded far more sincere than the tough-talking American leaders when he asked India to sign the CTBT so that the two countries could work jointly for a nuclear-free world. India should not overlook an important point while debating the pros and cons of responding to Mr Mori’s plea for signing the CTBT. Japan is an important member of the G-8 without being a nuclear weapons state. It does not need to carry a gun for discussing business with interested parties in the global village. Its well-developed economic muscle has helped it secure a place of respect in the global marketplace. Ever since Dr Manmohan Singh rewrote the rules which governed the country’s domestic and international economic policies India too has begun showing signs of developing its biceps. And the explosion in the information technology sector has helped it add strong sinews as well to its economy. A primary reason why President Clinton came a visiting in March, after seeking to isolate India in the international community for having had the temerity to conduct nuclear tests, was the IT revolution in the South Indian states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Mr Mori too was essentially on a business trip.

But since his country has suffered the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons his commitment to evolving a nuclear-free world is genuine. But so is India’s reservation about signing on the dotted line. President Clinton may talk about the CTBT from the global forum and even have pleasant dreams about a nuclear-free world, but the US Congress which represents the collective will of the people has refused to ratify the Treaty. Besides, the situation in Kashmir is far from normal and Pakistan is not going to give up supporting cross-border terrorism, with or without a democratically elected government in place. However, both India and Pakistan have said that they will not conduct more nuclear tests. So why don’t they sign the CTBT? The Islamic version of the Sangh Parivar is as vociferous as the one in India in its opposition to the idea of peace and friendship between the two countries. However, India’s long-term global interests would be better served if it is made to realise the economic and technological advantage of delinking its position from the one which Pakistan has taken for signing the CTBT. An economically secure India would be in a better position to defend its borders against the threat of aggression from a cash-starved Pakistan. The country’s IT professionals have created a big enough opening for India to announce its presence in the global marketplace as a major player. Most developed countries are now dangling green cards and hard cash for attracting the attention of Indian entrepreneurs and software professionals. Logically a country which commits itself to not conducting nuclear tests should become more attractive to the global corporate giants as a destination for making massive investments. The future belongs to those with ringing cash registers and not those with smoking guns. A bullish economy and hawkish political posturing is what India needs for banishing poverty and social unrest in the country and emerging as a key player in the cash-driven world which has already arrived.

Drama in West Bengal

POLITICS in West Bengal is about to undergo a major transformation CPM patriarch Jyoti Basu is getting ready to take his final bow. Ms Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress is rearing to take on the Left Front in Assembly elections next year. The Congress is settling down at the third place, a distant third that is. After the election the political map is likely to be totally different than what it is now. The most dramatic change will be Mr Basu’s retirement. After rejecting his request for at least two years, the CPM is about to give in and the top leadership will decide to let him go as early as next month. That will give his deputy, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, some months in office as Chief Minister before the poll which a new collective leadership will fight. The party got a foretaste of things in the post-Basu days when the entire media criticised it in shrill tones over a fracas party workers had with some reporters. Even some months back such harsh treatment was unthinkable. The party is yet to recover from the defeat first at the Panskura Lok Sabha byelection and later in Calcutta municipal corporation. What is particularly galling is that the winner in both cases is the Mamata Banerjee party. For the first time in more than two decades the party shows signs of self-doubt. Its units in towns and villages are getting somewhat rusty and members are less enthusiastic. And to lose the charismatic leadership of Mr Basu now!

The Trinamool Congress is the fast rising phenomenon in the state. With her unbounded energy and propelled by her one-point programme of making the Left Front sit in the opposition, she is collecting supporters by the hundreds every week. A rally she addressed some days back is described as easily the biggest in Calcutta, a city of mammoth rallies. Her source of support is twofold. Congress leaders and members are swelling the Trinamool ranks. And many sympathisers of the Left Front are gravitating towards her party wanting something new after nearly a quarter century of Left rule. These days the Railway Minister spends more time in Calcutta and other West Bengal towns than in New Delhi. This is what she intends doing till the election next year. Her “mahajot” (grand alliance) idea has fizzled out and frankly she does not need any partners. From the looks of it, she is in a position to mount a credible challenge to the CPM’s electoral chances. And the joining of the Congress is unlikely to add much to her winning ways.

