Sunday, May 4, 2003		Books

Short takes
All that war destroys
Jaswant Singh

War and Environmental Security
by Parashu Ram Gupta. Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly. Pages 138. Rs 150.

EVERY war in this world has been more destructive than the previous one. The author, who is a teacher of defence studies, has counted 84 conflicts in different parts of the world in the past five years. These wars have seen 90 lakh deaths, 19 crore refugees and 3.9 crore persons displaced in their own countries.

Though the thrust of the book is on environmental security, yet a good part of it is devoted to defining the concept of war with quotations from dictionaries, encyclopaedias and authorities who specialise in the study of war and its characteristic nature over the centuries.

War has been defined in different ways such as (a) a customary reaction to circumstances jeopardising group solidarity and security, (b) a legitimate instrument of state policy, (c) an indispensable means of maintaining justice, (d) a legitimate procedure for settling quarrels between sovereigns, (e) an inevitable condition of the coexistence of sovereign states, and (f) an illegitimate form of state behaviour. But there is no denying the fact that over the past few centuries, war has tended to involve large populations and has been more intense and more costly, though a bit less frequent.

After defining war, the author moves on to the effects of war on environment. In this context, he points at the environmental devastation caused by the war in Vietnam and then in the Gulf region. Herbicides were used to destroy vast forest and crop areas in Vietnam. Clouds of smoke from burning oil wells in Kuwait blacked out the sun and lowered surface temperatures in many areas. Oil spills destroyed a large part of the marine life in the Gulf.

The book points out that even in peace time the military’s demands on land and resources have increased for testing missiles and other weapons which need large areas of land and even sea.

If war wrecks the infrastructure of civilisations, as it did in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the post-war effects are no less tragic. Unexploded mines, bombs, shells, rockets and grenades often cause disastrous accidents.

The book also discusses the effects of an unconventional war on the environment and classifies such warfare into four categories — nuclear, chemical, biological and environmental. A nuclear exchange between any two countries, the author points out, will result in global economic and social disruption apart from the colossal damage caused to the contestants.

The substances used in chemical warfare may be poisonous, blistering or having an irritant effect. The author draws a parallel between the testing of chemical weapons and the Bhopal gas tragedy, which took nearly 2500 lives and left more than 100,000 severely affected. The similarity between the Bhopal tragedy and the use of chemical weapons on a civilian population was so striking that many have gone to the extent of suggesting that the disaster was a planned experiment in chemical warfare, the author points out.

About biological warfare, the book lists about a dozen highly virulent species of bacteria that are very suitable for this type of warfare in which toxic biological substances are employed to cause casualties. Environmental weapons such as fire and flood have been used since ancient times. Others are only possibilities for the future.

The book contains an indictment of the Gulf War of 1991 as an environmental crime. It also contains a chapter on disarmament in the context of environmental security. The formation of an ecological task force of ex-servicemen for the protection of India’s ‘green belts’ constitutes the concluding chapter.

Char Dham, a Guide to the Hindu Pilgrimages
by Subhadra Sen Gupta. Rupa. Pages 211. Rs 295.

Pilgrimage is the most ancient form of tourism. For centuries the devout have travelled across difficult terrains to reach their sacred shrines. Countless Hindus have crossed remote Himalayan peaks and treacherous glaciers, braving cold, altitude sickness and frostbite to reach Mount Kailash and the Mansarovar lake. Millions have undertaken long and arduous journeys across perilous hill tracks and sandy deserts to reach remote shrines.

The most famous Hindu pilgrim was Shankracharya who began his journey as a teenager from Kerala, travelled to almost every important tirtha, and played a significant role in the revival of Hinduism as the principal faith of the land by setting up monastic orders called maths at the four dhams.

The four dhams, described in this book by a well-known scholar of Hindus cultures, are believed to be the abodes of Vishnu and are located in the north, south, east and west of the country. In the north is Badrinath in the Himalayas, where Vishnu bathes in the Alakhnanda. He gets dressed at Dwarka beside the Arabian Sea, eats a meal at Puri on the shores of the Bay of Bengal and proceeds to Rameshwaram where the Indian Ocean washes the southernmost point of the sub-continent, for a well-deserved rest after performing the arduous task of preserving the creation.

In addition to narrating legends connected with the four dhams, the book also describes other sacred places around each dham and the legends connected with them. For the benefit of today’s travellers, there is a chapter appended to each dham detailing the best time to visit the place, the mode of travel and other facilities available there.