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Killers on the train Choice is Hurriyat’s |
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Needless worry
Sonia can’t be Prime Minister-II
Happiness is the gift of pain
DATELINE WASHINGTON
DELHI DURBAR
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Killers on the train MANISH MISHRA did not die because he happened to be a relative of the Prime Minister. The 21-year-old youth was killed despite being a relative of the Prime Minister because he dared to stop a few eveteasers on the running Chhattisgarh Express near Mathura on Sunday. He committed a cardinal sin, indeed. Any “sensible” person should have known that such a mistake was an open invitation to trouble. Most witnesses to such everyday occurrence look the other way, as do the harassed girls who have nobody to look up to and have to bear the humiliation in sullen silence. Because Manish was the grandson of Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s sister Vimla Mishra, perhaps his killers will be apprehended and also given severe punishment. But, pray, will that make any difference on the ground, because the problem is not confined to any one train or area? Such incidents occur almost everywhere and since the authorities rarely react, these have come to be accepted as one of those things you have to learn to live with. In fact, the matter would not have even hit the headlines had the victim not been related to a VVIP. Now that it has, it must be treated as the last straw. Much-delayed correctives need to be applied forthwith. What rankles the most is that officials like the TTEs who are supposed to take care of the passengers become scarce the moment some hoodlums — mostly ticketless travellers – enter a compartment, even a reserved one. The same is the case with policemen. But the real crisis develops when the policemen and officials themselves become lawbreakers. There have been numerous instances of eveteasing and even rapes in running trains by railway policemen themselves. That is why the faith of the public stands shattered. The country has put up with this state of affairs for far too long. Travelling through Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is considered especially risky. The indifference of the onlookers has encouraged the wrongdoers. It is time the public rose as one against the oppression. The Prime Minister too will share their anguish like never before. |
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Choice is Hurriyat’s DESPITE having adopted the dialogue process for normalising the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, Hurriyat Conference (Abbas Ansari) leaders have been giving confusing signals for some time. It was ridiculous on their part to have joined the Hurriyat faction led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a hardliner, in issuing a Republic Day boycott call. As expected, the day passed off peacefully with no report of obstruction of the Republic Day celebrations from anywhere in the state. The only mentionable “impact” was that some people remained indoors in Srinagar. The people of Jammu and Kashmir have been longing for peace and the revival of economic activity. They do not want the changed atmosphere following the thaw in India-Pakistan relations to be vitiated. The Hurriyat leaders should have been wiser after the 2002 Assembly elections when the people ignored their boycott call and exercised their franchise in large numbers. It is surprising that Moulvi Abbas Ansari has found that the elections were “not fair”, a view contrary to that held by the international media and all those associated with the polls. The enthusiasm shown by the people in the elections, not only in 2002 but earlier also, has nullified the so-called plebiscite demand, which the Hurriyat had been making at the behest of Pakistan. If it is “moving away from its earlier stand to facilitate peace talks” it is only accepting the ground reality. Moulvi Ansari and his camp followers do not know how to face the public, which is curious to know about the goings-on between them and Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani. The people’s curiosity is understandable as the Hurriyat leaders had said that they were in the process of preparing a “road map for peace” before going to Delhi. The Hurriyat leaders must not indulge in anything that leads to hype among the public because of the simple fact that they cannot get from the Central government more than what the Indian Constitution permits. In any case, they must realise that they cannot have their cake and eat it too. |
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Needless worry THE US Senate Bill banning outsourcing need not cause any panic. Its full implications will be known only after the fine print of the law becomes public. Knowledgeable persons quoted in the media reports emanating from Washington say the impact will be “little”. It is estimated that only about 2 per cent of India’s software revenue of $10 billion comes from the US. Secondly, the Bill confines itself to the federal government contracts only. Most of these are already given to domestic companies under the existing laws. The private sector, which accounts for most of the business, is beyond the purview of the Bill. Though the damage the Senate Bill may cause is limited, experts worry that the states may take a cue from the federal anti-outsourcing move and pass similar laws to discourage the outflow of offshoring business. Last year at least eight states had introduced anti-outsourcing Bills, but did not pass them. As elections approach, there is a renewed interest in offshoring. There is also a talk of tax incentives for US companies that keep their jobs within the country. Outsourcing is linked to job losses. And jobs are a serious issue in the US, especially in an election year. Americans have to elect, apart from the President, all 435 members of the House of Representatives, 34 Senators and 11 Governors this year. So every vote seeker is raising the emotional issue of job losses for a bountiful political harvest. What is lost in their shortsighted, election-eve rhetoric is the fact that they are harming the long-term interests of their own country. Outsourcing to countries like India and China lowers production costs and inflates corporate profits. Shareholder pressure on the US corporate bosses to show results will compel them to resort to outsourcing. Americans need not worry unduly as the economic recovery will create more jobs.
