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Thursday,
September 11, 2003, Chandigarh, India  
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Road to Washington Protect witnesses Innocents in jails |
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Terrorism is a product of mindset
From that vantage point
To US or Canada — by hook or by crook
FROM PAKISTAN
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Road to Washington PITY
the Indian comrades who live in a world that does not exist. Pity the few protesters, representing equally irrelevant shades of public and political opinion, for interpreting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's state visit as a snub to the Indian Muslims and the Muslim world. First things first. Upgrading diplomatic ties with Israel is an initiative that was first given a serious look by Morarji Desai on becoming Prime Minister. Earlier, in September 1968, when the Research and Analysis Wing was founded, Indira Gandhi had asked R. N. Kao to establish contact with Israel's Mossad. The RAW-Mossad covert relationship made India understand the danger to its security from the Pakistan-China-North Korea military tie-up. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee merely brought the relationship out in the open by inviting Mr Sharon to visit India. The fear that it would damage the country's traditional bonds of friendship with the Arab world is exaggerated. Not unexpectedly, Prime Minister Sharon's visit made Pakistan throw a fit. It is upset because improvement in Indo-Israel ties would indirectly weaken its almost exclusive regional hold over America. In the unipolar world most roads now lead to Washington. But few get to travel on the Tel Aviv-Washington super highway. Improved bilateral ties with Israel would also allow India to receive improved telecommunication and agricultural technology besides intelligence and sophisticated equipment for fighting the Pakistan-sponsored proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere more effectively. The Nehruvian model of foreign policy was woven around an over-romanticised reading of the global reality. It is not that India should give up supporting the global underdog. But at what personal cost? Was it wise and diplomatically correct for a struggling economy to have ignored its own interest by spurning the friendly gestures of established economies because their treatment of smaller nations was not always fair? What has been the global impact of India's support to various liberation struggles? Mr Sharon's visit should see India's foreign policy relate more realistically to the evolving geopolitical reality. Only correct diplomatic initiatives can help the country realise its economic potential and play a more crucial role in shaping the contours of the changing world order. Prime Minister Sharon's visit, cut short by two days because of continuing violence at home, is an important course correction in India's foreign policy. |
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Protect witnesses ONE
positive outcome of the infamous Best Bakery case is that it has highlighted the plight of hapless witnesses who have to undergo untold suffering for no fault of theirs. It is not their predicament alone that has moved the conscience of the nation but the fate of the crucial cases which rest on their testimony. If somehow the witnesses are cajoled or forced to go back on their statement, the whole case collapses. In the Best Bakery case, the National Human Rights Commission intervened. There are thousands of other cases in which justice cannot be done just because witnesses have backed out. This malady has moved the Punjab and Haryana High Court to rule that it would be appropriate for both the Central and state governments to expeditiously adopt a programme for the protection of witnesses. It has cited the BMW and Jessica Lal murder cases in which prosecution has time and again failed due to the backing out of witnesses. This problem has also been acute in TADA cases. The end result is that even those held for heinous crimes escape punishment because no one dares to depose against them. Now that the court has brought on record the desirability of such a mechanism, the legislature and the executive should quickly formulate the necessary guidelines. The moot question is whether the politicians and bureaucrats will at all be keen to do so. One cannot be too hopeful that the example set by Queensland, Scotland, Canada and the US will be followed. If the administration itself is not willing to provide protection to the witnesses, there is no hope for them, as has happened in the case of Gujarat. Even if the government is not an interested party, it is not going to be easy to provide foolproof protection to witnesses. Take, for instance, the case of taxi driver Shivnarayan Pandey, who is a key witness in the Mumbai blasts case. Descriptions provided by him led the police to arrest the prime accused. His face is well known because he has been extensively interviewed by the media. He can no longer drive his taxi in the city and is under heavy protection at an undisclosed location. But what will happen to him after he appears in court and identifies the accused? The police has sought an annual budget of Rs 50 lakh so that it can provide fresh employment and complete relocation to witnesses like Mr Pandey after trial. Doing so all over the country is not going to be an easy task, but will have to be somehow carried out if the efforts to bring the culprits to book are not to be frustrated. |
