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Saturday,
June 16, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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Doubts, questions
remain Imposed ceasefire |
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Protecting
privacy THE US Supreme Court on Monday delivered a significant ruling on the basic right to privacy that Americans are entitled to enjoy in their own homes. The ruling should be of interest to every member of the evolving global village since it covers a yet unchartered territory. As a leading player in the rapidly expanding field of information technology the ruling by the US apex court could help India evolve its own laws for the settlement of privacy-related disputes.
India’s
nuclear weapon option
Wrinkles
may protect skin
Wanted:
a govt that works faster
A page
from Punjab’s turbulent history
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Doubts, questions remain THE two-member probe panel looking into the killing of King Birendra and his family members has put an official stamp on what some of the members of the royal family had already said: it was Crown Prince Dipendra who did it. Understandably, it will suffer from a serious credibility problem. So ghastly is the crime that few are willing to believe that this is the whole story or even the real story. The doubts originate from the basic premise that a son cannot kill his father, mother, brother and sister so brutally, whatever the provocation may have been there. What is being conveniently forgotten is the combined effect of liquor, hashish, cocaine or whatever else the young Prince was reportedly taking. The enquiry report is silent on the motive by saying that it was not within the periphery of the terms and references set by the new King. But it is quite possible that frustration in love was a powerful motive for an intoxicated mind to go berserk in the heat of the moment. Most private investigations reveal that the late Prince was prone to murderous rage. There are so many witnesses that it is hard to refute that he relied on the gun(s) on that fateful night. The public interest is now set on knowing whether he acted on his own or whether someone else used him. In other words, the conspiracy theory refuses to die down. The palace in Kathmandu exists in a time warp where the customs and traditions are quaint, to say the least. Suffice it to say that most conspiracy theories rule themselves out because of the sheer improbability of someone doing such an amateurish job. After all, it would have been obvious to anyone bent upon eliminating the King Birendra family that he would become an obvious suspect. It is just that the Nepalese consider their royalty divine and cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that the son of a Vishnu-reincarnate can do such a thing. This disbelief is being misused by Maoists to blame everybody from India to the USA. At the other end, there are men like our own Bal Thackrey who makes an equally outlandish claim that it was an ISI plot and that about 120 people were killed! Most of such wild surmises have been fuelled by the bumbling way in which the Nepalese Government and the Palace conducted themselves after the massacre. The initial silence followed by inane explanations that it was an "accidental" firing of a weapon that killed the King and his family were bound to raise suspicions. The gagging of the Press and the arrest of journalists made matters worse. As we wrote earlier, it is necessary for the new King and the government to come out with the whole truth. The enquiry report has left far too many essential questions unanswered. The sooner these are addressed, the better. One thing is for sure. The royal Shah dynasty will never be the same again. |
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Imposed ceasefire IT is a ceasefire extension with a sting in the tail. The major faction of Naga militants will hold fire for one more year and the Centre will bring all Naga-dominated areas under the ceasefire. This means that parts of three adjoining states – Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh – will be covered. True, there will be no real change but it gives a massive psychological boost to the old Naga demand for carving out a Greater Nagalim, or merger of all Naga areas with the present Nagaland. Obviously, NSCN -I-M (National Socialist Council of Nagaland – Isak-Muiva)) had made the ceasefire extension conditional on this. And by succumbing to the pressure the Centre has accepted in principle that the demand for Greater Nagalim has merit, however unstated it is. The ringing rejection of the condition attached to the extension by the three affected states is only the first salvo in what promises to be a bitter feud. It is important to remember that two of them are under Congress rule and Manipur is under President’s rule. Two former Chief Ministers of Manipur, Mr R.K.Dorendra Singh and Mr Radhabinod Koijam, had during the recent crisis accused the Centre of destabilising the state government to pave the way for conceding the NSCN (I-M) demand. Ironically, the Centre has resisted this pressure ever since 1997 but has now given in inexplicably. Once there were reports that the then pointman, Mr Swaraj Kaushal, had agreed to this during the Paris parleys but even the NSCN (I-M) did not make any reference to it. It is disingenious for the Centre to claim that the new twist to the old ceasefire is between two entities – namely, the Centre and the NSCN (I-M) — and the states have nothing to do with it and nothing to fear. It is a vacuous jargon and carries no meaning and clarifies nothing. The three worried states read two dark meanings in this. One, the Centre is partial to peace and does not realise the long-term effect. Two, the fear of their states being further truncated is very real and that will set off a political and social upheaval. Peace should be desired and sought at all times; peace is a reward in itself. And in troubled states rocked by militant violence ceasefire is the second best thing. But
