O P I N I O N S

EDITORIALS

Acquittal mode
The guilty will have the last laugh
Fourteen years of high-profile judicial proceedings in the St Kitts case have proved to be a wild-goose chase, with the last accused, self-styled godman Chandraswami, being discharged by court. That is a sad but not quite unexpected end to the controversy involving the “forging” of certain bank documents to show that former Prime Minister V. P. Singh’s son Ajey Singh had an alleged bank account with First Trust Corporation Bank in St Kitts islands with a deposit of $ 21 million in 1986.

President Karzai
Afghans get a taste of democracy
The Afghans have finally reposed their faith in the leadership of President Hamid Karzai. As expected, he has won the October 9 elections with a comfortable majority, though the results will be declared officially in a few days. His two powerful opponents, Mr Yunus Qanooni and Mr Abdur Rashid Dostum, both former ministers, have accepted defeat.

Sufi Bard
Or call him what you will
It is an established fact that the British nicked the famous Kohinoor diamond from India. It can now be said the country lost not one but two Kohinoors to the invaders from Blighty. The crafty British presented the other diamond to the literary world as William Shakespeare, the Bard from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

• Thought for the day

ARTICLE

NPT is of no use
Threat comes from rogue outfits
by K. Subrahmanyam
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laying the foundation for Proto-type Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam on October 23 is both an act of faith in the Indian scientific community and a challenge to international conventional wisdom. He was launching India into the second phase of Homi Bhabha’s three-phase energy security plan at a time when most of the world has turned its back on nuclear energy.

MIDDLE

The return of Birbal
by Shriniwas Joshi
I was in Chandigarh recently. My nephew Abeer who has just stepped into Punjab Engineering College (PEC) asked me a question, “Mamaji, if somebody asks you how many birds are there in Shimla, what will your reply be?” I told him a witty one from ‘Akbar-Birbal Vinod’.

OPED

Bombshell for Bush: 350 tonnes of explosives go missing in Iraq
by Rupert Cornwell in Washington
In a massive pre-election embarrassment for the Bush administration, nearly 350 tons of lethal explosives — which could be used to trigger nuclear weapons — have vanished from a military facility in Iraq supposed to have been guarded by US troops.

Tackling shortage of water, power
by R.N. Malik
The Pong dam and Ranjit Sagar reservoirs are seldom full to the brim during the monsoon. This year the reservoirs were hardly half full. Four MAF of the Beas water has already been diverted to the Gobind Sagar reservoir to facilitate the running of the right power plant during a lean period, thus depriving the Pong dam reservoir of the entire flow from snow melt.

REFLECTIONS

EDITORIALS

Acquittal mode
The guilty will have the last laugh

Fourteen years of high-profile judicial proceedings in the St Kitts case have proved to be a wild-goose chase, with the last accused, self-styled godman Chandraswami, being discharged by court. That is a sad but not quite unexpected end to the controversy involving the “forging” of certain bank documents to show that former Prime Minister V. P. Singh’s son Ajey Singh had an alleged bank account with First Trust Corporation Bank in St Kitts islands with a deposit of $ 21 million in 1986. The other two accused in the case, former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and former Union Minister K.K. Tiwari, were discharged in 1997 while the fourth accused, Kailash Nath Aggarwal, alias Mamaji, died during the proceedings. Ironically, the court judgement delivered on Monday does mention that the documents were forged but says it found no evidence that prime accused Chandraswami had participated in the forgery. That means that all the dramatis personae will go scot-free.

It will be wrong to blame the long-winded judicial proceedings for this bungling. The fault lies with the CBI which was either incompetent or chose to be so. It presented merely circumstantial evidence before court, which did not have much value. Why, it could not even procure originals of “forged documents”. Whether this was the result of political compulsions is a matter of conjecture, but the CBI record in such cases, as Mr V.P. Singh has pointed out, does not enhance its reputation.