What if this present were the world’s last night? — John Donne |
Sonia can’t be Prime Minister-II THOUGH even a non-member of any House can be inducted into the Cabinet temporarily, a person not qualified to be a Member or who is under a disqualification to be one cannot be so sworn in as a minister or a chief minister or as the Prime Minister. That is the law categorically declared recently by the Supreme Court in Ms Jayalalithaa’s case. The basic qualification to become a Member of a House is, as noted already, that he or she should be a “citizen of India”. Further, if the Member has voluntarily acquired the citizenship of a foreign country, or is under any acknowledgement of allegiance or adherence to a foreign state, he or she cannot continue to be a Member. Whether a registered citizen is “under adherence” to his or her original motherland will be a relevant question. The expression “adherence to a foreign state”, occurring in Article 102(d), was borrowed from the Australian constitution. In the Constituent Assembly H.V. Kamath significantly observed: “A subject or his citizen or one who is entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power clearly stands in a category…. is of more serious import.” No one opposed his views. Legal dictionaries indicate that “right in a foreign state” would amount to “adherence”. Thus, a person who enjoys dual citizenship or entitled to be a citizen of another country as a matter of right, may be through the umbilical chord, has “adherence” to a foreign state — he is not a citizen only of India — he or she is a citizen also of India. It is well settled that in a written Constitution, not everything is stated expressly. Often, the powers and limitations are to be implied from the context, scheme and other provisions of the Constitution. Fundamental rights not expressly enumerated in the text have been deduced or inferred on the principle that they are implicit or implied in the express guarantees. There are innumerable examples of interpretations of our Constitution by the Supreme Court, which have either expanded or restricted the apparent scope, even by adding words. Freedom of the Press, right to privacy, right to reputation, right to earn livelihood, right to shelter, right to know and right to information, right to education, power to amend the Constitution being limited by the “basic structure theory” are all products of judicial interpretation. The procedure relating to the appointment of judges to the higher judiciary, the impropriety of appointing a person ineligible to be a member of a legislature as a temporary Chief Minister are some of the glaring examples of working a constitution differently from its wording. In the constitutional context of appointment to high constitutional offices of the President, Prime Minister and the like, it may be legitimate to interpret the expression “citizen” to mean only a permanent citizen of India. This would be in accordance with what appears to be the intention of the framers and the larger interest of the nation. Altering this position may violate the basic structure of the Constitution. Mrs Sonia Gandhi was a born citizen of Italy. Under the Italian law a natural born citizen of Italy can, as a matter of right, re-acquire the rights even if he or she has opted for another citizenship after relinquishing the original citizenship. The question is: does a former Italian citizen continue to adhere to Italy, within the meaning of the expression in Article 102 of our Constitution, even after getting registered as a citizen of India by virtue of marriage? This question would arise in the case of every registered citizen. In addition, marriage of a woman of one nationality to a man of another gives rise to peculiar legal issues. Professor J.G. Starke, a well-known authority on international law, in his famous work, “Introduction to International Law”, sets out the legal position as follows: “Owing to the conflict of nationality laws and their lack of uniformity, it often arises that certain individuals possess double nationality. A frequent instance is the case of a woman who, marrying somebody not of her own nationality, may retain her nationality according to the law of the state of which she is a national and acquire the nationality of her husband according to the law of the state of which her husband is a national.” “Article 8-11 of the (Hague) Convention deal with the nationality of married women, containing provisions mitigating the artificial and technical principle that their nationality follows that of their husbands, and enabling them under certain conditions to retain premarital nationality. An advance on these provisions was made in the Convention on the Nationality of Married Women opened for signature on 20 February, 1957, under which each contracting state agrees that neither the celebration nor the dissolution of marriage between one of its nationals and an alien, nor a change of nationality by the husband during marriage, shall have any automatic effect on the wife’s nationality, and provision is made for facilitating, through naturalisation, the voluntary acquisition by an alien wife of her husband’s nationality”. Article 5 of the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in November 1967, provided more broadly: “Women shall have the same rights as men to acquire, change or retain their nationality. Marriage to an alien shall not automatically affect the nationality of the wife either by rendering her stateless or by forcing upon her the nationality of the husband.” This proposed principle is spelled out in more elaborate terms in Article 9 of the Convention of 1979 on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Paragraph 1 of the Article provided: “1. States/parties shall grant women equal rights