today’s action should not lead to a crisis tomorrow. There are many such incidents in the recent history of the country. It will be
inexcusable if the country invites one more in distant North-East, a deeply troubled region. |
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Protecting privacy THE US Supreme Court on Monday delivered a significant ruling on the basic right to privacy that Americans are entitled to enjoy in their own homes. The ruling should be of interest to every member of the evolving global village since it covers a yet unchartered territory. As a leading player in the rapidly expanding field of information technology the ruling by the US apex court could help India evolve its own laws for the settlement of privacy-related disputes. The case before the US Supreme Court was brought by an individual whose house was "searched" with the help of a thermal device by the police. The homeowner was suspected to have set up a facility for growing marijuana inside the house through heat-control methods. The thermal device proved useful in busting the drug-making business of the houseowner. But while conducting the search with the help of technology the police overlooked the constitutional protection against invasion of privacy available to US citizens under the Fourth Amendment. The case came up for hearing before a nine-member Bench. The homeowner's plea was upheld by a narrow margin of one. Four judges insisted that no search warrant was needed because the infrared scan merely measured the "waste heat" emitted from the exterior of the house, and that the images obtained were too murky to reveal intimate private information or disclose much about the "private activities" in "private areas" of the house. But Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the five-member majority judgement stated categorically that "in the home...all details are intimate details, because the entire area is held safe from prying government eyes". The operative part of the ruling, perhaps, was that homeowners should not be "at the mercy of advanced technology". Unfortunately, in India the right to privacy has seldom been accorded the importance it deserves. Vindictive political leaders have had the mail of ordinary citizens opened for keeping tabs on the activities of their rivals. Tapping of phones is a common complaint which politicians make from time to time. Against this backdrop most Indian political leaders may like to keep the option of abusing the "advances in technology" for committing what can be called "Watergates" against their rivals. Only strong public opinion in favour of adopting the US Supreme Court ruling for the protection of the individual's absolute right to privacy can make them fall in line. |
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OPINION LARGELY under wraps is an important — one may say crucial — facet of India’s nuclear programme and nuclear technology acquisition. It’s the linkage between India’s nuclear power programme and nuclear weapon capability; that Indian nuclear weapon capability is a spin-off from the nuclear power development programme. To comprehend this novel Indian facet of nuclear technology let us take an overall view of the Indian nuclear programme. Focused primarily on atomic power generation and other peaceful applications such as agriculture, industry and the medical domain, India’s nuclear programme kept the weapon option open from the beginning. That was the era of the fifties. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were followed by a new vista of atoms for peace, of nuclear power generation, transformations in agriculture and medical diagnostics and therapy using atomic science and technology. But in the backdrop the ultimate horror of nuclear weapons still loomed large, for the big powers, in particular the USA and the Soviet Union, kept up the race for building nuclear weapon arsenals, with the addition of the hydrogen bomb, and later, the neutron bomb. India under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru was dedicated to the peaceful uses of atomic energy, but it could not wish away the lurking threat posed by nuclear weapons, and so per force Indian option for nuclear weapons was kept open. For both areas — peaceful applications and the weapon option — Dr Homi Bhabha, the architect of India’s nuclear programme, had a clear strategic vision and priorities. A poor country like India cannot afford to give priority to atomic weapons. And uranium enrichment based on the diffusion method, then the prevalent route to weapon making, was ruled out absolutely for the massive input of electricity and other resources that it involved. Bhabha’s vision tied Indian weapon option to plutonium technology, the cheapest route and one most suited to Indian needs of a nuclear watchdog. The Indian weapon option then was to be a byproduct of India’s nuclear power generation plans. A landmark in the buildup of infrastructure for India’s nuclear capability was the construction in 1964-65 of a nuclear spent fuel reprocessing test plant at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) by a team of scientists and engineers headed by Homi Sethna. It is this breakthrough that provided the link between nuclear power production and the weapon option based on the