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Wednesday,
August 14, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Meaning of Kalam’s visit Hurriyat’s welcome response Managing water |
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Indian idea: towards fraternity-III
Home they left, desperate
One-step method to revolutionise photography
Newborn named after horse
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Meaning of Kalam’s visit By selecting Gujarat as the destination for his first official visit outside Delhi, President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had made it obvious how anguished he was by the human tragedy that had befallen Mahatma Gandhi’s home state. And on reaching there on Monday, when he exhorted the state authorities that the relief and rehabilitation work should be expedited, the message was dignified and subtle, but quite clear: a lot remains undone, deliberately or otherwise. Just this much prodding from the First Citizen of the country should be enough to galvanise the lazy ones and shame the partisan ones. One hopes that the BJP leaders who joined issue with the Chief Election Commissioner would not be as indiscreet and take the advice from the father-figure in the right spirit and with due respect and humility. Mind you, the President studiously avoided stirring up any controversy and adhered strictly to the exalted norms associated with the high office that he occupies. It is another matter that the state government tried to give him a “conducted tour”, apparently to soften the contours of the harsh reality. But if the Chief Minister or someone else thinks that he has managed to hoodwink Mr Kalam, he is wrong, because the President can see through the bureaucratic smokescreen. One positive spin-off was that the relief work that had been ignored for months was done at the last moment, including the disbursement of compensation
money, at least in the camps the President visited. This was another demonstration by the state government that the distribution of relief money was a routine job for it, no different from the repair of roads or the repainting of signboards on the eve of a VVIP’s visit. Perhaps the hapless people would have had to wait for many more months if Mr Kalam had not paid them a visit. Equally uncalled for was the hush-hush attempt to attach motives to his visit. The Gujarat tragedy is too big to belong to any caste, colour or religion. It is only incidental that the President himself belongs to the minority community that was targeted during the riots. He would have been equally exercised if they happened to be Hindus, Sikhs or Christians. It is obnoxious on the part of a few people to see the President through the wrong end of a communal binocular. On the other hand, there were also murmurs by some victims that he did not visit all the places that had suffered the maximum damage during the post-Godhara riots. That, perhaps, was neither practical nor necessary. The assessment that the President made from the few places that he visited was enough to give him an overarching view of the situation. More important, his visit signified to all victims that the nation was solidly behind them. |
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Hurriyat’s welcome response At long last the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference has come to realise that it is a good policy to seize every opportunity for talks whenever and from wherever it comes. And it is always better if such an offer comes from the Centre (Delhi, as people in Srinagar call it). Thus, it is a happy development that the Hurriyat has agreed to enter into negotiations with the Kashmir Committee headed by former Union Law Minister Ram Jethamalani for ending the crisis in the valley. But what will the two sides talk about? The most urgent subject today is the Hurriyat’s participation in the coming Assembly elections, which the separatist conglomerate says is a “closed chapter”. Why? Is the Hurriyat afraid of getting exposed in the battle of the ballot? Or since Pakistan is opposed to the democratic exercise in Jammu and Kashmir, the Hurriyat has to behave on these lines? The separatist leadership must bear in mind that Pakistan has been using the conglomerate for its own nefarious designs. Nowadays the military regime in Islamabad is reportedly working on a plan to render the Hurriyat irrelevant. This is the price one has to pay for being a proxy for an outside agency (read Pakistan in the present context) which has its own interests to serve by fuelling trouble in the valley. Separatist leaders say that the elections cannot solve the Kashmir problem. But what is the harm in jumping into the electoral fray unless one is not sure of one’s following, or one’s intentions are not pious? They have agreed to exchange views with the Jethamalani-led committee because, as the Hurriyat has clarified, it is a private initiative having official backing. One hopes Mr Jethamalani is finally successful in convincing the Hurriyat leadership to agree to test the electoral waters to substantiate its claim of being the real voice of the Kashmiri masses. This is the ideal time for the purpose when the stress is on holding a rigging-free election with greater participation of the people. The Centre has at the moment opened two channels for handling the Kashmir situation. Both are being looked after by former Union Law Ministers——-Mr Jethamalani and Mr Arun Jaitley, currently General Secretary of the BJP. Mr Jaitley has been given the responsibility of dealing with the state government headed by Dr Farooq Abdullah to remove the hurdles in the way of free and fair elections as promised by the Election Commission. Mr Jaitley is busy convincing the Chief Minister and his son, Mr Omar Abdullah, chief of the ruling National Conference, that they should agree to holding the elections under President’s rule in view of the requirement of the circumstances. This will amount to meeting the basic demand of the Hurriyat, which it had aired some time ago. The Abdullahs’ plea for more autonomy for J&K is being studied under the garb of devolution of more powers to the state. The Hurriyat’s participation in the polls, if at all it comes about, may brighten the atmosphere for a better climate in the valley. |