with men to acquire, change or retain their nationality. They shall ensure in particular that neither marriage to an alien nor change of nationality by the husband during marriage shall automatically change the nationality of the wife, render her stateless or force upon her the nationality of husband.” Paragraph 2 was in these terms: “2. States/parties shall grant women equal rights with men with respect to the nationality of the children.” Did Mrs Sonia Gandhi exercise this right and the rights available under the Italian laws with respect to the nationality of her children? This is not a personal matter because every member of the Nehru family is a potential Prime Minister of India. The issue is vital. The objection against a temporary citizen occupying crucial constitutional posts is not just sentimental nor can it be brushed aside as narrow-mindedness. Heads of State or persons enjoying high constitutional offices have access to several documents and information of highly sensitive or critical nature. In any event, every time there is a leakage of state secrets, the needle of suspicion will point to the foreigner, turned citizen who can at any time escape to the motherland. When great care is taken before selecting persons to sensitive assignments and persons of dual nationality are either barred from employment or chosen after full verification all over the world, how can our country’s administration be entrusted to a person of multiple adherence? How can the armed forces or intelligence agencies share secrets with such a person? Sentiment and emotion should not take the place of reason while discussing an issue concerning the nation. In every country the law-enforcement machinery is prepared at best to deal with its own erring citizens. However, when the defendant or accused is a foreigner, the enforcement machinery virtually breaks down. Portugal has agreed to extradite Monica Bedi and, perhaps, may eventually extradite Abu Salem also. Several wanted criminals have been deported from the UAE. All these are citizens of India. In contrast, India has not been able to secure the extradition of any foreigner: examples — Ottavio Quattrocchi, who is an Italian, and Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Manon, who both are now Pakistani citizens. The growing number of former Heads of State and Government the world over, facing prosecution for abusing their positions and acting against the interest of their countries, is not very comforting. If the wanted criminals have one leg firmly rooted abroad, the affected nation will have no remedy. And the felicity with which “money bags” get into the Rajya Sabha clearly points to another possible danger to our very freedom through imported Prime
Ministers. (Concluded) |
Happiness is the gift of pain THERE are moments when we are drawn to reminiscing about our yesterdays and all they have meant. And we feel a sense of wonderful nostalgia for time that has been so well and richly spent. Now that train to Pakistan is back on track and air services have been resumed, a few indelible imprints, out of crowds of memory of my childhood, have refused to fade out. It was on “Id-Gah” road in Ambala Cantt where my father had built his dream house. The “Jama Masjid” was at a stone’s throw. The morning “Azaan” from the mosque was our alarm clock when mother would wake me up with strict directions to occupy the study table quickly. I went to a school which was earlier known as Hindu Muslim High School where our only teacher, Maulvi Sahib, would teach us all subjects. There was no nursery or kindergarten classes. Fountain pens were banned as emphasis was on good handwriting. The teacher would be respected not only by all the students but also by their parents. Just a slight gesture was enough to bring the unruly students to order. The school session would start with the prayer “Saaray Jahan Say Achcha Hindustan Hamara”. Love and respect for each other and for the country was instilled and inculcated right from the so called grass-root levels. The festival of Id would be celebrated by all of us. Greetings and presents would be exchanged with our Muslim friends and neighbours. In fact, I would anxiously wait for its arrival as extra pocket money would be given for celebration and non-vegetarian delicacies would arrive. Divali would be celebrated with equal enthusiasm by them and we would reciprocate by sending packets of sweets and basket full of fruits. Hamid Sahib, as we called him, was a family friend. He was transferred to a distant place but would invariably spend his yearly vacation with us. His father was buried here and would visit his grave to offer prayer. All of us never failed to accompany him and shared his grief by joining in the prayer. It was a break away from orthodox image as we never felt that the departed was not one of our respected elders. Tall and handsome Azhar (not the famous Indian cricketer) was the flamboy of our school and pace bowler of the cricket team. Once he had captured most of the wickets of the rival team and was surrounded by a few girl admirers after the close of the match with autograph books in their hands. Finding Azhar nonplussed, I whispered in his ears that they wanted his signatures! Earlier, while alighting at the Lahore Railway Station he shouted “Aaj Paida ho Gaya”. It was a saying during those days that if a person has not seen Lahore then he has not come to this world. Suddenly everything vanished. There were countless painful experiences and our composite culture faded away. Samjhauta Express has after more than 50 years managed to wipe the despair off the faces of the people and replace it with hope. Life can be made full of little thrills and pleasures now by giving importance to every activity. After all, happiness is the gift of pain.