plutonium route. Over the years, as Indian scientists acquired a grip over spent fuel reprocessing technology, the plutonium route to atomic weapons opened up, bypassing the enormously costly uranium enrichment method. India now has four reprocessing plants — while the pioneering BARC unit has become a full-fledged plant, at Tarapur a spent fuel reprocessing plant was built and has been operating for a decade and a half, and the most modern and advanced reprocessing plant has come up at Kalpakkam. The fourth unit, a specialist reprocessing plant, has been built at Kalpakkam itself for reprocessing fast breeder spent fuel, to begin with spent fuel of the fast breeder test reactor (FBTR), which contains weapon grade plutonium in far larger percentage than what is obtained from reprocessing spent fuel of other reactors — thermal or research reactors. And a fifth magnum size reprocessing plant is already in the conceptual stage, to be located in north India for reprocessing spent fuel from Narora and possibly Kakrapar and the upcoming reactors in Rajasthan. The acquisition and rapid development of spent fuel reprocessing technology justifies the Indian scientists’ claim that this country’s route to nuclear weapon capability is a spin-off from the power programme. The cheapest weapon programme anywhere in the world. Albeit, with the limitation that India’s aim is the buildup of a credible nuclear deterrent — and no more. It rules out India joining a nuclear arms race of global proportions — on scientific as well as economic considerations. Another link between the Indian atomic power programme and the weapon option was construction of the high flux research reactor Dhruva, whose indigenous development by a team of leading engineers and scientists headed by Dr Anil Kakodkar in the eighties, denoted acquisition of nuclear technology of a high order. Dhruva, an important tool as a research reactor in the atomic power programme, also provided weapon grade plutonium 239, essential in the plutonium route to nuclear weapons. Plutonium obtained from reprocessing spent fuel from power reactors is not weapon grade. Valuable no doubt for the Indian nuclear programme, as reactor grade fuel for fast breeders and the upcoming Advanced PHW Reactor, this reprocessed plutonium’s structure has a mixture of Pu239, Pu240 and Pu241, undependable for weapons. A small additional source of Pu239 in India is the Cirus research reactor built with Canadian cooperation in 1962. Now the Kalpakkam plant for reprocessing fast breeder spent fuel will considerably augment India’s PU239 pool. But not till Dhruva spent fuel reprocessed plutonium was at hand to enable building a stockpile could India have prudently exercised its weapon option. That flash point in the Indian weapon programme came in 1998 when on May 11 and 13 five tests of varied strength, which included testing of a thermonuclear device, were conducted with great success at Pokhran. In this runup, the 1974 Pokhran test served as a dress rehearsal. Between Pokhran I and Pokhran II, a vast scientific and nuclear technology acquisition by Indian scientific institutions is revealed, a striking advance on all sectors of nuclear capability. But glamorous as the Pokhran II tests appear to be, far more fascinating and absorbing is the uphill road taken by India for building atomic power generation capacity as mapped out by Bhabha, overcoming the constraints of denial by the West of advanced reactor technology. To overcome uranium enrichment problems for reactor fuel — later encountered for operation of the Tarapur reactors built with American turn-key collaboration — India took to pressurised heavy water reactor (PHWR) design of the Canadian type, and has built a chain of PHWRs in different locations of the country, upgrading the design and operational features, particularly the safety aspects, in the process. These are 220 MWe reactors, fuelled by natural uranium, obviating the need for enriched uranium fuel. The last commissioned being the state-of-the-art reactors at Kaiga and Rawatbatta. The next line of 500 MW PHWR construction has now commenced. The second generation reactors now under construction are the fast breeders and the AHWR. Here is the integral link between the nuclear power programme and weapon capability development; and part of the route for the weapon option and the power programme are common, symbolised by Dhruva and spent fuel reprocessing plants. Without these technology achievements the power programme would be lame duck and the weapon option unrealisable. Reaching this stage of capability, India’s nuclear establishment had to cover a long and uphill road — of mastering different facets of nuclear science and technology, building nuclear infrastructure and related industrial capacity even while overcoming the constraints of a severe nuclear blockade imposed on India by the Western powers after the first Indian atomic detonation at Pokhran in 1974. Traversing these stages of India’s nuclear journey is among the glorious chapters in Indian nuclear technology acquisition. On way to implementation of the Bhabha strategy of constructing pressurised heavy water reactors in the first phase, followed by fast breeders, the second and third generation reactors, activating India’s vast thorium reserves in the process, a strong base has been laid for Indian nuclear capability overall by creating a comprehensive research and development network all over the country. This R&D network serves both the nuclear power programme and nuclear weapon capability buildup. In laying this R&D base for nuclear capability, India is ahead of China and Japan, next only to the nuclear big four — the USA, France, Russia