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Managing water Water has become a problem — at the local, regional, national and global levels. A five-day World Water Symposium is being held in Stockholm, attended by some 900 scientists, politicians and industry representatives, where the unanimous view is that “efforts to halve the number of people worldwide living in poverty by 2015 will fail unless access to clean water is radically improved”. According to Mr Klaus Toepfer, head of the UN Environment Programme, 2.2 million people die each year due to water-borne diseases like cholera and dysentery. Apart from the need for clean drinking water, which has been stressed frequently by experts at many forums, there is a widely shared concern at the mismanagement of water for irrigation and growing insanitation all around. Now better water access is being seen as a key to poverty removal. Water is one of the main themes at the UN Earth Summit starting in Johannesburg next week. These global initiatives should prompt us to do introspection over how and where we have failed to manage our water resources. How have we failed to check recurring floods in certain parts of the country, and drought in others? Can’t there be a cross-country network of canals, similar to the national highway currently being constructed to link the four metropolitan cities, rising above narrow parochial considerations, so that the water needs of all citizens are met effectively. A national water policy with coordinating state-level efforts can be put in place to ensure better management of resources. Making clean drinking water available to every citizen has to be a national priority. South Africa has included the right to water in its constitution after decades of uneven water distribution during the apartheid era. At the regional and local levels, efforts have to be made to provide potable drinking and irrigation water. The recent outbreak of cholera in a planned city like Chandigarh is a disturbing development. If this can happen in Chandigarh, which enjoys a so-called reputation for cleanliness and beauty with maximum possible funds at its disposal and a highly literate citizenry, what happens, and what can happen, elsewhere is not hard to imagine. The root cause of the problem is general indifference towards the basic issues that confront us all. That the ground watertable is falling at an
alarming rate and is also getting contaminated is all widely known, yet little action has been initiated to control the situation. The results are before us. In about 200 villages of Jalandhar district the level of safe drinking water has fallen further, rendering hand pumps inoperative. Installing a hand pump, which caters to the needs of a family, costs Rs 15,000 and a submersible pump, which can meet the needs of an entire village, costs Rs 42,000. Yet these provide no long-term solution and the problem is not confined to one district or one state. The situation is equally bad, if not worse, in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. It is time for the awakened citizens to assert their right to clean water access and make the short-sighted politicians address their basic needs for leading a life of dignity and ensuring a livable place for the coming generations. |
Indian idea: towards fraternity-III There has been a deep-seated failure to understand and respond to the social dynamics at work in the country. Politicians, academics and the media alike appear bemused by “hung legislatures”, the continuing rise of regional and local parties and pressure groups, and shifting coalition politics. These are seen to reflect an unstable and dangerous fragmentation of the polity, threatening national unity. There is certain nostalgia for the old days of stable governments based on single party dominance and of a seeming unity in diversity without a sense of things falling apart. This view represents an optical illusion. India is far and away the most diverse country in the world. But in 1952 most of its diversity was latent within the passive underclass at the bottom of the social pyramid. Over the past half a century, the population has tripled to over 1000 million. With successive cohorts graduating from “Bharat” to India, there has been an increasing manifestation of social diversity in terms of caste and community, dialect, manners and customs, ways of life, levels of development and so forth. This continuing process may take another quarter century to exhaust itself. It is only then that India’s diversity will stand fully revealed in a population that will have grown to 1300-1400 million by then. What this means is that India’s diversity is upthrusting from below, each newly empowered cohort tangling with and pushing against those above and