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| Monday, July 9, 2001, Chandigarh, India   
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Hurriyat: Pak game plan Jaya’s climbdown
Indian politics in information age |
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North and
South
Anupam Gupta
New way to have designer babies
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Hurriyat: Pak game plan SOME
time ago reports emanating from Islamabad had it that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf would not insist on meeting All-Party Hurriyat Conference leaders during his visit to India. This was in keeping with the sensitivities of New Delhi. Within a few days, however, Pakistan has changed its stand. It has now declared that Hurriyat leaders will be among the invitees to the high tea being organised by the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi on July 14 in honour of President Musharraf. Besides this, the ruling General wishes that the Hurriyat should be involved at some stage in the India-Pakistan peace process going to be launched in Agra. Pakistan has begun to play the Hurriyat card knowing well that India has serious reservations about the conglomerate as it is composed of mostly pro-Islamabad and anti-New Delhi interest groups and in no way represents the aspirations of all sections of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. President Musharraf's game plan is clear. He wants to exploit the sentiments of the Pakistanis on the Kashmir question for his political goals. Islamabad's latest rhetoric on an "increase in incidents of rape and molestation of women by security forces" in Jammu and Kashmir makes things crystal clear. But this is bad diplomacy. This is also against the assurance Prime Minister Vajpayee and General Musharraf gave to each other — that both sides will not issue any provocative statement to spoil the pre-summit atmosphere — when the Indian leader congratulated the Pakistani ruler on the telephone on his assuming the post of President. Of course, Pakistan has invested hugely in the Hurriyat and it is not so easy for the General to dump the multi-party group when Kashmir is going to figure prominently in the Agra parleys. Moreover, the Hurriyat leadership has been begging Pakistan for some kind of face-saving gesture after the signals of its being ignored during President Musharraf's visit. The Hurriyat feared that it was being sidelined by Pakistan on this occasion and it would erode its base in the valley. Whatever Hurriyat leaders’ problems and Islamabad's compulsions vis-a-vis its proteges on this side of the Indo-Pak divide, there are certain norms which have to be observed by a visiting dignitary. He should do nothing to embarrass the host country. New Delhi has a valid point in asking President Musharraf to avoid any direct contact with those who have been doing all they could to harm India's interests, misleading the people in the Kashmir valley. After all, what should be more important than anything else on this occasion is that the Vajpayee-Musharraf dialogue sets in motion not only a process of finding a peaceful solution to the Kashmir dispute but also creates an atmosphere of mutual trust and understanding. |
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Jaya’s climbdown HER
pride deeply hurt, the Tamil tigress, Ms Jayalalitha, is desperately trying to salvage whatever she could from the disastrous arrest misadventure. The media has turned against her after she snubbed reporters by refusing to meet them and then by arresting several of them when they went to meet her arch rival, Mr Karunanidhi, in Chennai central jail. The people are by and large either angry or sullen. Only her ardent fans are with her and they are in a minority. The Centre is critical of her arbitrary action and has said so by issuing her a stern well publicised warning. Her ideas of rebuilding bridges with the BJP lie in ruins. She has bought time by ordering a judicial inquiry into all aspects of the arrest on the midnight of June 30. For the present the report should be ready in three months but then anything can happen in three months. For instance, the Supreme Court may dispose of the public interest litigation petitions challenging her appointment as Chief Minister. If the judgement goes against her, it is curtains for Ms Jayalalitha. By the middle of December she has to get elected to the Assembly to retain her job and that may not be easy. It is all so messy and for a person who wants to have the final word on all matters, unnerving. Right now she has loyal officers in all key posts but bureaucrats and policemen are known for their fickle loyalty, particularly when the leader is losing her office and also her way. These are minor problems compared to the certain possibility of judicial antagonism. So far the courts have refused to cow down to her awesome despotism. And she cannot afford to invite a confrontation with the judiciary. Ms Jayalalitha’s fate is virtually in the hands of judges. Her appeal against conviction in three cases decided by a special court is pending before the Madras High Court and an adverse verdict in any one of them will abruptly end her political career. It is a nightmare for Ms Jayalalitha, a former film heroine, who dreads to become a future vamp. And the Principal Sessions Judge of Chennai and the High Court have passed strictures against her government and the police. The lower court castigated the police for ignoring its orders to produce former Chief Minister Karunanidhi before a doctor before sending him to jail. The High Court condemned the implied political vendetta in the way the arrest was organised and effected. If the judiciary turns anti-Jayalalitha, she has no place to go and hence her spectacular