and Britain. The country can proudly proclaim this. A glimpse of some of these centres is inspiring. From the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) to BARC to IGCAR at Kalpakkam, the Centre for Advanced Technology (CAT) at Indore, Variable Energy Cyclotron at Calcutta, the Institute of Plasma Research at Ahmedabad. Here is a chain of advanced research centres which provide backup for India’s nuclear operations, overwhelmingly in peaceful nuclear applications — power generation, medical domain, agriculture and industry — but also in the exercise of the weapon option. Today, under the purview of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), along with the atomic power programme and other nuclear applications, the chain of research institutions have generated a number of high technologies, which include lasers for use in surgery and industry, accelerators for nuclear research, Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) at Pune, the biggest in the world outclassing the largest radio telescope presently in the USA, supercomputer systems using parallel processing techniques, advanced remote handling and robotic devices and servo-manipulators for application in industry, scintigraphic techniques used in organ imaging in medical diagnosis, and sophisticated facilities for analysis and characterisation of ultra-pure materials — non-destructive material testing. These technologies provide a reliable common base for atomic capability development, both in peaceful applications and for an effective nuclear weapon deterrent. * * India was able to chart this route to acquisition of nuclear technology thanks to Dr Bhabha’s vision and foresight. Bhabha minced no words that India’s priority had to be nuclear technology for developing power generation capacity. But he also had the scientific knowledge that the route to power development and the weapon option could be inter-related. Dr Bhabha ruled out the setting up of a uranium enrichment plant based on the diffusion method by India, if for no other reason than its economic implications. He, however, favoured India’s acquisition of centrifuge technology for uranium enrichment, still in the process of development in the sixties. Alongside, the Indian nuclear establishment guided by Bhabha’s foresight, focused on the advanced technology of reprocessing nuclear spent fuel which enabled extraction of the valuable man-made fissile element, plutonium. Reactor grade plutonium obtained by reprocessing nuclear spent fuel is a valuable requisite in the Bhabha-divined long-term strategy for building India’s capacity for power generation based on fast breeders. Simultaneously, weapon grade plutonium, obtained by reprocessing spent fuel from research reactors, opened the weapon option for India. Indian weapon capability was thus a spin-off from peaceful applications — the novel Indian route linking nuclear power capacity build-up with weapon capability. This unique Indian route to weapon capability was also the cheapest weapon route anywhere in the world. It imposed no harsh burdens on the Indian economy. On both these considerations, the Indian nuclear establishment under Bhabha’s guidance laid great stress on developing scientific and engineering capabilities for a breakthrough in the advanced technology of reprocessing nuclear spent fuel. And that was in the early years of this country’s nuclear programme. The Indian nuclear establishment knew that reprocessing technology was a closely guarded secret which only the nuclear big four — USA, Soviet Union, France and Britain — possessed. India was the fifth nation to acquire this technology. The Indian breakthrough in this advanced technology came as early as in 1964-65. Unfortunately, this important milestone in India’s developing nuclear capability received no recognition from the nuclear powers. Nor did the Indian political leadership proclaim this great feat of India’s nuclear scientists with a sense of pride. Rather, the Indian leadership, suffering from obsession that it might be bracketed along with powers opting for nuclear weapons, kept this major nuclear technological breakthrough more or less under wraps. For this sin, India suffered — and continues to suffer. Its status downgraded, it was lumped with the non-weapon untouchables under the NPT. For its PNE in 1974, India was barricaded with a “Chakravyuha” thrown round it, from which it has still not been able to break out completely. |
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TRENDS AND POINTERS HERE’S a new wrinkle in cancer research: people with smooth faces run a higher risk than those with wrinkles of developing the most common form of skin cancer. Researchers at the University of Manchester in England found that people with relatively heavy wrinkling were 90 per cent less likely to develop basal cell carcinoma — a slow-growing, easily treatable cancer that often appears on the face. That confirms what many dermatologists have observed, but it might surprise many non-experts: wrinkles are often associated with sun exposure, and sun exposure raises the risk of skin cancer. The findings do not mean people should feel free to become sun-worshippers, said Dr Christopher Griffiths, one of the authors of the study, which appears in Friday’s issue of the “Archives of Dermatology”. Sun exposure is strongly linked to other forms of skin cancer, including the deadliest:
melanoma. The study involved 118 white people over age 50 who visited a dermatology center at a Manchester hospital. Griffiths said it is not clear why those with more wrinkles are less likely to get basal cell cancer, but the explanation may lie in how the skin repairs itself.