below it in a bid to proclaim and establish its identity and assert its right to access to and participate in opportunity. This unstructured, on-going process will be characterised by turbulence and jostling as long-deprived communities will initially be more zealous of its rights than mindful of its duties. India, therefore, must be seen as moving from what was a superficial unity of elites to a boisterous diversity, characterised by localism, sub-nationalism and impatient assertiveness. This will organise itself in new, fast-changing social formations ready to make and unmake social and political coalitions to advance whatever be the cause. This will be neither tidy nor “stable”. But, given accommodation, growing empowerment and opportunity, it could unleash tremendous bursts of energy providing impetus for radical transformation and change. The process has to be forward looking and unifying, not hierarchical and harking back to an imagined past that cannot be reclaimed. The next two decades are, therefore, likely to be conflict-prone and will need careful political and social management through a widening and deepening of access and participation. The established order must yield to change on the basis of liberty (empowerment), equality (social justice) and fraternity (togetherness as citizens, in place of zealotry). Greater decentralisation and federalisation of government, smaller states and the strengthening of civil society will help achieve the future envisioned by the Preamble to the Constitution. Secularism inadequately expresses the dimensions of this unfolding drama, encompassing as it does only part of what it is going to take to breathe life into the Idea of India. India’s unity will be guaranteed in proportion to its celebration of diversity. The country is not a melting pot nor even a bouquet, but a garden of profuse colour, fragrance and variety. There is no “mainstream” here. Every rivulet makes and is part of the ocean. On this reasoning, the revivalist “cultural nationalism” of Hindutva and the concept of Hindu Rashtra appear out of place and irrational. So also any brand of Islamic fundamentalism propagated in India even if enunciated only as a defensive response. It is unacceptable, as recently happened, for orthodox elements to proclaim a fatwa against Muslims who supported the BSP to form a ministry in UP with BJP support. Religious interventions in politics, whether Islamic, Christian, Hindu or any other, will provoke a backlash. Nor is there any basis for a “clash of civilisations” in a plural and democratic India. The economy must grow and the polity must correspondingly allow increasing accommodation and participation. Hindus have no reason for worry. They have the numbers, the talent and civilisational maturity to hold course. Muslim Indians constitute a large segment of the Islamic world and as heirs to South Asia’s Islamic tradition have much to offer. Therefore, rather than retire into a shell, Indian Islam too must be ready and willing to innovate and not be fearful of change. Socially, Muslim Indians have fallen behind Pakistan and West Asia whereas, historically, they have every reason to be in the vanguard, taking their rightful place as a confident and progressive community within the Indian Fraternity. For all of this to happen, India must turn to social reform, abandoning the narrow practice of touch-me-not secularism which has come to mean equal respect for everybody’s communalism. An obvious casualty of this trend has been a uniform civil code. This Directive Principle of the Constitution has for too long been used as a stick by Hindu zealots with which to beat Muslims. All personal laws in India need first to be codified before one can even begin to think of a uniform civil code. These codifed personal laws and practices must also be brought in line with the principles and values of the Constitution such as gender equity and human rights if and where there is any departure from them. Uniform values are entirely consistent with divergent practices and so there is little need to insist on a mechanical uniformity. Nor is this what the Constitution seeks. At the same time, there is a real and urgent need for an optional civil code for inter-caste, inter-faith, inter-regional and inter-cultural interactions that are becoming increasingly common in India with upward mobility, migration and urbanisation. The uniform civil code does not have to be mandatory but can be left to individual choice. It is absurd that none other than Hindus can adopt a child in India. The rest must take recourse to the Guardians and Wards Act. Issues of marriage, divorce and succession have a great deal to do with women’s status and their property rights. The hidden agenda behind much of the opposition to an (optional) civil code is the fear that gender justice will injure masculine pride and pockets. Few know that Goa has a uniform civil code, a legacy of Portuguese rule, and that efforts by the Maharashtrian Muslim orthodoxy to persuade Goan Muslims to opt for the Shariat law have been firmly rebuffed. The government and civil society must enable and encourage all children to go through primary and middle schooling until the age of 14. There has to be an area-wise targeted approach to reach Muslim, SC, ST, OBC and other disadvantaged children. Madarsas enjoy a certain salience in Muslim education because formal schooling alternatives are lacking and as such they have a role to play. But there is no reason why madarsas should not be upgraded and integrated within