 |
Monday,
March 17, 2003, Chandigarh, India  
|
Anti-Kashmir resolution Containing thalassaemia
War for hegemony, not justice |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Midas touch
Anupam Gupta
Study says married men make better fathers
|
Anti-Kashmir resolution The best way to deal with mischief is to nip it in the bud. The New Hampshire lawmakers passed a resolution asking the US Congress to discuss the Kashmir issue “so as to facilitate a just, peaceful and rapid end to this conflict”. One view is that it is a routine occurrence. Diplomatic energy need not be expended on telling just about everyone holding political power in the USA not to interfere in the domestic affairs of India. Remember Dan Burton, the pesky American lawmaker, who would introduce an anti-India resolution almost every second day? He did manage to influence public opinion on a small scale. That should be treated as bad enough for the health of any nation in the global village. The better option is to create such a diplomatic stink that no American lawmaker, big or small, takes the liberty of making anti-India remarks just because the powerful Pakistan lobby pays well for being a loud-mouth. That is what Indian Ambassador to the USA Lalit Mansingh has done by writing letters to the New Hampshire Speaker and President of the state senate over the adoption of a resolution asking the US Congress to treat Kashmir as a human rights issue. He has offered to discuss the issue with the New Hampshire lawmakers and educate them on the developments since 1947, including the tribal invasion and the illegal occupation of a huge chunk of Kashmir by Pakistan. The adoption of the resolution has understandably raised the hackles of both the Indian establishment and the Indian American community who see in it an attempt to give propaganda advantage to Pakistan. It is for the first time that a state legislature in the USA has gone so far as to seek direct American intervention in Kashmir. Ambassador Mansingh should now mobilise the local Indian community and members of the Indian caucus for drawing the attention of President George W. Bush to the gross act of violation of international diplomacy by the New Hampshire legislature. Reports suggest that the Pakistan caucus has received funds from the ISI for stepping up the anti-India propaganda war. It now plans to persuade other “Pak-friendly” states to adopt similar resolutions with the sole objective of internationalising the Kashmir dispute. A Pakistani American member of the New Hampshire House, Saghir A. Tahir, evidently played a key role in the adoption of the controversial resolution. He organised the visit of a delegation led by Mr Robert Guida, majority leader in the House, to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. He was given doctored documents that suggested that the possibility of a nuclear attack by India was “dangerously high”. Ambassador Mansingh’s rejoinder covers a lot of ground, but the fact remains that without a matching response from the India caucus the Pakistanis may be able to influence popular opinion through the malicious and motivated propaganda war. In the age of information technology the global village must always be taken into confidence for countering the kind of disinformation campaign the Pakistan caucus has launched against India.
|
Containing thalassaemia Thalassaemia is an inherited form of anaemia caused by faulty synthesis of
haemoglobin. The entire Mediterranean belt — Cyprus, Italy, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and north-west India — has a high incidence of this disease. In fact, it is hypothesised that thalassaemia has travelled into India with foreign visitors and invaders, and it comes as no surprise that this disease is more prevalent in the western border states of Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat, though it has spread all over now. What exactly is
thalassaemia? It is a disease which is genetic in origin. Thus it is something that people inherit. It is also most of the time a benign disease, which remains undiscovered. People are carriers of the disease (called thalassaemia minor) without being afflicted by it. It is only in cases where two persons who are thalassaemic minor have children that problems come up. As many as 25 per cent of the children born to thalassaemic parents get thalassaemia major, a disorder where the red blood corpuscles of a person fail to multiply as in a normal person. Thus, someone who suffers from thalassaemia major needs regular blood transfusions and/or other expensive medical interventions. Thalassaemic major patients seldom survive into their thirties. The issue is of crucial importance to the region since, traditionally, Punjabis,