AP Vitamin C aids cancer-causing agents Vitamin C, an essential nutrient found in fruits and vegetables and taken in large doses by many people as a dietary supplement, is a double-edged sword, providing benefits but also inducing the production of compounds associated with cancer, researchers have said. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania added vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid, to solutions of a degraded version of an important fatty acid found in blood, and found that it triggered the production of DNA-damaging agents known to cause mutations associated with a variety of cancers. Lead researcher Ian Blair of the university’s Center for Cancer Pharmacology on Thursday cautioned that the study was conducted in a test tube and not with living human cells or in actual people. “Absolutely for God’s sake don’t say vitamin C causes cancer,” Blair said in a telephone interview. “The key finding is that vitamin C can do good things and bad things. And we’ve figured out what the bad ones are. In terms of the impact, I think it just redirects people’s attention to the fact that you can’t replace a good diet with magic bullets such as vitamin C.” The value of vitamin C has been the subject of a long and heated debate in the scientific community. One of the leading scientists of the 20th century, Linus Pauling, who died at age 93 in 1994, championed it as a tool for fighting cancer. But skeptics argued that numerous studies have found that vitamin C produced no benefit in combating cancer, and that taking supplements actually could have negative consequences. The new study appears to add weight to those concerns.
Reuters Walk tall & live longer Tall people tend to live longer, say scientists who examined hundreds of skeletons in northeast England dating back to the ninth century. It seems people who lack height have been disadvantaged for centuries when it comes to lifespan but it’s not clear whether this is a purely modern phenomenon or has always been the case. The findings were reported on Thursday in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The 490 skeletons chosen were among about 3,000 sets of remains unearthed from graves at St Peter’s Church in the small town of Barton on Humber not far from Grimsby. The remains dated from the 9th century to about 1850. Researchers led by Dr David Gunnell, from the Department of Social Medicine at Bristol University, measured the lengths of all available bones to the nearest millimetre. Sex and age at death were then calculated using standard methods. They found that walking tall has always gone hand in hand with living longer. For centuries people of short stature have tended to lead shorter lives too.
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ON THE SPOT MURLI
Manohar Joshi was accosted by a group of us hacks at a dinner he hosted for a Maldivian minister in Delhi recently. We were more interested in him than his guest and sought his views on subjects ranging from Kashmir to mass literacy. During the course of this impromptu discourse a question came on why he had made no moves to make elementary education compulsory so that the first real step towards mass literacy could be taken. He said he was not worried about literacy. Literacy rates in the country were already over 65 per cent, he said, and in his view it was only a couple of years before it went over 70 per cent and the cheering thing was that the gap between male and female literacy rates was lessening. No, he said, the problem was not literacy but nutrition. How could we expect normal mental development in children who did not get enough to eat through their childhood? Inevitably, someone pointed out that government granaries were bursting with food — we have more than twice that we need as a buffer stock — so why did he not start a school midday meal scheme? It is now accepted wisdom that Tamil Nadu’s literacy rates improved dramatically on account of this kind of scheme. His answer was that he had been shouting himself hoarse on the need for exactly such a scheme to be implemented countrywide. So, why has it not happened? Because, he said, the Agriculture Ministry and other ministries whose help is vital for such a scheme to succeed worked at their own pace. It takes six months sometimes, he said with refreshing candour, for me to get an answer to queries made at the highest official level. I tell you this story to give you an example of the key negative factor in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government: he has failed completely to give us a government that works faster and better than the governments that went before. It has to be said here that it is not entirely his fault. He inherited a government structure that was not just rotten to the core but non-functional to a criminal degree. This is one of the reasons why people got sick of forty years of Congress rule. Where the Prime Minister cannot be absolved of blame is in his seeming inability to make the necessary changes. The result is deep frustration among his own ministers. Mr Joshi is far from being the only minister whose attempts to bring about change have been thwarted by red tape and an indifferent bureaucracy who have a vested interest in ensuring that change does not happen. I have personally spoken to several ministers who, on conditions of anonymity, admit that their best laid plans go awry because