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Innocents in jails AFTER
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Srinagar initiative for India-Pakistan amity, a number of nationals of both countries have been released from jails as a confidence-building measure. The latest on the subject is that 16 Punjabi youths languishing in Pakistani jails have been reunited with their families. They had entered Pakistan illegally after being cheated by unscrupulous travel agents. Over 250 Indian fishermen have also been released. India has responded to these gestures by setting free some of those who strayed into this side of the border by mistake. The most prominent case is that of the Pakistani boy, Munir. However, the long wait of many families is yet to end. Reports say that Ram Prakash, a resident of Bishnah in Jammu and Kashmir, is in Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore. His crime was that he had strayed into the Sai area of Sialkot. The fate of two Pakistani boys (residents of Gaurali village in Punjab province), Abid Ali and Ali Raza, who entered R. S. Pura in August 2001 accidentally is no different. They have been found to be innocent, but legal complications have prevented their repatriation. Crossing over the border without the necessary documents is legally a crime. It is very difficult to establish if the person concerned is not a terrorist or a subversive element. Doubts are raised about almost every case because of strained relations between India and Pakistan. Yet, a mechanism can be evolved to ensure that innocents do not suffer. It is heartening to note that there is growing consciousness in India about the fate of those who stray into this side of the border because of topographical problems. Human rights watch groups have also been advocating their cause. One hopes people in Pakistan too will take up the cases of innocent Indians and get them released. Such gestures are bound to help the efforts aimed at establishing friendly relations between the two neighbours.
We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves. — George Eliot |
Terrorism is a product of mindset DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India. He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”. There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”. At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!! Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities. What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open. Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and
follies? The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan |
From that vantage point MY romance with height began when my father brought home a garishly “Printed in Sivakasi” calendar depicting the 14-storeyed LIC building on Mount Road in Madras. It was the first skyscraper south of the Vindhyas. Until then, the tallest structure I had seen was the marvellous, awe-inspiring gate of the Meenakshi temple at Madurai, when I accompanied my father on one of his business trips. But there was no way of climbing the gate; the builders had not intended it that way. The dream of seeing the LIC building remained unfulfilled for a long time. Meanwhile, I had to remain content with seeing Sealord Hotel at Cochin, which was then the tallest in Kerala. But my father could not summon up courage to take me inside the hotel, where we were told a cup of coffee cost Rs 8 when, back in my village, it cost 10 paise. No such inhibitions prevented me from joining, uninvited, the crowd that had assembled for the inauguration of Oberoi-Sheraton Hotel in Bombay in May, 1973. Despite the heavy police bandobast in view of the Shiv Sena protest against the alleged non-employment of Marathis in the hotel, I even managed to have a ride in the lift to the penthouse restaurant from where I had a grand view of Malabar Hills. The same year and around the same time, in distant New York, the tallest towers in the world — the World Trade Center — were opened. A few months later when I shifted to the Capital, the Hindustan Times building on Curzon Road had just been inaugurated. It was claimed to have dwarfed Qutab Minar. On the pretext of meeting the legendary editorial-writer, the late C.P. Ramachandran, I got into the building and had a ride in the high-speed lift. I had no clue at that time that a few years later I would work in the same building. But my fascination for tall buildings and high altitudes continued. It was, therefore, a dream come true for me when on a demonstration flight, the pilot took us — a group of newsmen — close to Mount Everest. Climbing up the Great Wall of China, riding to the top floor of Eiffel Tower in Paris, spending an afternoon in the snow-covered Alps near Munich are what I cherish most about my visit to those places. Every time I visit Guwahati, I go to the Nilachal hills on which is situated the famous Kamakhya temple, from where one gets a panoramic view of the city and