Sindhis, Gujaratis, Parsis and Lohans are more prone to this disease as are certain minority communities, including Muslims and Sikhs. Certain studies also point out a higher rate of occurrence among Jat Sikhs. There is no doubt that due to historical factors, people in northern and central India are more at risk of contracting this hereditary disease which has been virtually eradicated from its place of origin, Cyprus. This was done by rigorous state-sponsored implementation of testing for all potential couples. A simple test can save much pain later, since it occurs only if both parents are carriers. Of course, the issue is a socially tricky one, where such tests would be deemed intrusive. However, the need for such tests can’t be stressed enough, and given proper awareness, the general population would come around. Many urban marriages are now registered in civil courts. Perhaps a beginning can be made there, with all such marriages requiring certificates that show the couple to be free of thalassaemia and foetus-threatening situations like RH incompatibility. |
War for hegemony, not justice Just last month, the UK’s Blair government flagrantly plagiarised an article from an academic journal and claimed that it was based on reliable British intelligence and offered irrefutable proof of Iraq’s involvement in global “terrorism”. The intention was to paint Iraq in the darkest of hues — to justify war. Now, it turns out that the Anglo-American allegations about Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium from Niger are also based on crude forgery. The International Atomic Energy Agency compared the letterheads and signatures on the documents submitted to it, with the authentic originals from the Niger government and declared them fake. On March 7, IAEA executive director Mohammed El-Baradei also declared that there was no evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of illegal nuclear activities. He examined the aluminium tubes, about which the USA has been raising a hullabaloo for months, alleging that these were used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. But he found no such “indications”. Thus, some of the critical “evidence” cited for claiming that Iraq has weapons or capabilities of mass destruction (WMD) remains uncorroborated even after thousands of inspections at more than 3,000 sites. After UNMOVIC chief Hans Blix’s report certifying that Iraq has undertaken a “substantial measure of disarmament” and that Baghdad’s recent cooperation can be “seen as active or even proactive”, it’s just impossible to construct a plausible case for war. As Mr Blix put it: “We are not watching the destruction of toothpicks. Lethal weapons are being destroyed.” Yet, it is on this far-from-credible, indeed flimsy, factual ground that the USA is plunging into war. By the time these lines appear, an invasion of Iraq may well have begun. The USA has dropped lakhs of leaflets over Iraq, telling its soldiers to desert the army. Nearly 300,000 US and British troops are already in the Gulf. If Washington and London cannot muster nine votes (out of 15) for their amended “second resolution”, they may bypass the UN Security Council and rush into war anytime. The moral case for such war is simply non-existent. According to the theory of just wars, any use of force must be premised upon the exhaustion of all other means and on military necessity. The goals of war must themselves be just. Force must not be excessive or disproportionate, nor indiscriminate. None of these conditions is fulfilled in the present case. What lacks even a casus belli (rationale for war) cannot be a war for justice. It can only be a war to establish the hegemony of a particular state, a hyperpower, which has utter contempt for much of the world in whose name it speaks. So, how does Mr George W. Bush rationalise war? First, he justified it as a means to disarm Iraq of WMD. Next, he said that Mr Saddam Hussein is a terrible tyrant who has gassed his own people; hence a “regime change” is imperative. And now he declares: “I will not leave the American people at mercy of the Iraqi dictator ... if we need to act, we will act. And we really don’t need the UN approval to do so ... When it comes to our security, we really don’t need anybody’s permission.” Mr Bush hysterically ranted on March 7: “My job is to protect America, and that is exactly what I’m going to do ... I swore to protect and defend the Constitution; that’s what I swore to do. I put my hand on the Bible and took that oath, and that’s exactly what I am going to do.” He cited 9/11 eight times in his Press conference. There is something seriously wrong here. For one, there’s no link whatever between Iraq and 9/11. For another, his three rationales are mutually contradictory. And for a third, it’s altogether preposterous to claim that Iraq “threatens” America and the threat cannot be deterred or contained except by war. Nobody in one’s right mind can believe that a badly impoverished, half-broken, Iraq with its rusty weapons and its crude Al-Samoud 2 missiles (with a range of barely 150-180 km and without even a guidance system) poses a military threat to the USA from a distance of 8,000 km! Mr Bush’s case for war is reduced to the pathetic tune: “that man tried to kill my Dad.” America’s real war objectives have to do with oil, Israel, and religion or re-making West Asia by promoting “moderate Islamist” (read, pro-US) regimes. They also derive from a vaulting ambition to dominate the world. The USA misrepresents this war as a war of necessity, when it’s a war made out of choice. It’s also fighting a war against another state, although it has since 9/11 said its