The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

THE TRIBUNE SPECIALS

50 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE

TERCENTENARY CELEBRATIONS

OPINION

The security debate in Munich-2
Much depends on international cooperation
V.P. Malik
One and a half years after the most gruesome and innovative terrorist attack in the world, while the perpetrators of that crime are still at large, the international community is still groping for the right definitions and strategy for counter-terrorism. Why? Because most nations, including the only super power, tend to see this problem from their own restricted and narrow vision.

MIDDLE

Love’s unfailing language
S.S. Bhatti
Despite a highly developed rhetoric why do we fail to effectively communicate with fellow human beings? How did Guru Nanak do it during his odysseys spread over nearly three decades in different parts of the world where unknown peoples spoke languages far removed from his own mother tongue: Punjabi?

Nepal: factors behind Maoist problem
Ed Douglas
The cliche about Nepal is that the country has one foot in the 16th century and another in the 21st. It’s much more complicated than that. The royal family, one powerful strand in a labyrinthine culture, mixes a modern desire for a constitutional monarchy with the imperial arrogance of 19th-century London.

SIGHT & SOUND

Media killing Indian cricket
Amita Malik
It was about 10 days before the start of the World Cup when two TV news items caught my eye. The first that the South Africans were holding a very tough fortnight’s training camp. One way to build up the initiative and confidence of individual players was to leave them in a remote area in a forest and ask them to find their way back.

TRENDS & POINTERS

Bets placed on the wedding of Prince Charles, Camilla
Bookie William Hill has revealed in London that bets have been placed on a 2004 wedding for Prince Charles and his lover Camilla Parker Bowles. According to People News, William Hill is offering odds of 16-1 that the couple will get married this year, 4-1 in 2003 and 7-4 a year later in 2004.

Britney takes a swipe at Justin

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

EDITORIALS

Smear campaign

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee referred to the low-level smear campaign against him while addressing an election rally in Himachal Pradesh. Ever since the Madhya Pradesh Youth Congress circulated the offensive poster describing Mr Vajpayee as a beef-eater, the Prime Minister has missed no opportunity to express anguish over what is indeed a gutter-level campaign of character assassination. He chided the Bharatiya Janata Party leadership in Madhya Pradesh, currently in the hands of a fire-spitting Ms Uma Bharti, at the parliamentary party meeting in Delhi a few days ago for not "countering" the malicious propaganda. The reference to the smear campaign came when Mr Vajpayee made the public announcement about introducing a Central law for banning cow slaughter in the country. There can be no two views on the need for bringing back the element of political decency in the language that is currently used by most political parties during election campaigns. The Prime Minister's concern would have had more takers had he reacted to the obnoxious language being used by both the Congress and the BJP leaders in the election campaign in Himachal Pradesh even if he had not become the target of attack in Madhya Pradesh, where assembly elections are due later this year. He should have set an example for the Congress by directing the BJP units not to use character assassination as a political ploy for running down rivals. And it is not just the gutter language and the attempt to defame rivals by pulling out cases of corruption and misdemeanor out of thin air that needs to be corrected for cleaning the political air, as it were, of the stink that makes the voters begin to wonder how a seemingly sick system of parliamentary democracy can be good for the health of the nation.

The strategy that the Punjab Chief Minister employed against his Himachal counterpart has only sullied the image of the Congress. After all in Himachal the ruling BJP is in the dock and all that the Congress had to do was to present the list of non-achievements of the government for strengthening its cases for being voted back. The character assassination of Mr Prem Kumar Dhumal made the Gujarat Chief Minister dig up a "sex scandal" involving two Punjab ministers who visited his state for campaigning for the Congress. As Prime Minister of the biggest democracy in the world Mr Vajpayee should send out a clear message to the political class that raking up cases of corruption and acts of misdemeanor in the long run will weaken the real campaign against these evils. He should take other parties into confidence for evolving an agreed strategy for keeping out religion and communally sensitive issues from the domain of electoral politics. The Bhojshala-related tension in Madhya Pradesh has thus far claimed three lives, two in police firing, in Dhar and other regions. The BJP is as much a part of the Sangh Parivar as the outfits that are spearheading the current agitation, with an eye on the assembly elections. As the tallest statesman Mr Vajpayee should express the same level of concern over the communal tension generated by the Bhojshala agitation as he did over his name being dragged into controversy by the Congress.