of the rigmarole of procedures that strangle the lifeblood of good governance. Just take the fact that it takes a year, at the least, for a new idea to receive the approval of the Cabinet and Parliament and you understand the seriousness of the problem. If this were not bad enough you have the additional problem of our babus having acquired a vested interest in preventing any changes. The Congress model of ‘socialist’ governance had as one of its fundamental planks the idea of government being a provider of jobs so there is not a government office in the country which does not have between five and ten people doing what should be one man’s job. Let me give you just one small example. I went to meet a minister — one of our best young ministers — recently and this is the number of people I met before getting to his office. First, there was a peon sitting on a wooden bench in the corridor who asked who I wanted to see. When I told him he directed me to two other peons sitting on a wooden bench further up the corridor who asked me the same question. They then took me into an office crammed with desks, files and clerks. Upon mentioning that I had an appointment with the minister, one of the clerks rose and introduced me to an official in another office. This official then took me to the minister’s private secretary who rang a bell that summoned yet another peon who took my card in to the minister. In most other countries, the only person between me and the minister would have been his private secretary. In our country because we have so many people in between, most have only minimal work to do. So they take long lunches and chat for hours with relatives and friends — on tax-payers money — and in order to show that they are working spend a few hours in the day pushing dusty files around. If there is change, then they would all have to start working for their money. So why should they want change? The result is that even important things do not get done. Let me give you a few examples. The Planning Commission in its approach paper for the 10th five-year-plan admits in so many words that of the money we spend on poverty alleviation schemes only Rs 10 or Rs 15 of Rs 100 actually goes to the poor. The rest gets eaten up along the way. The Prime Minister and the Finance Minister have spoken for several months now about the need to change this shocking state of affairs. But nothing has so far happened. Then let us take the Public Distribution System, set up in the socialist time to provide cheap food to those who live below the poverty line. Of this food for the poor an estimated 36 per cent of wheat, 31 per cent of rice and 23 per cent of sugar gets diverted to those who are not poor which means that around Rs 4,000 crore of this food subsidy goes to those who do not need it. Since P.V. Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister we have been talking about the need to change this. Nothing has happened. The list of other important areas that require immediate change is too long for this column but to give you only a couple more examples allow me to remind you that the Food Corporation of India is another institution that needs complete revamping. Not only are its officials believed to be corrupt but their incompetence is of such a magnitude that thousands of tonnes of grain get eaten up by rats every year. The rest rots in the open because the FCI is unable to build enough storage space for it. Judicial reform which Arun Jaitley is trying desperately to push through and which the country even more desperately needs is embroiled in its own procedural delays. The minister has announced the willingness of the central government to pay for the setting up of 1,734 ‘fast track’ courts so that every district in India would have five. If less than 500 have come up so far it is because several Chief Ministers have not even bothered to reply to the minister’s letter. So what can be done? Well, what is needed is strong leadership from the Prime Minister and we can only hope that when his knee has healed, he will be strong enough to provide it. |
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DOWN MEMORY LANE THE recent death of Wing Commander Kamaljit Singh (retd) sent my mind nearly forty years back, to the early sixties, during a turbulent period in Punjab’s history. That was when the Akali leader, Master Tara Singh, had undertaken a fast for the creation of Punjabi suba. The fast began at a tumultuous gathering near the Akal Takht. Although his politics was controversial, Master Tara Singh was much respected after the notable path he had fought for during the partition. When in independent India he gave a call for the Punjabi suba, not only was Punjab convulsed, the whole of India was in ferment, everyone wondering whether it would affect the unity of the country. It was a major story of the time. We were a group of reporters who had come to Amritsar from Delhi and Chandigarh to cover the fast. Delegation after delegation, representing political parties, intellectual groups and religious associations, came from all over the country to plead with Masterji. Even the foreign Press, thinking that something far-reaching was going to happen in the border state of Punjab, shifted correspondents to Punjab. Master Tara Singh was a delightful political personality. You could meet him with a little persuasion. He was truthful and honest. You could ask