priority is war on non-state terrorism, a much more diffuse adversary. This confusion on the nature of war could cost the USA dearly in the long run. The USA, with its overwhelming military clout, will easily win the war. But winning the peace is another matter. Dismantling the Iraqi state will probably unleash uncontrollable forces in a country already divided between a Kurdish North, a 60 per cent Shia majority in the South, and minority Sunnis ruling at the centre. This will send shockwaves through three key countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. These societies are in deep turmoil and boiling with discontent against rulers who are seen as despotic and servile to the West. Heightened strife here won’t be controlled militarily. It is liable to take on a largely irrational, religious-fundamentalist form and incite more Al-Qaeda type networks. This will not only infuse poison into West Asia and South Asia. Ultimately, it will make the Americans themselves more vulnerable and insecure. That’s one reason why US establishment figures like former President Jimmy Carter, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and countless former Generals oppose war. The New York Times too has spoken out against it. These leaders warn against the damage a war would cause to the United Nations, and to the USA’s own alliance system. Even former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recognises that the USA is now isolated as never before. America has exerted enormous pressure on a number of states, including the six uncommitted Third World countries which are on the Security Council, to build what it calls a Coalition of the Willing, when it is, in fact, a Coalition of the Coerced. However, it can count barely 30 members — out of the globe’s 190-odd states. Not even one major state has joined the US-UK-Spain alliance in recent weeks. Turkey has defied Washington by refusing to station American troops — despite the offer of $ 30 billion and half of Iraq’s territory. For the past month, not even one of the “Middle Six” “fence sitters”
has declared support for the “second resolution”. The USA needs five of their six votes, and no veto if its resolution is to go through. This is going to be clearly the world’s most unpopular war. It is sending tremors through governments and ruling parties — witness Labour in Britain where MPs and ministers are revolting. It is also a war which has been opposed for months before it may begin — for altruistic reasons inspired by the most elevated standards of morality. War will produce utter devastation for the long-suffering people of Iraq. Already, some half a million children have perished because of the sanctions imposed on this country of 23 million. Countries like India can contribute to the global anti-war effort. But the Vajpayee government is reluctant and afraid of annoying the Americans. At the March 10 all-party meeting, Prime Minister Vajpayee opposed a Parliament resolution on Iraq. He even refused to commit India not to provide military help to America. But on March 12, he suddenly departed from the prepared statement and declared India stood for peace, and totally opposed external aggression to effect a regime change. He also said the weapons inspectors should be given more time and warned against “puppet regimes”: “If a change has to come about, it should be done by the people of that country, not an outside power...” In the UN, New Delhi’s vacillating stand has further softened despite Mr Blix’s March 7 report, which demands the argument for war. The official position admonishes Iraq to offer “immediate, active and unconditional cooperation” to UNMOVIC, but is silent on the USA’s unreasonable conduct. No wonder, US Ambassador Robert Blackwill told a newspaper (March 4) that he was “satisfied” with India’s position. This must change. New Delhi should take a harmonised stand based on sound moral principles, multilateralism and informed public opinion. In a Delhi middle class sample polled by MODE 87 per cent people say war on Iraq is not justified, and only 5 per cent say India should offer military support to the USA. It is a safe bet that people in other Indian cities, and villages, also share this view. The time has come for the government to reflect this in policy and action — and for the millions to join the global movement for peace. |
Midas touch Teaching T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to post-graduate students can be a cathartic experience for any teacher of literature in modern times. The reasons may not be very far to seek. It may just have been a piece of “rhythmical grumbling” or “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life” for T.S. Eliot despite the critics’ desperate attempts to prove it otherwise; yet the poetic masterpiece is an undoubted critique of our so-called social and cultural facade. It may have been relevant initially as a First-World-War aftermath cry, where the poet hollers and howls about the loss of tradition and values, yet it is no less relevant or true in today’s scenario where nothing seems to go right or has any prospects to go right anyway. Ours is the world where money-God reigns supreme and subversion of