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DATELINE WASHINGTON
THERE'S not much John Kerry and Howard Dean agree on these days. But the two leading Democratic presidential candidates find consensus in their beliefs that President George W. Bush misled the American people on the reasons for invading Iraq. Adding fuel to the argument are remarks by a former US weapons inspector that he believes Saddam Hussein had no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons and only “rudimentary” nuclear programs. Iraq has dominated the run-up to the November presidential elections like no other war in recent history. For the seven Democrats slugging it out for their party’s presidential nomination, the situation in Iraq is as much a talking point as domestic concerns. “We were misled not only in the intelligence but in the way that the president took us to war,” said Massachusetts Senator Kerry, campaigning doggedly to retain his front-runner tag. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean is quick to point out that Mr. Kerry supported a congressional resolution that gave Mr. Bush the authority to use force in Iraq. A Vietnam War veteran, Mr Kerry couches his volte-face on the matter in the distasteful specter of a long and bloody war, not unlike the one in Vietnam, for U.S. troops in Iraq. This may not be an improbable argument given that the American death toll in Iraq last week surpassed 500. Like Mr Kerry, Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Edwards, also voted in favour of Mr Bush’s request for congressional authority. Congressman Dennis Kucinich is the only candidate who voted against the resolution. And, though not members of Congress, New York civil rights activist Al Sharpton and former General Wesley Clark have also opposed the war. Mr Clark has accused the Bush administration of “hyping” intelligence. “This administration has hyped the intelligence to get us into Iraq. The President still didn’t admit the truth in the State of the Union speech that there aren't any weapons of mass destruction there. David Kay said there weren’t when he gave up his position. And we’ve damaged the credibility of the presidency. We’ve damaged our national credibility on this issue of weapons of mass destruction,” he said. Never quite watertight, the Bush administration’s case for a war in Iraq has been questioned by a leading human rights group. “[D]espite the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the invasion of Iraq cannot be justified as a humanitarian intervention,” said Ken Roth of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. In his report “War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention” Mr Roth points out that Human Rights Watch “ordinarily takes no position on whether a state should go to war…. A humanitarian rationale was occasionally offered for the war, but it was so plainly subsidiary to other reasons.” Over time, the principal justifications given by both Washington and London for the war have lost much of their force. More than seven months after the declared end of major hostilities, weapons of mass destruction have not been found. Instead, there is overwhelming evidence that Iraq did not have banned weapons at the time that the US and British forces invaded. Nor has any significant prewar link between Saddam Hussein and international terrorism been unearthed. Brutal as Saddam Hussein's reign had been, the scope of the Iraqi government’s killing in March 2003 was not of the “exceptional and dire magnitude” that would justify humanitarian intervention. “We have no illusions about Saddam Hussein’s vicious inhumanity. However, by the time of the March 2003 invasion, Saddam Hussein’s killing had ebbed,” said Mr Roth. In an exhaustive report released this week, the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) made the case that the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime was “not an adequate justification” for war, and that the US and British authorities did not seriously try to make it one until long after the war began and all the false justifications began to fall apart. Concluding that the rationale for overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime was bogus, BASIC director Dr Ian Davis said: “[T]he failure to find banned weapons in Iraq suggests very strongly that the UN weapons inspectors succeeded in their mandate, and that Iraq complied with its obligations to dismantle and destroy all nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.” Preventing the spread of these weapons is indeed a major concern for our time, but mistakes must be acknowledged, policies reviewed and doctrines amended. Mr Powell, in fact, dropped a recent bombshell when he conceded that Saddam Hussein’s regime might not have possessed any banned weapons at the time the US-led coalition launched its war in Iraq. “The open question is how many stocks they had, if any. And if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn’t have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?” Mr Powell told reporters that his forceful February 5 argument in favour of a war was based on “what our intelligence community believed was credible.” It is the competence of this intelligence community, which in May 1998 missed signs of India’s nuclear tests, Mr Kay has come to doubt. An internal Central Intelligence Agency review led by Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director, found that US intelligence analysts lacked new, hard information about Saddam Hussein's weapons after UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998. So they had to rely on data from the early and mid-1990s when concluding in the months leading up to the war that those programs continued into 2003. Though the review did not say so explicitly, the findings indicate that there was no hard-and-fast intelligence that Iraq possessed ready-to-go chemical or biological weapons. The previous confidence in Iraq's possession of advanced WMD appears to have been based on a combination of US and British intelligence misjudgements and the result of distortion by members of the Bush administration and Blair governments. |