him any question, even unpleasant ones but he never took umbrage. We would be usually treated to tea and sometimes delicious dal that came from the langar. As the fast lengthened the family felt alarmed about his health and persuaded us not to crowd around him too much. His family included his daughter, Rajender Kaur. Many years later during the militancy, after Master Tara Singh had passed away, Rajender Kaur was gunned down. I have fond memories of the family. Most of the reporters could speak Punjabi. I suffered the disadvantage of not being able to understand the finer points in Punjabi. This was grievous when Master Tara Singh spoke in chaste Punjabi. It was here that I must express my gratitude to his family who filled my mind with proper translations of what Masterji said in impromptu comments. Would you believe that many months later, after the suba controversy had died down, Master Tara Singh came to my newspaper office in New Delhi to meet me? Around his camp during most of the formal and informal confabulations there was usually an anti-government atmosphere. But here was a man in Masterji’s family who was an officer of the armed forces. He was Kamaljit Singh, son-in-law of Master Tara Singh. He was a young officer and many wondered whether he was embarrassed to be there. But he was a model of rectitude and good behaviour. He was there on leave to look after Master Tara Singh’s comfort. He was a great gentleman. He never took part in political discussions. He kept away from the media too. Everyone came to admire him. Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister. Sardar Partap Singh Kairon was the Chief Minister. One of Master Tara Singh’s major aides was Sardar Gurnam Singh, a former High Court judge who later became the Chief Minister of Punjab. The fear was that as the fast lengthened out Master Tara Singh would be arrested and taken to hospital for being forcibly fed. One of the police advisers who had come from Delhi was Surinder Nath, the senior officer who later became Governor and was killed in an aircrash. He used to live in the same hotel where the media stayed (in fact next to my room). He came and went but he never gave a hint of what was going to happen. Of all the family members whom we followed was Kamaljit Singh. As Master Tara Singh’s followers would get heated up against the government, most of us wondered how Kamaljit Singh, a member of the armed forces, would be reacting. But he never interfered with what was happening. Apart from looking after the personal needs of Masterji, he was a model of non-interference. He was gentle and sober and earned everybody’s praise. God bless the likes of him. |
Alleged kidnapping of Children VERY lately, there was a rumour that at a certain railway station near Jubbulpore, an unclaimed bedding containing the bodies of two boys of 8 years each had been found before the arrival of the train. It was also stated that some people were kidnapping children and putting them in bags (boris) and ruining away. That this belief is not absolutely untrue is shown to the following:- A chumar boy, named Lalo, 9 years old, was on the point of being kidnapped in Gun Carriage Factory Estate on June 1st while minding his cows. The boy was first chloroformed and made senseless and then tied in a cloth. This was noticed by certain coolies working on railway siding. They came running, while those two culprits ran leaving the senseless boy. Two men perused but the culprits made good their escape. The police is investigating into the case. |
Mansoor laughed when he was being killed. He laughed so loudly that the people who were killing him could not contain their curiosity. They asked, "Mansoor, what is the matter? Are you mad or something? Why are you laughing? He said, "I am laughing because you are killing somebody else. This body is not Mansoor — I am not it. If you think I have committed a crime by declaring myself God, then punish me. Why are you punishing this body? This poor body has done nothing. Why are you cutting my legs and my hands? It is like punishing the house of a man who has committed a crime - this is sheer stupidity. That is why I am laughing?. Mansoor was killed in a far more inhuman way than Jesus. He was cut piece by piece. He said again: "I am laughing at God because I am telling Him 'You cannot deceive me. Even if You come in the form of these butchers, I know You, I recognise You, I love You, I worship You because even in these hands who are cutting me and killing me it is Your energy and no body else...." —
Osho, Zen: The Special Transmission ***** Tolerate the limitations and weaknesses of others; there are many limitations in you which are tolerated by others. Taking another to be a sinner do not pride yourself on your being a virtuous person. Who knows when things may take such a turn in life that you may be compelled to commit sins like him. **** As soon as you hear something against you from the lips of a person, do not take him to be your opponent straight off. Look out for the reason for his opposition and make a sincere effort to remove that cause. It may be, the cause lies within you which you have failed to detect so long or without any evil intention, he has merely been carried away by circumstances. Under such circumstances you should respond with peace and love. —
Hanuman Poddar, Wavelets of Bliss |
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