the only he-river in the world. The most memorable part of my visit to Srinagar was the climb to the Shankaracharya temple, located on one of the highest hills in the town. It is precisely for this reason that I always visit the Cathedral of Mary Help of Christians in Shillong from where on a clear day, the mighty Brahmaputra and the snow-crowned peaks of the Himalayas can also be seen. Small wonder that at the prospect of a visit to New York, I dreamt of visiting the WTC towers. After all, it was the most widely recognised of human-made structures, both beloved for its photogenic skyline presence and vilified for symbolising heartless modernism. My wife had a pain in her neck, as she craned to look at the top from the ground. The view from the top was simply breathtaking. The huge Statue of Liberty we visited a couple of hours earlier in the day appeared puny from that vantage point. The high point of the visit was having a cup of steaming coffee at the Windows on the World restaurant where the manager was Jupiter Yambem from Manipur, a friend of my friend Sanjoy Hazarika. As we took the lift back to the mezzanine floor and walked out of the building, I had no clue that just a week later suicide bombers would ram hijacked aircraft into the towers and bring them down. And that Yambem, too, would die in the event that changed the world like no other event ever
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To US or Canada — by hook or by crook
HUMAN-trafficking goes on unabated — in one form or the other — from Punjab’s Doaba region. It has always been a craze among youngsters and middle-aged people to go and settle abroad by adopting any available course, even if it is illegal, and in spite of the tragedies which struck a number of unfortunate aspirants and tales of horrendous treatment meted out to them on their way to greener pastures. The glitter of dollars still attracts a large number of youth belonging to Punjab in general and of Doaba in particular. Many aspirants — the illiterate ones in particular — fall prey to unscrupulous travel agents, including some “part-timers”, who have minted money in crores by doing the business of “Kabootarbaazi”, as they call it, by donning the cap of a singer, a sportsman or a filmmaker. The registration of hundreds of cases against travel agents, highlighting of the gimmicks used by them to befool people, heart-rending experiences of those who could not make it and of those who were either arrested or died midway, or were deported after spending years in jails abroad, have failed to deter the younger lot, which is always ready to push off at any cost. The death of about 125 Punjabi youths in the 1996 Malta Boat Tragedy or landing of scores of youth, whose agents ditched them during their effort to reach Greece or Italy, and who had ultimately landed in Pakistani jails, where they were allegedly tortured, has failed to diminish the spirits of aspirants. Investigations have revealed that people interested in going abroad were ready to pay even up to Rs 20 lakh to a travel agent who could “ensure” their safe landing in the country of their choice. The recent case pertaining to five missing women cricketers in England was also seen by many in this light. “In Doaba the rate of sending a person to the US is Rs 20 lakh followed by Rs 8 lakh for Canada and Australia,” maintains a travel agent. Though the price to be paid for a voyage to Gulf countries is much less —between Rs 50,000 and Rs 2 lakh — most of the aspirants from Doaba region prefer to go to countries like Canada, the UK and the US, while aspirants from Malwa and Majha regions also choose to go to Gulf countries first with a long-term strategy to settle in the US or Canada finally. The latest method adopted by unscrupulous elements involved in illegal human trafficking is to present the interested person as a member of a sports team, a film production unit or as an associate of a singer, which usually made things easier, especially for securing a tourist visa. The modus operandi, allegedly used in some such cases, was to first form a sports club or an organisation dealing in major games and even in games which had little international recognition. Then names of two or three interested persons, called “kabootars” in the local parlance — from whom anything between Rs 8 and Rs 10 lakh was charged — were added by the organiser to the list of genuine sportsmen The same paper usually facilitated the grant of a visa by unsuspecting embassy officials. In one such case, the police had reportedly initiated investigation against a senior player and organiser, but the investigation was left midway for reasons best known to the police authorities. Enquiries revealed that some police offcials, including a Jalandhar-based head constable, were also doubling as travel agents. Intelligence sources reveal that a large number of aspirants did not hesitate to reach the UK, the US, Canada and Germany by adopting the political asylum route. The quantum of human trafficking in Doaba can be estimated from the registration of 117 cases against travel agents in 2002, followed by 97 during the current year by the police in Kapurthala alone. Similarly, nearly 100 cases were registered by the Jalandhar police against Mr. Gagan Bakshi, a