The most pathetic case is that of the Congress. The recent elevation of working committee member Pranab Mukherjee as state unit president, overlooking the claims of Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, is a purely ad hoc step. Even so it shows up the absence of dynamic leaders and their inability to work as a team. Mr Abdul Ghani Khan Chowdhury had to go because of his old age and his constant quarrels with Ms Prabha Rao who is in charge of the state unit. He will take his mass base with him to the Trinamool Congress and reduce the Congress to a memory in his Malda district. Like in UP and Tamil Nadu Congress is a shadow of its former self and that is a big roadblock in its attempts to come back to power at the Centre.

And now drought!

LAST year, the nation’s thoughts were riveted on Orissa as the state was flattened by a supercyclone. Nature’s fury was made unbearable by monumental mismanagement. A large number of sufferers died because of this criminal neglect but the charitable explanation given by some was that the administration was simply overwhelmed by the dimensions of the tragedy. It was thought that in future a guilt-conscious bureaucracy would be better prepared but those fond hopes seem to have been belied. It seems that nothing much has changed in the way the government functions. The people who faced unprecedented floods are now passing through an unusually dry spell and the possibility of a severe drought looms large. At least the victims had the sympathies of the whole nation with them during the flood. But the present problems have evoked only apathy. The pity is that drought has been the “natural state” for this God-forsaken state. Names like Kalahandi and Bolangir have become synonyms for extreme poverty. Many more —- Bargarh, Jharsaguda, Rayagada, Malkangiri, Angul, Deogarh and Kendrapara —- may be added to the list if drastic measures are not taken immediately. In fact, Sundargarh district is already in a precarious position. The official response has been tardy as usual. Only now has the state government woken up to the gravity of the situation and is in the process of sinking new wells! The task of minor repairs to lift irrigation projects will also begin only now.

Such waking up to a crisis situation only when it is too late is not confined to this particular state. This has become a routine. Almost a similar failure was in evidence in Gujarat earlier this year. The argument that the administration was not able to cope with the unprecedented crisis may hold water in the case of an unexpected natural calamity. But when it is known that a particular state is hit by drought repeatedly, surely official machinery can and must take preventive measures. But that rarely happens. Northern states are in a slightly better position to the extent that these do not have to face extreme floods or droughts. But there too, safety and relief measures are never up to the mark. Every year, official handouts claim boldly before the onset of the monsoon that all steps to tackle any adverse situation have been completed. At the first downpour and all these big words go down the drain. Since accountability is something alien to the sarkari work culture, nobody gets the rap for such neglect. But surely, the officials are answerable to their own conscience!

Pak nuclear, missile plans
Multiple hidden dimensions
by G. Parthasarathy

IT is our right to obtain nuclear technology. And when we acquire this technology the Islamic world shall possess it with us”. Thus spoke Gen Zia-ul-Haq in 1986, while describing the nuclear ambitions of his country. The pan-Islamic dimensions of Pakistan’s policies were further clarified when General Zia told American scholar Selig Harrison in 1988: “ We have earned the right to have a very friendly regime in Afghanistan. We took risks as a frontline state and won’t permit it to be like before, with Indian and Soviet influence there and a claim on our territory. It will be a real Islamic state, part of a pan-Islamic revival that will one day win over the Muslims of the Soviet Union”. Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, the Islamic dimensions of its nuclear policies, and its support for extremist Islamic elements in Central Asia should, therefore, be seen as an integral part of its ambition to be a “Frontline State” in promoting “Militant Islam” across the globe.