the formal educational system. The content and infrastructure of education — textbooks, the writing of history, buildings, equipment and, above all, the training of teachers — must be ensured. The tendency for vested interests to appropriate history for narrow ideological ends must be resisted. The current battle over the school curriculum, textbooks and the writing of history will, hopefully, result in the evolution of sensible norms and methods in this regard. Children must be exposed to all points of view and not be brought up on prejudice and stereotypes. Comparative religion and cultural appreciation should be taught at all levels so that children and adults alike learn to understand and appreciate the inter-cultural rootedness of so much of what is around us. Religion is and should remain a personal affair while culture belongs to all as a shared tradition. Hinduism, a great and lofty tradition, is very different from Hindutva, a narrow mindset. It is, therefore, a matter for concern that the latter should have stridently appropriated the former. The crisis within Hinduism is manifest in the Hindutva narrative of “innocent victimhood” and revenge. Placing “Ayodhya above the law is to court trouble. The RSS reversion to the two-nation theory at Bangalore and more recently in relation to the “trifurcation” of J&K spells danger. While India does have a problem with Pakistan, any attempt to arouse jingoism and national chauvinism and turn this inward must be firmly resisted. A resolution of Indo-Pakistan tensions and building SAARC would be a potent means of softening communal angularities and enlarging fraternity. That should be the direction of Indian diplomacy. Caste represents another major impediment to progress and modernisation. It has indeed been wasting away steadily; but its death throes could be prolonged and prone to violence if weak or delayed social reform retards political and economic growth to a degree incommensurate with the expanding opportunities needed to accommodate the quantitative and qualitative transition from Bharat to India. Twentyfive years ago, Govind Nihilani could make a film, “Aakrosh”, where the hero, a bonded labourer, remains silent throughout, only grunting and groaning as he is beaten cruelly by his master’s henchmen. That silence has since yielded to a culture of protest. But rising Naxalite and tribal unrest and pent up dalit impatience and anger could explode in greater rural and urban violence unless there is change. The causative factors and pattern of adivasi violence against Muslims in rural Gujarat merits closer analysis. Is this a harbinger of things to come? There is a crisis in Indian Islam too. Muslim Indians have to come out of their shell in greater numbers and claim their Indian heritage. An outgoing and achieving community will do more to ensure Muslim pride and wellbeing than the dictates of the orthodoxy. The jehadis are, of course, a throwback. The very fact that Muslim leadership has had to be assumed by the Personal Law Board is sad evidence both of a vacuum and an inwardness of thinking that fails to relate to the bigger picture and larger opportunities. This again is not a task to be left exclusively to Muslim Indians.... It has to be a shared national responsibility. The Supreme Court has defined secularism as being a basic feature of the Constitution. Rather that it had substituted Fraternity in this definition. However, there is no reason why in this day and age governments should have any role in the management of temples, gurdwaras, wakfs and similar religious institutions. The state may legislate where necessary; beyond that it should withdraw and leave it to the respective communities to manage their religious affairs. All “isms” tend to ossify. So it is perhaps with secularism. Henry Cox in “Secular City” distinguishes between secularisation and secularism. He describes secularism as “an ideology, a new closed world view which functions very much like a new religion. Secularism is a closed ism. It menaces the openness and freedom secularisation has produced (and) must, therefore, be watched carefully to prevent it becoming the ideology of a new establishment”. Further, “It clips the wings of emancipation and fixes a society on the pins of another orthodoxy”. (Cited from A.T. Thiruvengadam, “Indian Intellectuals and the mea culpa culture”. (The Hindu, April 23, 2002). Are we then in danger of being trapped in a rigid mould? The issues of secularism and fraternity, majoritarianism and minorityism need to be debated anew. Though something terrible happened in Gujarat, the greater tragedy and worry is that some feel no remorse and would justify what happened. Rather than barren confrontation and further polarisation, this should be a time for reconciliation. That will only be possible through widespread introspection and intense dialogue among and between all sections of Indians. The understanding and resolve that this engenders could lead to a national catharsis leading to a new social contract based on fraternity. (Concluded) |