Dawood kin

After a frustrating wait of nearly a decade, some key accused in the Mumbai serial blasts case have started falling into the police net. The deportation of Iqbal Hasan Kaskar, younger brother of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, and another key associate Ejaz Pathan, from Dubai has caused a sensation in Mumbai’s underworld. These were men on India’s most wanted list. The feeling so far was that they were beyond the pale of law. Now that they have been remanded in police custody in Mumbai up to March 6, the disquiet among the lesser fries is understandable. This will be the first time that the top members of the dreaded D-company will be on trial in India. Both of them are expected to yield crucial information about the terrorist network in the country. The catch is a result of a sustained diplomatic offensive, but the intelligence agencies should not start patting themselves as yet. There are murmurs that the deportation is the result of complex rivalries in the unholy empire of Dawood Ibrahim. The claim of Iqbal’s counsel that he had not been deported but came to India on his own as the UAE authorities asked him to leave the country for lack of passport, might not be just bravado. Similarly, there are reports that Ejaz Pathan has fallen out with Dawood Ibrahim. In any case, the UAE authorities have become active only after the US prodding that followed the 9/11 attack.

Almost simultaneously, Minister of State for External Affairs Digvijay Singh announced in the Rajya Sabha that Portugal has agreed to hand over underworld don and Mumbai blasts accused Abu Salem to India. But the minister seems to have jumped the gun. Investigating agencies reveal that the proceedings against Abu Salem are still on in a court of law and no one is in a position to anticipate the verdict. In fact, there are reasons to suspect that the judicial authorities in Portugal might take a negative view of the minister’s assertion and this might complicate the extradition process. That would be unfortunate, considering that India’s record of getting wanted persons deported from various countries has been poor all along. The agencies which are not able to ensure conviction of various criminals in Indian courts because of technical slip-ups fare even worse before foreign courts. Now that a global consensus is emerging against the scourge of terrorism, they must pull up their socks and present the evidence available with them in a more cogent manner. While the government laments that its hands are tied because it does not have extradition treaties with many of the countries, it has itself yet to sign the United Nations Convention on Trans-National Organised Crime.

Excuse for evasion

On the face of it, Union Health Minister Sushma Swaraj’s statement in the Lok Sabha on Thursday on the new norms for bottled water prescribed by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) is unconvincing and does not stand the test of logic. Her reply in response to a calling attention motion that the Union Government was “not in a position to take any legal action against the manufacturers” as they had to only abide by the BIS prescription exposes the Centre’s insensitivity to the problem and its utter disregard of the sentiment of the people. What did Mrs Swaraj mean when she said that the samples of water analysed as per BIS methods were found to comply with the requirements? Norms or no norms, it is precisely because of the Centre’s failure to ensure safe, clean and pure drinking water, even at extra price, to people that the entire issue has snowballed into a major controversy, having put both the government and the manufacturers on the mat. But for the timely study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), the entire issue would have remained where it was. Most unfortunately, even the new BIS norms announced by Mrs Swaraj on Thursday (which will come into force from April 1) do not inspire much confidence among the people for the simple reason that the government has not addressed the roots of the problem with the attention it deserves. When it is a question of one’s life, how can one quantify the degree of percentage for pesticides in bottled water? If anything, the Centre’s entire exercise ever since the study of the CSE was made public on February 4 seems to be half-hearted and an excuse for evasion.

Apparently, the manner in which the Union Government has responded to the CSE study suggests that there are too many wheels within wheels in the system. What is more, it has so far failed to issue a coordinated response to the problem and convince the people of its intentions to clean up the watery mess. Considerable confusion seems to exist between the Union Ministries of Health and Consumer Affairs in dealing with the problem. On February 19, for instance, Union Consumer Affairs Minister Sharad Yadav had ordered the withdrawal of permission to use the ISI mark from eight bottled drinking water plants. And the next day, Mrs Swaraj told Parliament that the Centre cannot take legal action against any company as they are bound by BIS norms. The same is the case with following the safety standards of either the European Union or the World Health Organisation. The Centre may have clarified that it will stick to WHO norms, but the point is instead of indulging in sterile rhetoric and meaningless officialese, it should get to the roots of the problem and tackle it with a sense of urgency. In a globalised society, India needs to march ahead, keeping pace with the other nations. How will it emerge as a super power if it cannot provide even clean water to the people? Let the quality of life of the people be improved first by ensuring them pure, safe and clean drinking water.