There is a mistaken belief that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme was a response to the Pokhran nuclear test of 1974. The decision to develop a nuclear weapons capability and acquire nuclear weapons was taken by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in January, 1972. Bhutto felt that after the Bangladesh disaster, Pakistan would need these weapons to act as an “equaliser” to deal with India’s conventional superiority and strategic depth. This was confirmed by no less than Pakistan’s able and articulate Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar just before the military takeover last October. Sattar and two other eminent Pakistanis then asserted that the decision taken in 1972 was primarily to “deter another Indian onslaught aimed at the territorial integrity of residual Pakistan”. One wishes that General Musharraf would take a leaf from the intellectual honesty of his Foreign Minister and stop shedding tears about why India’s Pokhran test in 1974 forced Pakistan to go nuclear. Those who constantly assert in India that our tests in 1998 forced Pakistan to go nuclear would be well advised to remember that Pakistan’s nuclear policies have their own rationale and dynamics. These flow from their perceptions on the need for a strategic “equaliser” to maintain “parity” with India and their belief that they do have a leading role to play in the “Islamic Ummah”.

The most important strategic dimension of Pakistan’s nuclear policies is the longstanding and internationally unprecedented ties that have developed with China on issues of nuclear and missile cooperation. There is now independently corroborated information that while a group of Chinese nuclear scientists visited Pakistan in October, 1974, shortly after Pokhran I, it was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who secured China’s agreement to provide all necessary assistance for Pakistan to acquire and develop nuclear weapons during his visit to China in April, 1976. By the early 1980s, China provided Pakistan with the design of a 25 kiloton nuclear weapon and also sufficient highly enriched uranium to build four or five bombs. In their paper in October last year, Sattar and his associates Aga Shahi and Zulfiqar Ali Khan have claimed that in 1984 Pakistan had warned India about the use of nuclear weapons against the Kahuta uranium enrichment plant. Since a number of independent assessments confirm that Pakistan’s own enrichment programme had not advanced sufficiently to produce adequate enriched uranium for a bomb in 1984, it is only logical to conclude that Pakistan was, in fact, threatening to use Chinese designed nuclear weapons made from highly enriched uranium supplied by China. It needs to be remembered that the then Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Sahibzada Yakub Khan, was present at China’s Lop Nor test site when a 25 kiloton device was tested in May, 1983.

There has been no letup in China’s support to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme despite what is undoubtedly an improvement in the climate of our relations with China. While there has been substantial publicity given to the supply of 5000 “ring magnets” for Pakistan’s uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta by China, a far more ominous development has been China’s decision to provide Pakistan with a 40 MW heavy water reactor at Khushab. This reactor will provide the plutonium and tritium for advanced compact warheads. There is also good reason to believe that China looks the other way as heavy water supplied by it is diverted to this unsafeguarded reactor. Interestingly, while the Reagan administration chose to turn a blind eye to China’s assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear programme in the 1980’s the Clinton Administration has waffled, obfuscated and covered up facts on this subject during its nearly eight years in office. It remains to be seen how a Bush or Gore Administration will now address this issue.

Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to China in December, 1988, certainly laid the basis for unfreezing relations with our northern neighbour. Subsequent high-level visits and exchanges have enhanced confidence and cooperation and reduced the possibilities of tensions along the borders. China and India do share many common interests in forums like the WTO and on issues pertaining to the environment and economic development. But one cannot ignore the fact that almost coinciding with Rajiv Gandhi’s visit, China decided to supply Pakistan with M-11 missiles to match the development of “Prithvi” by India. It is estimated that China shipped around 30 M-11 missiles to the Sargodha air base near Lahore under the agreement concluded in 1988.