climbdown. |
Indian politics in information age SOUTHERN India gave the country its first Silicon Valley and, many decades earlier, was a social innovator. Caste politics might have gone awry since then but Tamil Nadu’s pioneering work in social engineering has been unique. Is it any wonder then that Chennai, as it is now called, should lead the country again in connecting the information age to politics? Take the case of the arrests of the former Tamil Nadu Chief
Minister, Mr M. Karunanidhi, and two Union Ministers belonging to the DMK. Without the videotape showing the police bodily removing a protesting Karunanidhi and an unwilling Murasoli Maran in the dead of night, it would have been a traditional slanging match between the two Dravidian parties. It was the video footage that raised the incident to a national disgrace. How come a television crew was in attendance on the DMK leaders in the wee hours of the morning to catch the footage that left the country stunned and got the Vajpayee coalition government working overtime on the problem? It was, in a sense, a family affair. Sun TV is run by Mr Murasoli Maran’s progeny and since the Union Minister, who is the former Chief Minister’s nephew, happened to be in Chennai and lives a stone’s throw away, Sun TV was duly alerted and came charging along with Mr Maran. Belatedly, Jaya TV, the mouth piece of the AIADMK, came into the picture and sought to limit the damage by showing another set of videotapes (the so-called police tapes) before the punching and screaming began. But the battle had already been lost and in the information age, it is a question of who gets in first. In any
event, the placid clips of the “police tapes” were no match for the riveting tapes of Sun TV, disseminated widely. Jaya TV has not claimed authorship of the “police tapes”. Quite apart from the propriety of one party assuming office and seeking to settle scores with its rival party, the battle of the tapes is a lesson for all Indian politicians and parties. The information age has arrived with a vengeance and an essential kit in a political party’s armoury must now be a well-equipped television set-up. American politicians had learnt decades ago that the medium was the message and that in the information age the first sound byte was worth its weight in gold. Indian politicians must now learn the same lesson. It is said that history repeats itself as a farce and recent events in Tamil Nadu would seem to bear it out. Ms Jayalalitha was herself imprisoned briefly when Mr Karnunanidhi came to power in the state. The farcical overtones of the repeat performance by one political rival to get even with the other, with the timing of the arrest and the manner in which it was accomplished, were plain for all to see, courtesy Sun TV. In politics, as in films, there is a larger-than-life dimension to Tamil politics. Is it any wonder then that starting with M.G.Ramachandran — MGR to one and all — the principal politicians are intimately connected with the tinsel world? Ms Jayalalitha was once MGR’s leading lady and Mr Karunanidhi is no mean film script writer. The latter’s son and Chennai mayor, given the improbable name of Stalin, is being groomed as a script writer to give him legitimacy on the political stage. The rest of the country might not emulate Tamil Nadu in every respect but others must catch up with the Tamil politicians’ information agesavvy. With the advent of television, politicians were required to be telegenic. Now with the spread of satellite television, it is a new ball game again. The need of the hour is to be first with the story and to get it out with the visuals first. As the Tehelka tapes so dramatically revealed, the written word is now a poor cousin to the impact of the visual — the moving picture — in reporting or making a political point. Other societies exposed to the demands of the information age earlier have had to make adjustments (some of them painful). India is still a jungle country in this