When the premier investigation agency functions in a manner which is bound to raise uncomfortable questions about its independence and integrity, the whole state machinery comes under a cloud. The public tends to lose faith in the efficacy of various arms of the government. The general impression among the people is that the net cast by the CBI and other agencies can only hold small fish; big sharks can tear their way out of trouble. The St Kitts acquittal has done a lot to strengthen this unfortunate impression. The guilty with have the last laugh!

President Karzai
Afghans get a taste of democracy

The Afghans have finally reposed their faith in the leadership of President Hamid Karzai. As expected, he has won the October 9 elections with a comfortable majority, though the results will be declared officially in a few days. His two powerful opponents, Mr Yunus Qanooni and Mr Abdur Rashid Dostum, both former ministers, have accepted defeat. This is obviously a vote for stability, which this war-ravaged country badly needs.

The honour of being the first elected executive head of Afghanistan has come to Mr Karzai because he was the best bet available to the impoverished people. He had proved during his three-year interim rule that he was seriously interested in rebuilding his country. He also had the advantage of being the most popular representative of the majority Pashtuns. His opponents belonging to the dominant tribe were too weak to pose a serious challenge. But Mr Qanooni and Mr Dostum, both non-Pashtun, put up a good fight. That is why the victory cannot be described as a cakewalk for Mr Karzai.

In any case, the real challenge for Mr Karzai begins now. He has to ensure that his writ runs all over Afghanistan, which has not been the case so far. He could not visit many areas during the elections because of security reasons. Provincial warlords still control most parts of Afghanistan because Kabul has not been able to force them to surrender their weapons. They must be made to do so in the interest of rule of law. Mr Karzai needs massive international assistance to rebuild his country, which is also necessary to wean away people from the influence of destructive forces like the Taliban. The Afghans expect a lot from India because of historical reasons. India must do more than it has been doing for a friendly country which has tasted democracy at last.

Sufi Bard
Or call him what you will

It is an established fact that the British nicked the famous Kohinoor diamond from India. It can now be said the country lost not one but two Kohinoors to the invaders from Blighty. The crafty British presented the other diamond to the literary world as William Shakespeare, the Bard from Stratford-Upon-Avon. It is better late than never. A 96-year-old scholar has decided to make a partial confessional on behalf of the British people who changed the identity of an Indian genius — they even changed the language in which he wrote! — and presented him to the world as the playwright with that famous goatee.

That India could never take care of its myriad treasures is part of recorded history. It was the golden bird that every passing marauder plucked a feather from. Dr Martin Lings, (his name sounds suspiciously oriental) has decided to tell part of the truth about Shakespeare’s real identity. The respected scholar has promised to make the revelation through a lecture captioned “Shakespeare would have delighted in Sufism”. For instance the journey of Edgar, in King Lear, is like a Sufi’s search for the ultimate truth in which the seeker is helped by angelic forces and harassed by diabolical characters.

How about marshalling evidence that the Bard was influenced by oriental thought because he was actually an Indian. To be or not to be, is a philosophical question that Hazrat Nizamuddin and Amir Khusro asked their pupils as a matter of routine. Or for instance the oft quoted line of Prospero that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on” is every bit Indian. The country’s literarily establishment cannot come to any serious grief if it were to provide proof that Shakespeare was actually Sheikh Peeroo and Chaucer got his name because of his weakness for “chausar”, an Indian dice game. Charles Dickens was Chaar Dekhoon (one who could see in all the four directions) If Shakespeare was not Indian; he could not have turned “Heer Ranjha” into “Romeo and Juliet”.

Thought for the day

To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer. — Anonymous

ARTICLE

NPT is of no use
Threat comes from rogue outfits
by K. Subrahmanyam

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laying the foundation for Proto-type Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam on October 23 is both an act of faith in the Indian scientific community and a challenge to international conventional wisdom. He was launching India into the second phase of Homi Bhabha’s three-phase energy security plan at a time when most of the world has turned its back on nuclear energy. He has reaffirmed that India intends to continue to follow the path devised 50 years ago and set up a number of breeder reactors and then go in for the third phase of its nuclear energy programme based on the thorium fuel cycle.