OPINION

The security debate in Munich-2
Much depends on international cooperation
V.P. Malik

One and a half years after the most gruesome and innovative terrorist attack in the world, while the perpetrators of that crime are still at large, the international community is still groping for the right definitions and strategy for counter-terrorism. Why? Because most nations, including the only super power, tend to see this problem from their own restricted and narrow vision. This was evident in the last Munich Conference on Security Policy held on February 7-9, 2003.

Terrorism did not start on 9/11. That event does, however, mark the dawn of global recognition of the monster and heralded the declaration of war against it by the broadest grouping of countries outside the UN. The Security Council Resolution 1373, which has recently been reinforced by Resolution 1456, is a comprehensive statement of intent. But so far, the UN has not been able to translate these provisions into effective mechanisms for monitoring and enforcing compliance. Until the international community is capable of fully implementing these provisions for punishing those who finance, sponsor and harbour terrorists, this scourge is unlikely to diminish or disappear. The UN needs more teeth to enforce implementation and to deal with non-compliance of its resolutions.

On the tortured searches for the definition and lack of consensus thereon, India’s National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra in his address at the Munich Conference said: “Distinction between freedom fighters and terrorists propagates a bizarre logic, which glorifies massacres of one set of innocent civilians, while condemning killings of others...the right to life of innocent people cannot be superceded by a right to kill them for a political cause or to redress some real or imagined cause.” Referring to the “double standards” being followed by some countries, he said: “We see a contradiction in attempts to insulate developments across the Pak-Afghanistan border from the cross-border terrorism that we face. If the perpetrators of the latter are different from Al-Qaeda groups that targeted the World Trade Centre, it is only in their names and bank accounts — not in their ideology, objectives or sponsors.” He also cautioned that the novel version of democracy that Pakistan has recently unveiled has brought in more religious extremist forces into the polity, particularly on that Afghan border.

The USA, victim of the 9/11 catastrophe and the self-declared world leader in the global counter-terrorism campaign with support of its coalition partners, did successfully lead the operation to dislodge Taliban and Al-Qaeda from a part of terrorists’ epicentre in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, before this politico-military mission could be considered as adequately accomplished — Osama, Mullah Omar and the radical Jehadis are still around and can be heard frequently — it has shifted its focus to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Why do Americans leave war strategic missions half way? In 1990s, they did that in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. And in both cases they have had to return to complete that.

Despite some evidence of the Saddam regime and Al-Qaeda connection as given by Colin Powell, not many countries are convinced that the former poses a similar terrorist threat to the world. This was the main argument advanced by the German Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor. On incomplete action in Afghanistan, he said that today when we talk of Afghanistan, “we are talking about greater Kabul and not Afghanistan”. “And what about ideological, political and financial support to these (Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Jehadi) terrorists?” he asked during the conference.

Sergey Ivanov, the Russian Minister of Defence, echoed the same: “Counter-terrorism would prove far more efficient if and when the ideas nurtured by the masterminds and ideologues behind terrorism could be stripped of their activity, the links between the terrorist chapters around the globe torn off, with the financial backers shut down, manpower training facilities destroyed and arms supplies disrupted.” He cautioned that use of “double standards” could undo the very idea of burgeoning international cooperation in counter-terrorism.

Gen Xiong Guangkai of China conveyed that international terrorism is staging a comeback (179 large-scale attacks in 2002, causing over 3500 casualties). He admitted that China, too, is a victim of “East Turkistan” terrorists who have received military training in Al-Qaeda and Taliban bases and also participated in a number of attacks plotted by them. To strike against terrorists, Chinese legislature, aviation, finance, customs and other authorities have all taken preventive measures and China’s criminal law has been suitably amended. He gave out “mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality and cooperation” as the guiding principles of China in formulating and conducting its domestic and international counter-terrorism policies, and suggested that all countries must:

— Condemn and oppose terrorism of all forms and manifestations.

— Address both symptoms and causes of terrorism.

— Take an integrated approach to counter-terrorism.

— Give a leading role of the UN in coordinating international counter-terrorism campaign.

It was heartening to see that most countries of the world continue to be concerned about international terrorism and are seriously looking for global cooperation to fight the menace. The fight against terrorism is a long haul and a coherent conceptual framework is needed within which its objectives can be defined and pursued. Compartmentalised national approaches cannot deal with the seamless web of international linkages which terrorism has developed. What we lack today is some kind of “core guidance” at the international level, which can evolve and pursue strategies and mechanisms for such cooperation.