regard, with more than a whiff of the American Wild West in the air. With time, there must arrive conventions, if not regulations, to bring some order — and fairness — to this jungle. India can imbibe some lessons learnt the hard way by other societies that were pioneers in the information age. The nature of the beast being what it is, it is taken for granted that speed and visuals will give the practitioner an initial advantage. The first impact is the most telling and later explanations run a poor second. Here again, the Tehelka tapes are a good example because they shone a spotlight on a known evil -corruption in the corridors of power — and took in its sweep the guilty and the innocent alike. For the Tehelka editors, making the main point was more important than the fate and careers of those (including the innocent) who were unwittingly caught by candid camera. Tamil Nadu’s significant contribution is in marrying the information age to politics. Even before the arrival of satellite television, there was a heroic quality to Tamil politics, with its cult of giant cut-outs of leaders and extravagant processions of vans dressed in fancy hues providing a world of make-believe to the people. It is as if the actor-politicians were turning the real world into a version of the film world they were more at home in. The people loved it because it was free entertainment spiced with saucy political messages. Tamil politicians are now learning that with satellite television, they are elevating their extravaganzas to the national stage, with some unforeseen consequences. Settling local scores has a different resonance nationally. The absurdity of arresting a former Chief Minister in the dead of night on corruption charges was compounded manifold by film clips showing him being dragged away by the police. The argument of Ms Jayalalitha’s followers that she herself was imprisoned by Mr Karunanidhi’s government does not sound convincing. The dot com revolution has seen the sprouting of hundreds of thousands of big and small institutions seeking to connect the country to the new age. With satellite television and Tamil Nadu’s innovative brand of politics, we shall soon see the growth of new institutions seeking to teach politicians how to use the tools of the new age forpartisan profit. —
The writer is a former Editor of The Statesman. |
North and South ONE fine morning I was asked to leave for Bangalore to market kinnows, a citrus variety. I was to move to the Silicon Valley of India in an attempt to earn more money by selling to the people of South India kinnow nectar, which we North Indians are so used to. While packing my bags to the destined place my eagerness to be in Bangalore kept allowing a smirk on my face which was not to the liking of my wife. The reason was that I was leaving my betterhalf behind and moreover she knew Bangalore as more of a Pub city than a place which housed “Infosys” the mega software company. Knowing that the mouse shall play when the cat is far-away the idea of my being left amongst temptations didn’t impress her much. Anyway I was able to convince her that my going to Bangalore was imperative and pledged to her my word that I shall not play the fool. Her nod was enough to put me airborne Southward. In common parlance of us North Indians anything that is South of India is “Madras”,&Isquo;Madras’. The people, the food and language in Southern India has one term in proverbial Punjabi, “Madrasi”. My first tryst with the Madrasi culture was in the flight itself when the pretty looking air hostess asked me: “Vegetarian or non-vegetarian “Non vegetarian obviously,” I retorted with that same silly smirk, which I had before leaving. My request granted me a chicken dosa, an unheard of dish, which seemed like a distant cousin of our Kathi Kebab. I think we North Indians can spend hours and hours discussing of what virtue Dosa and Idli are in comparison to our Tandoori Murga and Prantha, not realising that the Madrasis have progressed far more than the people “Sada Punjab” who have remained midgets in the IT revolution. The tele-serial “Ghar-Jamai”, is a true reflection of a Punjabi’s attitude towards a South Indian. But of what goodness is an attitude when it beckons moronic behaviour. I mean a Punjabi would prefer to show his superiority by trying to outclass his Madrasi friend in an alcohol drinking bout rather than proving his intelligence. He drinks till he becomes befuddled and after that he wants to display his might. “Muscle is mightier than the brain” he seems to be telling everybody after his drinking round and soon he picks up a fight with a non-entity in his life. All this for what? Simply to impress the Madrasi. In any case we Punjabis are all the same and one day in Bangalore my ego prompted me to teach a software engineer a lesson for he was talking incremental and it is a crime to talk Hi-Fi to a Punjabi. But the match ended with the worst hangover of my life. After a month of an overdose of etiquette, beer, cyber-cafes and English speaking taxi drivers I wanted to head back home. No woman seemed interesting and no pub suggested that I might as well stay longer. The only thing I wanted to do was take a flight back to Chandigarh. My rationale suggested that since I was headed north I should get North Indian food on my flight back”. Chicken Dosa was what came to me again and I barked: “Vegetarian”. |