If India succeeds in it — the chances are that it will — then this country may become a pioneer in nuclear energy generation based on thorium, abundantly available in India, unlike uranium which is in short supply. It is of significance that this development comes about when the oil price has hit $ 55 a barrel, the prospects of stability in West Asia, a major energy source, are receding and the Russian Duma has voted for the Kyoto protocol highlighting the international concern on global warming.

There is a growing opinion that if more catastrophic consequences of green-house gases accumulation in the atmosphere are to be avoided, the world may have to look at a less riskier nuclear energy generation strategy. This is particularly applicable to densely-populated Asian industrialising countries such as India, China and Indonesia.

Even while launching India on the second phase of the Bhabha plan, the Prime Minister drew the attention of the world to the follies of not thinking beyond the Cold War nonproliferation treaty regime which has now outlived its utility. The non-proliferation treaty was designed by the US and the USSR to prevent Germany and Japan from going nuclear. In the mid-sixties the Germans were demanding to have a finger on the NATO nuclear trigger. The treaty’s purpose was also to prevent the emergence of nuclear weapon states outside the bipolar framework which would complicate the bilateral deterrent equation.

Even as deterrence stabilised and the US and the former USSR agreed that the possibility of a nuclear war between them was receding, the US was permissive of Chinese proliferation to Pakistan as a price for enlisting Islamabad’s cooperation in the US campaign to unleash jehadi resistance against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The proliferation also served the Chinese purpose of countervailing India by arming Pakistan with nuclear weapons and missiles. The actions of these two countries in effect destroyed the non-proliferation treaty. Pakistan in turn proliferated to North Korea and Iran and attempted it in respect of Libya.

The so-called Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards were aimed at preventing proliferation to industrialising countries outside the two power blocs through technology denials. When the game-keepers turned poachers, as it happened when France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, the UK and other West European countries turned a blind eye to the transfer of nuclear weapon materials and technology to Pakistan and Iraq by their firms, the safeguards regime was reduced to a mockery.

The Cold War ended and even the leaders of mindless weapon proliferation, the US and Russia, realised the folly of their nuclear war doctrines. The incentive for the acquisition of nuclear weapons in the industrialised world, among the nations of the two former Cold War blocs, reduced drastically even as the incentive for it increased among less responsible nations such as China, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq and Libya.

The Chinese, even while joining the NPT in 1992, continued their policy of proliferation support to their Israel — Pakistan. Iran has been compelled to consider going nuclear as it is placed between Wahabi extremists and the latter’s allies, Pakistani Sunnis, armed with nuclear weapons.

Jehadis in Pakistan mow down regularly Shias even as they pray in their mosques. The Shia-Sunni conflict goes back 13 centuries in history. To make matters worse, the nuclear weapon powers, without much forethought, coerced and cajoled the international community to legitimise nuclear weapons by extending the NPT indefinitely and unconditionally.

Meanwhile, 9/11 demonstrated that the primary threat to industrial nations, particularly the US, is not from nation-states but non-state actors armed with weapons of mass destruction, including radiological weapons — the so-called dirty bomb. The A.Q. Khan network has demonstrated that this threat is real. The Non-Proliferation Treaty and its safeguard systems are today found to be ineffective to deal with this threat. New measures such as the criminalisation of proliferation are ad hoc steps proposed to deal with the failures of the NPT to meet the new threats.

Yet the proliferation fundamentalists refuse to see the global ground realities and are fanatical about the NPT and its futile safeguards. Technology denial in the nuclear field to India is a result of this mindset nurtured over the last 30 years. It is also based on unrealistic assumptions — there not being further growth of nuclear energy, especially in Asia, no new advances in nuclear energy generation technology and no pressures that are bound to arise as a result of the Kyoto protocol coming into force.

In this respect, the world, particularly the US, needs to be educated. When in the 1980s and the 1990s they were warned about jehadi terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan they blithely ignored it and argued that it was only a problem in West Asia. Then Pakistan-Taliban facilitated 9/11. Even now they continue in their unilateralism and feel that they can manage the non-state proliferation within the framework of obsolete NPT and its hypocritical technology denials for legitimate nuclear energy generation. It is time for the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to start a campaign for meeting the nuclear threat from non-state actors which needs a new post-NPT international management system.