As already stated, its other national interests have now distracted the USA, which very ably led the global campaign to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan. Besides, the obsession with the global Al-Qaeda group has resulted in inadequate political consultations and selective intelligence sharing on the global terrorist threat. This has led to costly gaps in the global campaign against terrorism. The international terrorist today has a network of wide geographical spread, instant communications through cell phones and the internet, and a well-oiled machinery for movement of lethal weapons and equipment, evading national customs, tariffs and non-tariff barriers. He can only be thwarted by international counter-terrorist coordination. Real-time intelligence sharing and operational intelligence cooperation can help integrate diversely collected bits of data into an interlocking coherent picture. Analysis of this data can be further improved by involving those who are familiar with the cultural subtleties and the local idiom of its origin.

In his Munich Conference address, Mr Mishra pointed out that the immediate expediency of 9/11 had created a coalition and a short-term alliance to deal with a particular manifestation of terrorism. That coalition contains members who were, and still are, a part of the problem. He proposed working of a core group of nations within the coalition, who believe in peaceful coexistence, practised democratic values, a liberal market structure, and shared “aspirations to safeguard peace, promote pluralism and maximise economic growth with social justice”. As these nations are the primary targets of the terrorists, are most vulnerable, and have maximum stake in counter-terrorism, they will more naturally develop multilateral institutions and coordination required to fight and exert a persistent pressure on international terrorism in a holistic and focused manner. Blocking financial supplies, disrupting networks, sharing intelligence, simplifying extradition procedures: these are preventive measures which can only be effective through international commitment and cooperation based on trust and shared values. (Concluded)

The writer is a former Chief of Army Staff.

MIDDLE

Love’s unfailing language
S.S. Bhatti

Despite a highly developed rhetoric why do we fail to effectively communicate with fellow human beings? How did Guru Nanak do it during his odysseys spread over nearly three decades in different parts of the world where unknown peoples spoke languages far removed from his own mother tongue: Punjabi? When learned scholars could not answer these questions, I looked for the answer in Guru’s own Bani (revealed word). Succinct is the Guru’s averment: True is the Lord, true His justice, and infinite love His language.

I put the holy word to test and found it to be working wonders by transcending the barriers of caste, creed, colour, ethnicity, and the notorious generation gap. Three incidents, which stand out among many in my life, convincingly demonstrate that love has a language that never fails in communication that is both effective and humane.

I was invited to attend a convention in Madras three decades ago in which a hundred Canadians — sociologists, social workers, researchers, and teachers — conferred with their Indian counterparts on many sociological problems. On the very first day I instinctively spotted a delegate from Vancouver who I approached with an irresistible urge to communicate. And lo! in the next few seconds we were locked in a bear hug such as I have rarely experienced again. We fell in love at first sight and continued to exchange notes for a year or two until Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s veritable lament took its toll: The world has succeeded in the estrangement of your remembrance/Even more heart-beguiling than you are the woes of livelihood!

The second incident pertains to a roadside dyer who assists his elder brother in Sector 15, and is deaf and dumb. I spotted him three-four years ago and ever since we are inseparable companions-in-spirit. I quickly learnt his non-verbal language of signs and symbols. When I go there to give my turbans for starching, he comes dashing to me in a flush of infectious affection. He shakes my hand with passionate vigour, then moves his palms to and fro in my direction to say: “Is all well with you?” When I return the gesture in positive signs, he points skywards to tell me: By God’s grace my life is entirely steeped in happiness!” Moving my fists in a certain way I tell him that turbans are to be washed, then I open and close my hands in a taut motion to suggest that they are to be starched too. And he promptly responds with tell-tale gesticulations to assure me that he has understood the instruction.

The last episode is such as dispenses with the need for any further proof. I met Mr Singh, a former chief town planner of Haryana, at a conference dinner. He was holding his eight-month-old grandson. The baby looked wide-eyed at me and my colleague standing next to me who he stared in the face longer. This gentleman told me: “The boy finds your headgear strange, therefore, he has written you off!” But then the miracle happened. This bundle of irresistible loveliness suddenly leapt into my lap. I played with him, even mimicked the dance in response to the tune of the music to which adults were already dancing.

The two of us became instant cronies as if we had known each other since previous births, so much so that the little boy chose to abandon his grandpa — who had ultimately to take the baby away forcibly. Next morning when we met again at the town planning convention, Mr Singh confessed that he had been reflecting on love’s strange power the whole night. I told him that love never fails because it means: Life’s Overt Vernacular couched in Empathy (karuna).

Love binds hearts with the glue of unpolluted emotions which alone can holistically express with unconditioned spontaneity (sahaj) the intensity and immensity of joie de vivre: a feeling of exuberant enjoyment of life.