While the Pakistan Air Force can use its Chinese supplied A-5, French Mirage and American supplied F-16 aircraft to deliver nuclear weapons, China and Pakistan seem to have decided in the mid-1990s that Pakistan should possess medium range missiles if it is to reliably and accurately target Indian population centres in northern India- a task the M-11 with a limited range cannot accomplish. It is evidently with this aim that China is supplying M-9 missiles with a range of 800 kilometres to Pakistan. Named “Shaheen I” these proven missile systems have been “flight tested” by Pakistan, with flight paths over crowded Pakistani population centres. Further, following the flight- testing of the “Agni” missile, China has supplied Pakistan with the 2000 kilometre range M-18 missile, called “Shaheen II” by Pakistan. China is collaborating in these efforts with the rising star in the Pakistan nuclear establishment, Dr Samar Mubarak Mand, who is a quiet and low-key professional, like his Indian counterparts. Dr Mand is now overshadowing the brash and publicity addicted Dr A.Q. Khan. It is acknowledged in Pakistan that with the setting up of the Kahuta uranium enrichment plant based on designs stolen by him now completed, Dr A.Q. Khan has outlived his utility. Further, allegations of financial irregularities in the A.Q. Khan Laboratories cannot be entirely overlooked by a military regime claiming commitment to the principle of “accountability”.

It is now obvious that even as it seeks to lessen prospects for tensions in bilateral relations with us, China is determined to adopt a policy of strategic containment of India by its nuclear and missile collaboration with Pakistan and its growing influence in Myanmar to our East. It remains to be seen how we will meet this challenge. We obviously need to reduce tensions and enhance cooperation and confidence in our relations with China. But there is also need to look at what needs to be done to make it clear to China that pursuit of its current policies will not be without its own diplomatic and strategic costs.

Tragedy across Palk Straits
by Depinder Singh

FOR many reasons, geographic proximity and a shared culture among others, events in Sri Lanka cannot but have a profound effect in India. The reverse is equally true. During recent times the ethnic strife in Sri Lanka, tragic as its consequences have been in that country has aroused powerful emotions in India. To analyse why this is so, it is necessary to go back to 1972 when the seeds of the ethnic struggle were sown and then see what has been reaped over the years.

After Sri Lanka gained independence from British colonial rule in 1948 and opted, like us, for the Westminster style of parliamentary democracy the majority Sinhala community sought to right certain perceived wrongs started prior to independence and persevered with since then. So, jobs for Tamil were drastically reduced; promised autonomy to Tamil majority district councils was not granted; Tamil plantation works were disenfranchised; Sinhalas were sought to be re-settled in predominantly Tamil areas with a view to altering the demographic patterns; and so on. They failed to realise that, in an economy like theirs, progress can never be predicated by decreasing opportunities for those already dispossessed. In this milieu was born the LTTE with the avowed aim of creating an independent state for the Tamils. Thereafter, it has been a story repeated all over the world, more so in India, where the divisive policies of politicians, Sinhala and Tamil and the promotion by each community of centrifugal forces when the need of the hour was encouragement of centripetal forces, laid the stage for a tragedy of enormous proportions.

Politics in Sri Lanka has been dominated by two main parties, the UNP and the SLFP. By a strange coincidence, power has been enjoyed by each alternately: the party in power has always sought accommodation of Tamil aspirations while the one out of power advocated the hard line. There is a touch of irony here as on the one hand adoption of the hard line was insisted in the case of Tamils, in the context of the JVP Sinhala insurgency the leader of the SLFP declared: “We must convince ourselves that if our youth have chosen the argument of force rather than the force of argument, the change represents our failure, not their aberration”. Concurrent with the repressive policies, Tamil militant organisations continued to grow and exact their own form of retribution. In time, through a process of coercion and murder, the LTTE emerged as the predominant militant organisation that claimed to represent Tamil aspirations.

The road to this eminence has been a rocky one. On the way, assistance was obtained from, among others, the Israelies, the PLO, the drug connection and expatriate Tamils. Massive as some of this assistance has been, in no way can it match, individually or even collectively, the sustenance provided by Tamil Nadu. This is so because in the former case it is a business deal or in the case of expatriates, a sense of loyalty; in the latter it comes from the heart as emotions are involved. Tragically, this sympathy and assistance did not diminish even when the IPKF and the LTTE were locked in mortal combat with effect from October 10, 1987.