Tamil Nadu: arresting moment for all legal brains A little more than a week after television in Tamil Nadu triggered off a national outrage and the “politics of the visual” almost turned the Constitution of India inside out — with even such a capable Union Law Minister as Mr Arun Jaitley speaking of a constitutional crisis — saner counsel has started emerging on all sides. The strain that the Chennai developments cast on legal thinking was best brought out only yesterday by none other than Attorney General Soli Sorabjee, who himself played a highly responsible role in calming down tempers in the Union Cabinet after the release of the two Central ministers. “The insistent requests by enthusiastic young mediapersons”, wrote Soli on July 8 in his Times of India column, “to explain the constitutional implications of various Articles and options open to the Centre in just one minute on the telephone credited me with (a) prowess and ability which I do not possess.” That is a deliberately light-hearted way of alluding to a grave crisis that rocked the nation barely a few days ago. And that the Attorney General chose to use his column for the purpose so soon after the crisis blew over is not, I believe, without considerable significance. No government, in the state or at the Centre, said Soli, should act like a police state, resorting to midnight-knock arrest, unless there is an overwhelming urgency and a well-founded apprehension that the person might escape. He was dealing with the justification offered by the Chennai police that they had followed the practice in the state of arresting political leaders before dawn to avoid any ugly or unseemly incident. The dark hours of the night, he said, quoting the late (and great) Justice S.R. Tendolkar of the Bombay High Court, are associated with dark deeds. Misguided by her own zeal in seeking revenge — hell hath seen no fury like a woman jailed — and having messed up the whole business of bringing Mr Karunanidhi to justice, as he, in his time, had brought her, Chief Minister Jayalalitha would surely keep this pregnant metaphor in mind while plotting her moves for the future. But it is for the judiciary of the state of Tamil Nadu that the Attorney General, one of India’s ablest lawyers, reserves his most incisive comments. “There were other extraordinary features of the Tamil Nadu episode,” he wrote. “The magistrate who held Court at three in the morning and ordered judicial remand for Karunanidhi without questioning the need for urgency, subsequently discerned serious legal infirmities in the procedures adopted and lambasted the police for its action.” “Apparently,” quipped Soli, excelling in sarcasm, “the human brain does not function fully during the wee hours of the morning.” There can be no other explanation for the craven and cowardly manner in which the judge in question — actually not a magistrate but Chennai Principal Sessions Judge Ashok Kumar — remanded Mr Karunanidhi to judicial custody upto July 10 the very first time he was produced before him. Remanded him to jail, that is, not for one, two, or three days but for a full ten days upto July 10. “Is your heart made of muscle or mud?” the same judge asked the Chennai police later on July 3, denouncing its misbehaviour with Mr Karunanidhi. “He is a 78-year-old man suffering from various health ailments....What was the pressure on you?” What, pray, was the pressure on the judge himself that he did not ask the question when Mr Karunanidhi was first produced before him on the night intervening June 30 and July 1? Why did he not abort the mischief there and then by refusing to remand Mr Karunanidhi and releasing him on bail that very night? Or even on his own bond? With years of judicial experience behind him — he is a Sessions Judge, after all, and not a fledgling magistrate newly initiated into the arcane mysteries of the legal process — why should it have required a storm in the country to break out for him to realise that the man before him could not have been arrested the way he had been? And why should it have required the Attorney General of India to have raised this point for anyone else, including yours truly, to acquire the courage to raise it? “An old invalid with poor vision, sleeping in his bedroom, a respectable person, Chief Minister four times, does not need to be disturbed by midnight knock and dragged and roughed up,” wrote an emotional Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer in The Hindu on July 2. “If the eye will not lie (he said), the television media luridly showed a ghastly scene of rude use of brute power by a crowd in uniform, the solitary valetudinarian, octogenarian victim in bed, struggling and crying — a scene of woe the like of which my eyes have never before seen, nor my heart conceived, nor my pen or tongue could adequately tell.” But even Justice Iyer, for all the brilliance of his fury and the fury of his brilliance, has not a word to say about the colossal dereliction of duty by the judicial man on the spot, the Sessions Judge (or the magistrate