Nepal: factors behind Maoist problem
Ed Douglas

The cliche about Nepal is that the country has one foot in the 16th century and another in the 21st. It’s much more complicated than that. The royal family, one powerful strand in a labyrinthine culture, mixes a modern desire for a constitutional monarchy with the imperial arrogance of 19th-century London.

The Shah dynasty, of which Gyanendra is the 11th king, usually proves a weak-hearted bunch. Few have made it past 50. Gyanendra, a heavy smoker, is now 55. Nepal’s current upheavals won’t be helping his prospects for long-term survival. “oh my God!” one prominent member of the Rana clan told me at a Kathmandu cafe. “Who knows what will happen when he goes?” Even in the highest social circles, it seems, Paras, the crown prince, is not good news.

Until the massacre, the new crown prince was most famous for allegedly killing a popular young singer, Praveen Gurung, in a hit-and-run accident in August 2000. Paras escaped prosecution, despite a colossal popular petition that he be stripped of his royal title. Now he is being rehabilitated, taking up his father’s role as a conservationist, writing poetry, attending conferences. He’s all the family has left.

Nepal was already a troubled kingdom before the lurching horror of watching the royal family almost consume itself. The death of King Birendra was like a curse coming true. From 1996, people in the Kathmandu Valley had read in horror of the spiralling destruction being inflicted in Nepal’s remotest districts. I was in Kathmandu soon after the “People’s War” was launched by the Maoist wing of the Communist Party of Nepal. It didn’t seem serious then, not compared to all the other problems Nepal’s fledgling democracy, hatched in 1991, needed to address.

The Maoist leader was Comrade Prachanda, literally the “fierce one”, a 41-year-old former horticulture teacher. His rhetoric and aims seemed almost quaint in 1996, a kind of nostalgic glance backwards to extreme left-wing peasant movements, from Peru’s Shining Path to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. Nobody was laughing for long.

With astonishing swiftness, the Maoists gained control of Nepal’s remote western districts as the country’s elected leaders squandered their chance. A dozen governments came and went, all of them characterised by factionalism and greed.

In contrast, the Maoists were well organised. Without foreign support, they fashioned home-made weapons and overran remote police posts to acquire guns and ammunition, rolling back the state’s presence. By the time of the royal massacre, as much as 40 per cent of Nepal was under Maoist control.

Prachanda and his Maoist cohorts have at least attempted to address the problems of Nepal’s rural poor, such as bonded slavery and the dismal position of women. But work by government or development agencies was antithetical to the revolution, so they systematically destroyed communications, health posts, hydroelectric schemes, schools — anything with the smell of imperialism. They unravelled what limited progress the country had made since 1950. One aid worker in western Nepal told me: “We’re going back in time here, and very quickly.”

In covering Nepal’s agonies, Western journalists have focused heavily on the Maoists themselves; shadowy, exotic figures who make good copy. In a rare interview, Prachanda’s deputy, Baburam Bhattarai, was asked by the Nepal-born academic Dr Chitra Tiwari in the Washington Times whether the Maoists could ever mount a campaign like that experienced in Cambodia under Pol Pot. Bhattarai’s response was chilling.

“There is no independent and authentic account of events in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge available so far,” he told Tiwari. “Whatever is emanating from the Western media appears to be highly exaggerated.” When Tiwari asked for a little personal background to put a human face on the Maoist machine, Bhattarai’s response was just as hardline: “We believe people are mere products of historical necessity and occur as a matter of chance... you can take me as a typical representative of a Third World educated youth of peasant background.”

There’s a Nepalese saying that everyone in a village knows who the Maoists are except the soldiers searching for them. In Jagatiyaa, the army accused Lakshmi’s family of giving food to the Maoists — the reason they searched the house and killed Rupa. It might be true, although Lakshmi denied it. And while many villagers support the Maoists, many do so through fear.

While I talked to Lakshmi, I knew that Maoist sympathisers were watching for any sign of dissension from the cause. “I cannot say,” one villager hissed when I asked him about the Maoists. “All I can say is that we want to live in peace.”

Now there is at least a chance at peace. Negotiations between the government and the Maoists have started again, although there are few guarantees that the current ceasefire won’t end as quickly as the last one in November, 2001. Then the government declared a state of emergency and asked the king to deploy the army which, despite democracy, has remained under his personal control.