Ironically, whereas Mr MG Ramachandran, then CM of Tamil Nadu and the architect of Indian involvement in the affairs of Sri Lanka, used to talk about our Tamil brothers across the sea; Prabhakaran used to be quite emphatic in stating that the Tamils of Sri Lanka were a different entity to the Tamils of Tamil Nadu. Over the years LTTE’s dependence upon Tamil Nadu, a consequence of Sinhala repression and not its cause, has increased manifold. Unfolding circumstances shaped Sinhala, Tamil and Indian responses. Let us examine what these responses have been and, more to the point, what they should be in future with the aim of ushering in peace into this war-torn country.

Sinhala, in the form of the Sri Lanka Government (SLG), attempts towards finding a solution have, as already discussed, always died premature deaths as narrow, ethnic compulsions have thwarted the emergence of a package acceptable to the Tamils, except in September, 1987, when a comprehensive package was unrolled that, in my opinion, more than met Tamil aspirations. It was accepted by Prabhakaran in the IPKF headquarters at Palaly, but rejected as soon as he reached Jaffna a couple of hours later. The SLG had relied, prior to this (and after the IPKF left) on military action which took the form of indiscriminate shelling and bombing and an economic embargo, all of which resulted in untold misery and death as we were to witness when the IPKF was inducted in July, 1987. Thereafter, there have been devolution packages which have been attractive but always falling short of an independent state.

The LTTE response has been equally kneejerk. While in the ascendancy militarily, it has sought nothing less than secession, when the military situation has been adverse, it has agreed to a ceasefire and talks. As soon as the military posture has improved, talks have been broken off and fighting resumed. The IPKF experience was that Prabhakaran will never accept a solution where elections are involved because he has come to depend more on the bullet than the ballot. After all, can one imagine Prabhakaran, the undisputed leader of the LTTE, moving from house to house seeking votes? Or, consider another possibility: elections are held and he loses! Consequently, the LTTE cannot accept anything less than secession with Prabhakaran at its head.

The Indian response, initially masterminded by the late Mr Ramachandran (then CM of TN), was to support the Tamils of Sri Lanka in obtaining their demands to be treated as equal citizens. The 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka accord was a political and diplomatic masterpiece in that it envisioned the big brother brokering a peace deal and ensuring Tamil safety and honour. However, as a consequence of massive political bungling, we soon had the LTTE turn against us and then, to add insult to injury, the SLG teamed up with the LTTE to demand the withdrawal of the IPKF. Public support in TN for the LTTE persevered, however, and though, in the aftermath of Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, there were some visible manifestations of support withdrawal, covert support has continued. Today if there is one single element that sustains the LTTE, it is the moral and material support provided by Tamil Nadu.

More recently, we have witnessed some spectacular military successes by the LTTE which promoted a strange Indian reaction: an offer to evacuate Sri Lanka Armed Forces (SLAF) in the Jaffna peninsula. This offer was, quite rightly, dismissed by the SLG and the SLAF appear to have stabilised the military situation and now must be in the process of improving their defences, causing attrition on the LTTE and enforcing an economic blockade on the peninsula which will once again cause untold misery to an innocent population. The SLAF endeavour must also be to ensure that the bulk of the LTTE cadres, now deployed in the peninsula, remain there and are not re-deployed in the Central and Eastern Provinces south of Elephant Pass. There is a Norwegian initiative at brokering peace, of which not much is known. The Indian initiative has been a visit by our Foreign Minister to Colombo where he would undoubtedly have urged his hosts to work out a devolution package that can be sold to the LTTE.

The impediments to this sale are three. First, the SLG cannot countenance secession and nor for that matter can India in our own interests. Second, the port city of Trincomalee is vital to the LTTE, it is equally vital to the SLG and the latter cannot part with it. Interestingly, in one of many meetings I had with Prabhakaran in 1987, he made me an offer: help the LTTE get Trinco and they would ensure that its facilities would be made available to India. Third is the question of numbers in the Eastern Provinces. (Trincomalee, Batticaloa, Amparai). The LTTE covets these but the demographic pattern, approximately 33 % each of Tamil, Muslim and Sinhala militates as against this desire. India is impaled on the horns of a cruel dilemma. On the one hand, to placate public opinion in TN, it wants to support the Tamils of Sri Lanka, which in effect means the LTTE. On the other hand is the necessity of ensuring the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka, if not for the noble reason of supporting a neighbour, the more practical one of not giving every insurgent group in India the green light to persevere.