in other cases) whom the Constitution, following hoary common law tradition, obligates, at first instance and within the first 24 hours, to safeguard a detenu’s human rights and to inculcate the ethic of discipline in the arresting authority. It is alright for the police — the “crude khaki crowd” as Justice Iyer chooses to call it and the favourite whipping boy of jurisprudence — to be held responsible for human rights violations. But the crude coalescence of the court and the prosecution which occurs indiscriminately in the lower reaches of the criminal justice system, and has now begun to infiltrate its higher levels as well, when will that begin to be rectified? Or even detected? But let us leave the court system at that and go back to the executive. And to the doctrine of federal immunity, or immunity of federal ministers from state process, propounded by law minister Arun Jaitley in his briefings to the Union Cabinet and press briefings outside. For all my admiration for Arun Jaitley as a lawyer and as law minister, I cannot but flinch at the consequences of his views. I am relieved, however, of the burden of framing my disagreement in appropriate terms by Cho Ramaswamy’s withering piece on the subject yesterday in The Hindustan Times. As the redoubtable doyen of Tamilian journalism, Cho’s blazing independence of thought and pen needs no introduction. Arun Jaitley, reports Cho in his article “Unionising the Union”, believes that the state police have no authority to arrest Union ministers and dubs it as a violation of the Constitution. And also that the state police have no right to enter the residential premises of a Union minister, even if they suspect the presence of an accused in a case within the premises. Jaitley would, Cho infers, confer a constitutional immunity from the process of law on Union ministers, whatever may be the offences with which they are charged. He would also extend to the residence of Union ministers (within the territory of a state) the diplomatic immunity that is granted to the premises of foreign embassies. The inferences drawn from the facts reported may be slightly exaggerated but it would not be wrong to say that, broadly speaking, Jaitley’s utterances in the days immediately following the arrest of Karunanidhi did convey that impression. In any case, what Cho then goes on to say or posit has my complete approval and I can do no better than quote his exact words: “Are we to understand (he writes) that, henceforth, Union ministers, who are accused of obstructing the police from carrying out their duties and assaulting them, are immune from arrest? “Are we to get reconciled to the idea that Union ministers can also function as roving judges, empowered to decide on the spot the legality or otherwise of any police action, in any state? “Are we to recognise that the houses of Union ministers in a state are islands of immunity from the police and the law? “And if these principles, as enunciated by the Union law minister, are not accepted by a state government, are we to apprehend the break-down of the constitutional machinery in that cursed state?” Cho then savages the law minister in a manner that is so typically his. “Jaitley (he writes) has not just amended the law orally, he has recast it. I am surprised that with such a deft hand at its disposal, the Union government should have taken the trouble of appointing a commission to review the working of the Constitution! Jaitley, if entrusted with the responsibility, can finish the job in the course of a few appearances on the TV.” Under the Constitution as it stands orally amended by the law minister (Cho continues), or perhaps under the original Constitution itself, the Union government was threatening Tamil Nadu with the imposition of President’s rule on the ground that the constitutional machinery had broken down in the state. But with the charges against the two Union ministers having been dropped and Karunanidi having been released, the threat has been withdrawn and the constitutional machinery has started running again! If it requires (says Cho) only the arrest of two Union ministers and a former chief minister to cause a break-down of the constitutional machinery, then the “fragility of that contraption is indeed frightening”. Jayalalitha, Cho concludes comprehensively, had to quench her thirst for revenge; she did it by arresting Karunanidhi. The Centre had to keep the DMK satisfied; they did it by imposing themselves on the Tamil Nadu government. The media had to teach a lesson to a party elected much against its (own) concerted campaign; they have done so by putting aside the police video, and accepting the Sun TV recording as the only authentic report of the entire episode. The leaders of public opinion had to exhibit their faith in human rights; they did it by conferring on one individual (Karunanidhi), the rights that can never be dreamt of by the (mass of) people of this country. “Caught in the crossfire of this multi-cornered mendacity, the concept of equality before law has been badly mauled.”