values is the order of the day. While our age-old cherished traditions and values gather dust in history-books — nee recycled-bins — our 21st century information-technology savvy social system totters forward, totally oblivious of the umbilical cord that ties it to our heritage rather delicately. It is a system where chaos rules the roost, and the precious lives “are measured out with coffee spoons”. Be it the social system or the political or the bureaucratic, the waste regions of the self are never far to seek. Deepa, my friend and colleague in the adjoining college, and I have a strange habit of sharing such thoughts over our long conversations over the phone. We share a strange telepathy and often come out with unusual literary but appropriate cliches and allusions. Incidentally, our husbands too, though belonging to different cadres, share a subtle bureaucratic rapport, groomed as they are by the very same icy steel frame of the government. Therefore, it is not very surprising that our talk often takes a detour from the “pep-talk” about weather, kids and the “Oh! so dull and boring college” to a more interesting, gossipy and very much “in” talk about corridors of power replete with juicy gossip and scandals galore. On one such gossip-session, the conversation veered round to the evergreen subject of transfers and postings in bureaucratic circles. Coming like a bolt from the blue, these transfers and postings always generate a lot of interest among colleagues as well as some heart-burning and bitterness too. A colleague of my husband, in the midst of some controversy, got shifted from a “plum” posting to a so-called “sidelined” slot, hitherto reserved for the offending black-listers alone. Deepa happened to make a casual remark that the officer concerned might have asked for the “forbidden fruit” himself. I countered her argument by saying that the “fruits of labour” might as well be elusive in this forbidden and not so hot a seat as this. “Precisely! that’s what I mean, dear. Rather, it may prove to be the other way round, you know,” said she, almost nonchalantly. “How come, ya...ar! what will he get out of this stony rubbish,” I again quoted T.S. Eliot. “You don’t know, Suchita... some people just have that famous Midas’ Touch and then, of course, this Kaliyug!” she roared with that mischievous laughter of hers. “Yes, of course!” was all I could mutter and feigned a laugh, thinking all the time about T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” where the postings too, have come to acquire that legendary Midas’ Touch. |
War and peace from the Suez Canal to the Gulf “I cannot imagine a worse case of aggression,” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote on October 31, 1956, referring to the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt following Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. “If this aggression continues and succeeds, all faith in international commitments and the United Nations will fade away, and the old spectre of colonialism will haunt us again...” Saddam Hussein is no Gamal Abdel Nasser, of course, but Nehru’s reaction to the Suez crisis 47 years ago would apply with no less accuracy to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, an invasion itching to happen despite the visible reluctance of the United Nations to play ball. Contained in a letter to the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and quoted by Prof S. Gopal in his three-volume biography of India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru’s words also serve as a benchmark for appraising the Vajpayee government’s weak-kneed policy on the Iraq crisis, nay, its failure of leadership on the question. A mere statement in Parliament, that too under the pressure of the Opposition and after millions in London and Europe had poured onto the streets in an upsurge against war uprecedented since World War II, does little credit to a government heading a nation of India’s size and population, a nation whose commitment to a world without arms has always transcended its otherwise exhausting preoccupation with domestic strife fomented by external inspiration. If the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union disoriented the non-aligned movement, almost robbing it of its raison d’etre, the coming American invasion of Iraq without the authority of the United Nations and in wilful defiance of it will, I submit, have the reverse effect of reviving nonalignment (both in concept and practice) and pushing it to the frontlines of the campaign to restore international law in a world drunk with power. If only India, now a nuclear power and with a far greater capacity to impress friends and deter rivals than it ever had during Nehru’s time, were willing to assume once again its moral leadership in world affairs. “The danger,” as Philip John Noel-Baker — Ernest Cassell Professor of International Law at the University of London from 1924 to 1929, Harold Laski’s successor as chairman of the British Labour Party in 1946, and one of the very few men privileged to participate in the formation both of the League of Nations and the United Nations — put it in 1959 while receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, “is