The intervention factor no longer figures, firstly, because of the legacy of Operation Pawan and the knowledge gleaned through a study of Great Power Projection, an art in which we are still novices, that “big brother” has many sticks to achieve objectives in the national interest of which the military option is but one. These contradictory requirements will have to be reconciled by rising above regional aspirations and working for a devolution package that ensures Tamil safety and honour within Sri Lanka. This can be worked out by urging the SLG to evolve a package that has the backing of both political parties. Politicians in TN then have to be persuaded to get the LTTE to accept this package. The alternative, which everyone must understand, is the fatal effect of the embargo which the SLG will be fully justified in initiating as the bulk of the LTTE cadres is concentrated in the Jaffna peninsula. This will result in enormous devastation among the innocent civilian population who have already endured untold suffering and misery.

Politicians of all hues must now cease to be mere politicians and rise and don the mantle of statesmen to usher in an era of peace not only for the sake of the population but the region as a whole.

The writer is a retired Lieut-General.

Questions that need answers
How good are alternative systems of medicine
by Tavleen Singh

TWO weeks ago in this column I wrote an article on a man called Tapasvi Dr Janak Shahi. I wrote that he claimed to have healing powers through an ancient Indian system of medicine called mantra therapy. I mentioned that he had brought hope to a friend who had terminal cancer. Since then I have had hundreds of telephone calls demanding the telephone number of Tapasviji. To those callers with whom I managed to speak I have emphasised that I have no proof of his healing powers and that I wrote the article only to draw attention to the need to investigate alternative systems of healing for those whom allopathic medicine had no cure. It made on difference.

Nearly everyone I spoke to insisted on getting Tapasviji’s number anyway and I convinced nobody that I had no proof of his healing abilities. Among those who called were people with desperately ill relatives who had been told that allopathic medicine had no cure. They all said that they did not want proof of Tapasviji’s powers, only his telephone number. The calls have not stopped yet either to the newspapers in which the article appeared or to my home telephone number and this is my only reason for writing again about Tapasviji. This time please let me say in the clearest possible terms that I have no proof whatsoever that mantra therapy works. Nor am I convinced that Tapasviji is not a charlatan. To those of you who called him I hope he did help, to those of you who may still want to call him please remember that I do not endorse his healing powers.

May I also say that my friend about whom I wrote the article died last week. To the end she continued to believe that Tapasviji would help her but her family says that when he realised he could do nothing for her he became less available and had to be virtually forced to her bedside. When he did come to Bombay Hospital, they say, he seemed reluctant to attempt healing her and disappeared on the morning she died.

Her family still believes that though he may not have managed to save her life he helped her in the last months of her life. He gave her hope, relieved her pain and made her believe that she would live. He also spared her endless rounds of chemotherapy which in her case, she had been told, would not help much since she had the kind of cancer that was unlikely to respond. There is a great deal to be said for someone who can do even this much for a person who is terminally ill but there is also an urgent need for the claims of men like Tapasviji to be investigated.

Not just to disprove them but to discover whether there is a scientific basis for their claims. India has more than her share of faith healers and practitioners of alternative systems of medicine and almost nothing has been done to investigate their claims. The result often is that desperate people flock to their doors without knowing whether they are dealing with crooks and charlatans or not. If they have genuine healing powers, as Tapasviji claims he has, then they should have no qualms about allowing themselves to be investigated.

Tapasviji has been more convincing than most and as I mentioned in my last article, has even managed to set up a clinic in Delhi that caters exclusively to Members of Parliament. An investigation into his claims could, perhaps, begin here or we should at least be told how he managed to get preference over so many others of his ilk who would be prepared to give almost anything to be allowed similar privileges.