Home they left, desperate The desperation of Punjabi youth to migrate may be read as a natural human desire for greener pastures, but there is more to it than meets the eye. How do you explain the marriages between sisters and brothers detected by the immigration departments of many countries? There are Punjabi parents more than willing to marry off their 18 or 20-year-old daughters to any NRI, aged 40 to 50. The daughters then ensure immigration of their brothers, sisters and parents in due course of time. Then there are parents who see nothing wrong in sending their boy to any country illegally. Punjabi youth have emotionally blackmailed or even coerced their parents to sell off whatever little they owned to enable them to go abroad. This sense of desperation has been fully exploited by travel agents, who have mushroomed all over the state. Leaving aside individual mishappenings, the first major fallout of the trend towards illegal immigration was the Malta boat tragedy. A boat carrying 289 illegal immigrants capsized in the Mediterranean sea on the night intervening December 24 and 25, 1996. The immigrants were mostly from Punjab and each had paid Rs 3 lakh to travel agents. A CBI inquiry was ordered and 27 travel agents of New Delhi were nabbed. The Jalandhar police identified Vijay Kumar Pandit, a travel agent of Amritsar, as the kingpin who sent 23 boys abroad. But the Punjabis refused to learn any lessons from the tragedy. Another boat capsized near Greece in April, 2001, seven of the occupants were rescued and 50 went missing. All the seven turned out to be Punjabi boys, who disclosed that the missing occupants were also from Punjab. A few bodies were subsequently recovered. Six of the boys in this boat were from Nawanshehr district and each had paid Rs 1.5 lakh to a travel agent, Satnam Singh, in Delhi. Another Rs 1.5 lakh was to be paid on reaching Greece. I They were roped in by one Gurmeet Singh, who had claimed to be a travel agent in Greece. On his directions, the money was paid to Satnam Singh, who met the boys separately in a Karol Bagh hotel. No one new his real address and none bothered to cross-check his credentials. Shailender and his two brothers owned six acres of land. Shailender had mortgaged his share of land to pay Satnam Singh. Now his widow and son have nothing to fall back on, and are totally dependent upon the two brothers of Shailender Singh. When this correspondent asked the family whether they knew that everything about the immigration was illegal, they did not shy from the truth. Then why did they indulge in it? Brothers, Mohan Singh and Manjit Singh, said, “Alcohol, cigarettes and all the brands of tobacco very clearly say that it is injurious to health, yet people consume them. We were aware that it was illegal, yet our brother wanted to take the risk”. The family mortgaged this one acre and also borrowed money from relatives to send Onkar Singh to Greece. They too had paid Rs 1.5 lakh to Satnam Singh. With Onkar Singh reported missing, the family back home has no other option but to till other peoples’ land on contract. They too had mortgaged it to send him abroad. With him reported missing, this family too has no other option but to till other peoples’ land and survive on whatever is left after paying the contract money. Both families too knew that the entire method of immigration was illegal but were depending upon luck as many other boys from the village had earlier succeeded in migrating in these very ways. He too had paid Rs 1.5 lakh to Satnam Singh in Karol Bagh, Delhi, as his mother, Kamaljit Kaur, reveals, crying inconsolably. Although Jatinder Kumar is reported missing, his mother is desperately clinging to the hope that her son could be alive. An emotional wreck, she lives with her brother along with her younger son and daughter. What all these families were not aware was the fact that the majority of the boys, who illegally migrate, lead a hazardous life. They are forced to go through indignity, humiliation and run around like fugitives. Whether in France, Greece, Ukraine, Dubai or Jordan, hundreds of Punjabi boys lead a pathetic life, selling mineral water bottles, ice-cubes, dancing dolls or even stand motionlessly as statues to earn their bread. They are afraid of returning home because they feel they have no face to show to their parents, as everything had been put on stake to send them across. Besides, many Punjabi boys are also languishing in jails in various countries after having been caught. |
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One-step method to revolutionise photography Replacing the 200-year-old process of photography, US scientists have developed a new method, called acid-amplified imaging (AAI), which could make high-resolution colour prints from digital images in a single sheet of film and requires none of the ‘wet’ processing conventionally used to develop and fix photographic images. Since its inception photography has always involved basically the same process — using light to convert silver salts into dark particles of silver metal on film. However, John Marshall and colleagues at the Polaroid Corporation in Waltham, Massachusetts, have effectively replaced silver by acid. Exposure of the photographic film to light produces acid, which then converts colourless dye molecules into coloured forms. At this stage, AAI film isn’t sensitive enough for snaps in ordinary daylight, say the team. But it can be triggered by strong light sources such as lasers and light-emitting diodes. It would be ideal for applications such as digital printing, producing a colour image directly from an electronically controlled light source, reports Nature. One of AAI’s biggest potential advantages is that it can generate extremely sharp, high-resolution colour images. In conventional photography, the resolution limit is set by the size of the silver grains. The Polaroid team’s new process uses the same three-layer principle — but the dyes that form the colour image are switched on by acid.