not in trying to do too much, but in trying to do too little”. If politics is the art of the possible, said Noel-Baker, statesmanship is the art of the impossible, and it is statesmanship that our perplexed and tortured humanity needs today. Joining hands with a newly revived peace movement that has already decisively influenced the Gulf policy of two major European powers, France and Germany, with its consequential impact on the decision-making structures of the United Nations, a revived nonaligned movement could correct, substantially if not entirely, the acute imbalance of power in the world that the disintegration of the USSR has left in its wake. And given statesmanship (instead of politics), it could also prevent what diplomats and publicists around the world have already started talking about: the collapse of the United Nations, like the collapse of its predecessor, the League of Nations, in case the United States goes ahead with its attack on Iraq, flouting the UN Security Council. “Ceaselessly attacked by the Axis, progressively abandoned by the democracies,” wrote F.P. Walters in his 800-page history of the League of Nations, one of the few and perhaps the best on the subject, “the League had been deprived of all the powers by which its founders had hoped to make of it the guardian of the world’s peace.” A leading international authority in a different field — the law of nationality and citizenship — the late Prof Clive Parry was even more to the point when analysing the failure of the League of Nations. “It was the destiny of the League,” he said, “to encounter a greater measure of deliberate aggression, attended by a wilful and deliberate disregard of all humanitarian considerations, than has ever been manifested — again either before or since — in any comparable span of years.” For Japan, Italy and Germany, he said, in turn asserted during the life of the League an “absolute right to go to war for any reason or no reason, and an indifference to the laws of either war or peace to which the only ultimate answer could be, as in fact it proved to be, likewise war unlimited in scale or method.” President Bush’s obsession with Saddam Hussein and his determination to go to war against Iraq with or without the United Nations, and his total indifference to all canons of international law bearing on the point, amount, in their totality, to a similar claim of an absolute right to go to war for any reason or no reason, against a target and at a time of America’s choice. Alarming as this arrogance of power is, and uncomfortably reminiscent of the fate of the League of Nations, it has at the same time induced an unprecedented estrangement of Europe from America and unleashed the fury of international public opinion, both factors of the highest practical importance. “Questions of law”, ruled Justice Radha Binod Pal of India in his dissenting opinion of 1948 in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of Japanese Premier Hideki Tojo and 24 other defendants — one of the most outstanding judicial opinions in the history of international law, woefully buried in the archives — “are not decided in an intellectual quarantine area in which legal doctrine and the local history of the dispute alone are retained and all else is forcibly excluded. We cannot afford to be ignorant of the world in which disputes arise.” By quarantining itself in the groove of Indo-Pak relations and excluding all other disputes from its range of interests, the Vajpayee government is only betraying its ignorance of the world in which disputes arise. |
Study says married men make better fathers What makes a man a perfect father. It is marriage and not biology, says a new study published in Marriage and Family. The study conducted at University of Maryland found that married stepfathers are equally good at fathering both their biological children and stepchildren who live with them. In contrast, the research found that unmarried men in a cohabitation setting who are the biological fathers of the children living in the household don’t put in as much time with the children and don’t show as much emotional warmth as married biological fathers. The study looked in detail at two-parent blended families where the men were biological fathers to some children and stepfathers to other children. It included black, Hispanic and white men of all income levels. It was found that the children spend as much time with married stepfathers as with married biological fathers. Stepfathers spend an average of 12 hours a week engaged with their stepchildren and do nine of 13 different types of activities with them in a month. Those activities include reading a book, doing laundry, playing video games or sports, the researchers said.
ANI |
Blessed are they who covet nothing, for they will receive all that others covet. |
 |
| Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir | Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs | Nation | Editorial | | Business | Sport | World | Mailbag | Chandigarh Tribune | Ludhiana Tribune 50 years of Independence | Tercentenary Celebrations | | 123 Years of Trust | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