Allopathic doctors are virulent in their anger against people like Tapasviji because they believe that they are merely “scavengers” who feed off the hopes and fears of the rich and the powerful. In the words of one doctor; “How is it that they always manage to home in only on rich and powerful people? Do they ever offer their skills to poor and unimportant patients?”

These are questions that need answers. At the same time we could be losing a wealth of information if we dismiss all our alternative systems of medicine as unscientific rubbish. Ayurveda is one of the most important of these and I have met many people who claim that they have been cured of various diseases by going to some vaid or other. On the other hand I have met almost an equal number who claim that Ayurvedic medicine, when analysed, is sometimes found to have allopathic drugs like cortizone in it and that the harmless looking pills that Ayurvedic doctors hand out are really more dangerous than they look. Both sides of the story need to be investigated so that we can separate the charlatans from the genuine healers.

The Health Ministry has from time to time expressed its intentions of setting up institutes of alternative medicine but little seems to have happened beyond good intentions. The result is that the medicinal importance of Indian herbs — neem, haldi to mention only two — are often discovered first by the West and patented before anything happens in India.

One of the people who called me after my article on Tapasviji appeared and to whom I said that I had no proof that mantra therapy actually worked said that he did not want proof. “I have a seven-year-old daughter who has been in a coma for two months and for whom doctors say they can do nothing. Mantra therapy is an ancient Indian system of medicine but we will only accept it when it comes back with a made in USA stamp on it”.

Faith, though, is not nearly enough. There is an urgent need for more to be done. We need more investigation, more information, more analysis of the claims of men like Tapasvi than have so far been attempted. Tapasviji himself seems to have no objections to this. In a brochure he brought out to commemorate his silver jubilee as a mantra therapist he had this to say:

“It may be worth appreciating that the veil of mysticism has to be wiped off and the divine powers of Tapasviji are to be channelised in a rational manner, so that maximum numbers of people suffering from incurable diseases are able to see the glow of life once again”.

Well, let us begin by wiping the veil of mysticism of Tapasviji’s powers. Meanwhile, those of you who still believe he can help you – whether his claims has a scientific basis or not — please remember that I am not endorsing his healing powers. Incidentally, just as I finished writing this article I received a letter from Somnath Chatterjee, M.P. whose wife Tapasviji claims to have cured. He denied ever having met Tapasviji and asked me to clarify this as soon as possible. Those of you who still wish to get in touch with him please do so through his e-mail address: janakmantra@mantraonline.com. But, please do so at your own risk.

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

Rama is gone and Ravana too

Whose progeny was so vast;

The world must vanish like a dream

And everything be lost ....

He who is born must die, him death

Must take now or some day.

Away from all entanglements,

Lord's praises he must stay ....

His name shall live, His saints shall live

God shall be aye our guide.

Those who recite the Guru's Word

Shall evermore abide.

— Guru Tegh Bahadur, Slok, 50, 52, 56

*****

Death is not an event of life.

Death is not lived through.

If by eternity is understood not endless

temporal duration but timelessness, then he

lives eternally who lives in the present.

Our life is endless in the way that our

visual field is without limit.

The temporal authority of the human soul,

That is to say, its eternal survival after death,

is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption

in the first plane will not do for us what we always

tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that

I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic

as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life

in space and time lies outside space and time.

— L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

*****

Nothing is ever born and nothing ever dies. Things only move between manifestation and unmanifestation. They become visible, they become invisible .... After each life your body is so tired you need a new body, a new manifestation. The old wave disappears, but the water in that wave remains in the ocean; it will come again in a new wave. The old is continuously becoming new — allow it.

— Osho, I am That

*****

Real happiness which lasts forever and which is above all needs, is the power of the soul. It is the essence of life and shines within everybody. Every atom is in its place by this power of the Atma. This same thing is referred to as the central source of the power of God. By obtaining this power, man is able to override even the greatest distress in this world.

— Mahatma Mangat Ram ji Maharaj, Apostle of Samata, Chapter 3