Many Western diplomats in Kathmandu quietly welcomed the move, imagining a short, successful campaign that would contain Prachanda and allow the development of this chronically poor country to resume. Instead the true causes of Nepal’s chaos became clearer.

The state’s institutions, including the army, were exposed as being rotten with incompetence and corruption, incapable and unwilling to meet the people’s needs. The Maoists were not the problem at all, just a symptom. By going to war the government had accelerated Nepal’s slow decline. Guardian Newspapers Limited

SIGHT & SOUND

Media killing Indian cricket
Amita Malik

It was about 10 days before the start of the World Cup when two TV news items caught my eye. The first that the South Africans were holding a very tough fortnight’s training camp. One way to build up the initiative and confidence of individual players was to leave them in a remote area in a forest and ask them to find their way back. On the same day, I also watched on TV our cricket team at a glamorous filmi event in Mumbai. All top players and even little Parthiv Patel, were sitting in the front row rubbing shoulders with film stars. You could see Kaif, Sehwag and Harbhajan Singh, simple middle-class boys, mouths agape watching sexy filmi singers and dancers on a huge stage, to which they went up afterwards to get their share of adulation. I wondered why they were also not at a rigorous training camp doing serious post-mortems on their New Zealand fiasco. The reason was that their sponsors and advertisers, who had now decided to build them up like film stars for selfish , purely commercial reasons, felt it was more important to flaunt them in such public functions, no matter what the cost to their professional life as cricketers.

This expensive media hype continues. Sony Max has trivialized Indian cricket and the ads and sponsors have clearly taken over. First, endlessly chattering glamour girls with no connection whatsoever with cricket (and we have an Indian women’s cricket team which does very well in world contests) have been roped in to anchor what should be serious panel discussions. Mandira, whose dress varies from almost topless blouses with cocktail saris to what looks like special wear for weddings, has reduced her performances to a daily fashion show, heavily loaded with what look like diamonds. I wish someone would dump her and her coquettish colleague with the wild hairstyle on the ground, who flirts with some of the most dignified cricketers in the world, into one of the two oceans that border South Africa. I am sure de Beers would happily replace the diamonds, but not the girls. Mandira’s constant butting into the analyses of the matches by knowledgeable cricketers, adds insult to injury. It simply isn’t cricket.

Then the Tarot cards and astrologers, introducing some typically Indian mumbo-jumbo into the World Cup. Many of the greatest contemporary cricketers in the world, who are guests on Mandira’s panel, are seriously asked to join in the Tarot cards game. Then I found Zee TV asking an astrologer for forecasts of the India-Zimwabwe match. Later, somewhere near 2 am on the night before, I found Jain TV asking a “jyotishiji” for the same. The great man made some very ordinary “forecasts” which were no different from what sports writers were saying in the papers and had little to do with astrology. So between the Tarot cards in the long, boring and aptly named Extraa Innings, and the so-called astrologers on other channels, the World Cup has been reduced to a sorry tamasha.

The dignity and professional standing of our cricketers has also been reduced to dust by the humiliation they seem to suffer willingly at the behest of their sponsors. Their chantings of the Sahara mantra are bad enough. Watch the visual humiliation, the wanton flouting of Tendulkar’s dignity where he is rescued from being buried under a mountain of Pepsi Cola bottles by Shane Warne and Brian Lara. On coming to, he murmurs plaintively in Mumbai film style. “Where am I? Who am I?” as Warne and Lara hoot with laughter. The distinguished former international cricketer Abbas Ali Baig has made the bitter comment that Tendulkar is, indeed, in search of his identity as a member of the Indian cricket team. The other equally humiliating advertisement where Harbhajan Singh figures in an ad for whisky is something very hurtful, if not offensive and an assault on Harbhajan’s simple and unspoilt image. Something like a ban on this kind of advertising by the cricketing bodies, and even legislation should be brought in to stop inflicting such outrageous gimmicks on cricket as a sport. I am hurt and ashamed that our suddenly crorepati young cricketers, under pressure from their sponsors and, in their natural eagerness to earn astronomical sums of money before their retirement from cricket, should lend themselves to this kind of uncharacteristic behaviour in TV commercials. The deluge of music cassettes and other ugly commercial products to make a fast buck while the World Cup

lasts has already vitiated the atmosphere. Matters have reached a stage where at times one cannot see the cricket or hear the commentary at a crucial stage because those odious advertisements have taken over. Having built up our cricketers into super stars, no wonder over-emotional Indian fans reduce their heroes to villains at the drop of a wicket and start stoning their houses and families. Enough is enough.