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Delhi Durbar BJP President M Venkaiah Naidu has expressed his intention not to contest the Lok Sabha elections ever again even though he had nursed the Nellore constituency in Andhra Pradesh. Therein is a message to other BJP Rajya Sabha members like Pramod Mahajan, Mukhtiar Abbas Naqvi and Union ministers Arun Jaitley, Rajnath Singh and Sushma Swaraj. Naidu made this observation in Nellore where he had gone to celebrate Pongal with his family. It is no secret that Naidu had nursed Nellore during his short tenure as Union Rural Development Minister. There was a beeline of people calling on Naidu wanting to know if he or his daughter would contest the Nellore Lok Sabha seat. Naidu is believed to have firmly rejected these suggestions on the plea that he was against dynastic ambitions in keeping with the stand of the BJP. At the same time there is talk that Jaitley, vested with the responsibility of preparing the vision 2004 document, might contest from Delhi. Even though Jaitley is a Rajya Sabha MP from Gujarat, BJP strategists believe he should contest from Delhi as the party envisions a clean sweep of all the seven seats from the national Capital. After all the fight in the general election is not between Shiela Dikshit and Madan Lal Khurana, but Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on the one side and the Congress-led secular front on the other with its ambiguity about the Prime Ministerial candidate. Firm no to
expansion The Congress high command has put in cold storage a Cabinet expansion in Punjab in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections. The
dissidents, who had created a brouhaha of not settling for anything short of a change in leadership, are rueing that they have been shortchanged. Their demand for Cabinet expansion following the elevation of Rajinder Kaur Bhattal as Deputy CM is viewed as an exercise in futility at this juncture. This is because the Cabinet will have to be pruned within six months once the new law takes effect that the strength of a ministry cannot exceed 15 per cent of the total number of seats in the Vidhan Sabha. That would mean axing ministers, which can complicate the situation further. Advani no
hardliner Despite the evident bonhomie at the first Centre-Hurriyat talks, there was lack of a consensus on the nomenclature of the six-paragraph release agreed to both by Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani and the Hurriyat leaders. The five-member Hurriyat delegation called it a joint statement while Mr Advani called it an agreed synopsis. The two-and-a-half hour meeting seemingly changed many an impression. A Hurriyat leader later noted that Advani was not the ``hardliner’’ he was perceived to be and the two sides had similar views about several problems affecting Jammu and Kashmir. Farooq Sattar A convener of Pakistan’s Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and National Assembly member, Farooq Sattar, regrets that unlike India democratic
institutions in his country have been consistently weakened and not allowed to gain strength due to various factors, including military dictatorships. He ruled out his mentor and leader Altaf Hussain’s return to Pakistan. Sattar, a doctor, insists Pakistan is yet to break free from the clutches of
feudalism. He is categoric that those who had migrated from India and made Pakistan their home continue to be treated as third-class citizens. Supporting more people-to-people contacts, he recalled that his roots were in Bhavnagar in Gujarat and was visiting India after a gap of 33 years. As the third largest party in terms of votes polled in Pakitan, the MQM’s stronghold is Sindh. Farooq spoke at the Observer Research Foundation on the future of Mohajir nationalism and the MQM’s
perception of Indo-Pak relations. Contributed by T.R. Ramachandran and Prashant Sood |
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. — Mahatma Gandhi The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. — John Stuart Mill The cause of freedom is identified with the destinies of humanity, and in whatever part of the world it gains ground, by and by it will be a common gain to all who desire it. — Kossuth All are yoked to God’s will and will be judged according to their deeds. — Guru Nanak The pitfalls of monasticism advocated universally by Buddhism without any high criteria which led to the degeneration of both Buddhism and the monastic ideal, must be avoided. — Shri Adi Shankaracharya |
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