A bit cynical perhaps, a bit too astute, but not far from the truth. More on Tamil Nadu next week. |
Anti-Asiatic Bill IF the telegram published in these columns, summing up a statement received by a Calcutta contemporary from its Delhi correspondent, means anything it means that an announcement is about to be made in the Union Parliament either for the consideration of the Anti-Asiatic Bill or materially modifying it. Nothing else can be meant by the statement that “the forthcoming announcement will record success for the labours of Lord Reading’s Government and the ascendency in the counsels of the Union Government of a saner element which looks ahead and will rise above petty mindedness in dealing with a great racial issue.” So many conflicting statements have, however, been made on this subject during the last six months that the public would prefer not to hallow until it is actually out of the wood. One thing is certain. The Indian problem in South Africa is much wider than the question of the abandonment or modification of the Anti-Asiatic Bill, and as regards that “it remains to be thrashed out.” |
New way to have designer babies A
brave new world of consumer choice, where couples who want a baby can opt to have either a girl or a boy, is beckoning from across the Atlantic where a clinic has already produced nearly 200 designer babies with the help of a sperm-sorting machine. The success of the technique, its simplicity and relatively low cost raise the imminent prospect of a new wave of pilgrims from the ethically disapproving countries of the UK and Europe travelling to the USA to secure the baby they want. The procedure takes only a few hours and costs US $ 2,000. Most of the couples who have visited the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, want a girl or a boy for personal reasons, although the technique is also being used to enable couples to avoid inherited medical disorders that run in one or the other sex in their family. Harvey Stern, clinical geneticist at the institute, said he had no problem with the ethics of helping couples to have a child of their preferred sex, although he recognised that it would not be acceptable in some other countries. “I look at this as helping couples to have healthy, wanted children,’’ he said, as he revealed the clinic’s latest results at the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. “Many of the couples say, `I love my sons or daughters, but I would like to have a girl because I want to buy little dresses or I want a boy so I can leave my vineyards to my son.’’’ Couples are not accepted for treatment unless they have at least one child of the opposite gender from the one they are seeking. Selecting the sex of a child by screening embryos created in the laboratory is forbidden in Britain by the human fertilisation and embryology authority (HFEA), unless it is to eliminate the risk of a baby who would inherit a gender-related medical condition, such as haemophilia or muscular dystrophy, which run in boys. Ethicists and religious groups are opposed to unnatural selection. Nuala Scarisbrick of Life said it was wrong to reject a potential new human being on the grounds of gender. “Any kind of interference with the process of conception is wrong,’’ she said.
The Guardian |
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It is said that Brahman is lightening. It is called lightening because it cleaves. He who knows that lightening is Brahman cleaves sin, for Brahman is lightening. — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, V, 7 *** There are good many faculties lying hidden in what is called the subconscious and the unconscious mind of man. These are lying deep down, hidden and as it were, in deep sleep or in a state of obscuration but it appears that man has not yet come to know about these faculties and therefore feels that he is weak. *** A high peak is but a small, rock to a self reliant person. *** A soul-conscious person is always forgiving. — B.K. Jagdish Chander, Human Values, Moral Values and Spiritual Values
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