ANI |
Newborn named after horse An outraged Italian mother has gone to court after her husband furtively named their newborn son after a prize-winning horse. Before his wife was out of hospital, the man went to the records office in the small southern town of Boscotrecase to register his son as Varenne Giampaolo. Varenne is a seven-year-old horse considered the greatest trotter in history and Giampaolo is his jockey’s name. “He said his wife agreed,” an official at the records office told Reuters. Varenne is, after all, no ordinary horse. The dark brown racer is a national hero in Italy where he was awarded athlete of the year in 2001. But when the mother discovered she couldn’t change the baby’s name to Christian, she went to court. “She just wouldn’t accept that the name isn’t embarrassing or insulting,” the official said. The court’s ruling is pending.
Reuters Man dies after a day in morgue A man wrongly pronounced dead spent the day in cold storage before a mortuary assistant charged with preparing his body for burial found he was still breathing, French hospital authorities said. Emergency services rushed the 68-year-old man to the intensive care ward of a hospital in Bordeaux in southwest France after the worker raised the alarm on Friday night, but he died on Sunday, the authorities said. The man, a terminally ill cancer sufferer, was declared dead on Thursday by a doctor at an old-age home and his body was sent to the mortuary near Bordeaux the next morning.
Reuters Woman throws herself before crocodiles A Thai woman killed herself by jumping into a pit of more than 100 crocodiles, shocking crowds of onlookers at a Bangkok reptile farm on Sunday. The woman, 40, climbed a two-metre high fence and jumped into a concrete enclosure at the Famut Prakarn Crocodile Farm on the outskirts of the Thai capital, a tour guide who witnessed the event said. A crocodile dragged the woman into a pond and several animals swarmed over and tore her body apart. “She did not cry or scream when she was bitten,” Tanet Virayaporn, the tour guide, told Reuters. “It happened so quickly. Nobody could do anything.” The police said the woman had left a suicide note in which she complained about her husband and apologised to family members.
Reuters |
Whosoever after cutting all bonds, does not tremble, has shaken off (all) ties and is liberated, him I call a Brahmana. The man who after cutting the strap (i.e enmity) the thong (i.e attachment) and the rope (i.e scepticism) with all that pertains to it has destroyed (all) obstacles (i.e ignorance), the enlightened (Buddha), him I call a Brahmana. Whosoever being innocent, endures reproach, blows and bonds, the man who is strong (in) his endurance and has for his army this strength, him I call a Brahmana. The man who is free from anger, endowed with (holy) works, virtuous, without desire, subdued, and wearing the last body, him I call a Brahmana. The man who like water on a lotus leaf, or a mustard seed on the point of a needle, does not cling to sensual pleasures, him I call a Brahmana. The man who knows in this world the destruction of pain, who has laid aside (his) burden, and is liberated, him I call a Brahmana. The man who has a profound understanding, who is wise, who knows the true way and the wrong way, who has attained the highest good, him I call a Brahmana. Whosoever after refraining from hurting (living) creatures, (both) those that tremble and those that are strong, does not kill or cause to be killed, him I call a Brahmana. The man who is not hostile amongst the hostile, who is peaceful among the violent... him I call a Brahmana. The man whose passion and hatred, arrogance and hypocrisy have dropped like a mustard seed from the point of a needle, him I call a Brahmana. The man that utters true speech, instructive and free from harshness, by which he does not offend anyone, him I call a Brahmana. Whosoever in the world does not take what has not been given to him be it long or short, small or large, good or bad, him I call a Brahmana. —Khuddka Nikaya. From the Minor Anthologies of the Pali Canon (translator, F.H. Woodward) |
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Kulwinder Kaur, a widow with a seven years old son, is the wife of Shailender Singh, who died in this boat tragedy. 
Onkar Singh (19), a plus one student, and his brother, Ajmer Singh, owned just one acre of land in Nawanshehr district. 
Another missing boy, 20 years old Jasbir Singh, and his brother, Ranjit Singh, owned only 1.5 acres along with their father. 
Jatinder Kumar (21) had studied up to plus two. 
Bhajan Singh’s only son, 25 years old Mukhtiar Singh, a graduate, had also paid Rs 1.5 lakh to Satnam Singh.The family owns just one acre. Bhajan Singh too now survives by tilling other people’s land.