Jalandhar-based travel agent. “Every third complaint in Kapurthala district is against travel agents,” said Mr. L.K. Yadav, an SP at Kapurthala. “What encourages them is the almost zero conviction rate for failure of witnesses to stand by their statements. What such travel agents would do is to either return money to the victim if he was persistent or to try to win over the witnesses,” said Mr. Yadav. Though there is no exact number of such agents and sub-agents working in towns and villages of Doaba, their number is about 2,000. “Any person who has frequented the passport office or has once travelled abroad turns a travel agent and tries to mint money from others,” said Mr. Dharampal Sondhi, a leading travel agent of Jalandhar. He said the number of genuine travel agents in Punjab and Chandigarh was just between 400 and 500. The interrogation of about half a dozen youths hailing from different villages of Doaba, who were allegedly lured by unscrupulous agents on the promise of taking them to Lebanon and who had landed in Pakistani jails from where they were released in June this year, has revealed that a Delhi-based gang used to push them off into Greece through Lebanon or Turkey for their ultimate destination — Italy. But most of their “kabootars” were arrested by the alert Turkish police authorities, who in turn pushed them into Iran. From there they were sent to Pakistan through the border town of Taftaan where they were arrested in 2001. All agents in this case operated from their houses and were unregistered. The quantum of human trafficking in Doaba can be estimated from the registration of 117 cases against travel agents in 2002, followed by 97 during the current year by the police in Kapurthala alone. |
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FROM PAKISTAN ISLAMABAD: The Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) parliamentary party has asked the government to bring basic changes in the foreign policy vis-a-vis Pakistan's relations with the United States and Afghanistan. A meeting of the six-party religious alliance's lawmakers, held at the parliament house here on Tuesday, rejected the American president's 'telephonic pressure' on General Musharraf for sending Pakistani troops to Iraq, and demanded of the government to declare in unequivocal terms that Pakistan would not send its troops to “kill Muslim brethren in a Muslim state.” The MMA demanded of the government to review its relations with the US and its Afghan policy, and said General Musharraf's foreign policy had been a total failure and Pakistan was “moving fast towards isolation”. — The Dawn LFO protest
may intensify
ISLAMABAD: Leaders of Pakistan People’s Party, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal on Tuesday hinted at taking the anti-Legal Framework Order (LFO) protest to the provincial assemblies. “We agree to the idea in principle and will take up the matter in our parliamentary heads meeting,” the leaders of the three parties told reporters, saying Balochistan National Movement leader Abdul Rauf has floated the idea. Liaquat Baloch said it is a valid proposal and would be considered in the MMA meeting and the combined opposition’s parliamentary leaders’ moot. PPP’s Pervez Ashraf and PML-N’s Javed Hashmi also welcomed the proposal. “Given the renewed campaign by the treasury benches, the protest can be taken to provinces,” Hashmi said. —
The Nation DPSC members
may be sacked
LAHORE: The Punjab government, in pursuance of the National Reconstruction Bureau’s directions, has decided to depose those members of District Public Safety Commission who are above 65 years of age and those having strong political affiliation. The Punjab government is considering a proposal to fix the upper age limit for the members of DPSC at 65. Sources in Home Department confided to this scribe that the government was taking this step in view of the selection of some very old people as members. These members are retired officers of various government departments. Because of bodily infirmities, they have not been able to discharge their duties satisfactorily, the sources said. —
The News International Girls outwit
boys in exam
KARACHI: The female students shattered the supremacy of male students, which they had achieved last year in the HSC Commerce (Part-II) annual examinations, by securing top three positions in 2003 examinations. The Board of Intermediate Education, Karachi, on Tuesday announced the results of HSC Commerce annual examinations 2003, with a pass percentage of 47.72, which was about 4 per cent higher than that of the last year. As many as 14,140 candidates, including 4,597 female candidates, appeared in the examinations. —
The Dawn |
My effort should never be to undermine another’s faith but to make him a better follower of his own faith. — Mahatma Gandhi He is One but does in all things pervade He is the merchandise, His is the trade. This truth only the rare ones learn He is present whichever way we turn. — Guru Arjan Dev When the soul has laid down its faults at the feet of God, it feels as though it had wings. — E. Guerin Duty is carrying on promptly and faithfully the affairs now before you. — It is to fulfill the claims of today. — Goethe
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