MIDDLE

The return of Birbal
by Shriniwas Joshi

I was in Chandigarh recently. My nephew Abeer who has just stepped into Punjab Engineering College (PEC) asked me a question, “Mamaji, if somebody asks you how many birds are there in Shimla, what will your reply be?” I told him a witty one from ‘Akbar-Birbal Vinod’. Akbar, once asked his Darbaris, “How many crows are there in the skies of Agra?” All sat silent except Birbal who got up and said, “Your Excellency, there are 9878 crows here.” One of the Darbaris got up and said, “How can he be so sure of the number?” Birbal replied, “Your Excellency, I am sure of it but if he has some doubt, he may go in for census of crows.” The Darbari was foxed, but playing safe Birbal added, “If the census shows slightly higher figure then think their relatives have come here from Fatehpur Sikri, if it is less, then think that a few crows have gone to Fatehpur Sikri to meet their relatives.”

That was circa 1600, place Agra: this is 2004, place Chandigarh. One of “the Greats” asks a question from the class, “How would you count the number of birds in your city?” Abeer replies, “Had I been Shakespeare I would have said, ‘What’s in counting? That which we call a bird/ by any other counting would stay as statistics.’ Had I been Einstein, I would give a complex equation to count the number saying that the number of birds in our city is relative and proportionately equal to the number of birds I actually see in a particular street of a particular portion of a particular Sector. Had I been Hitler, I would have poisoned them all dead and then counted them. Had I been living in Communist Russia, I would have made it compulsory for all the citizens to identify areas for themselves and count the birds in the selected areas, the sigma or sum total of which be told to me. Had I been the President of USA, I would have outsourced the job to Indians and Chinese, and on receiving the number would have sold the information to the rest of the world, especially Britain, and made lots of profit. But because I am an Indian, I have constituted a committee and am expecting the results by 2008. The term of the committee is likely to be extended by a year and more and still more, and, God willing, by that time I would have made a mark as engineer in a Bill Gates’ firm developing software that would tell sex-wise, caste-wise, age-wise, religion-wise number of birds in a particular place with identification marks of their leaders in BBJP and INBC parties, the extra B stands, obviously, for birds.”

(N.B.: The information on the technology of counting birds in Chandigarh is copyright of Abeer Tewari of PEC, Chandigarh, and is in print here with his permission.)

OPED

Bombshell for Bush: 350 tonnes of explosives go missing in Iraq
by Rupert Cornwell in Washington

In a massive pre-election embarrassment for the Bush administration, nearly 350 tons of lethal explosives — which could be used to trigger nuclear weapons — have vanished from a military facility in Iraq supposed to have been guarded by US troops.

Hardly had the disappearance come to light than John Kerry, the Democratic presidential challenger, seized on the episode as proof that George Bush was incapable of keeping America safe. The material could already be in terrorist hands, he warned yesterday.

This was “one of the great blunders of the war,” Mr Kerry said on the campaign trail in the swing state of New Hampshire. A statement from the Kerry/Edwards campaign lambasted the “unbelievable incompetence of this President,” saying that George Bush, “who talks tough and brags about making America safer, has once again failed to deliver.”

According to The New York Times, which broke the story in a lengthy front-page story, the missing stockpiles — some 342 tons in all — are of HMX, RMX and PETN, extremely powerful, conventional explosives that are used to blow up buildings, fill missile warheads or detonate nuclear weapons. So devastating are they that just one pound of a similar explosive was enough to destroy Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988. HMX, RMX, or explosives like them have been used in car and apartment bombings in Moscow and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in recent years.

At the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the explosives were being stored by the Saddam regime, under United Nations control at the al-Qaqaa military facility south of Baghdad, which was mentioned in the Government’s September 2002 dossier as a source of possible chemical-weapons production. Some time after the fall of Saddam the explosives disappeared, but their loss was not formally notified to the Bush administration and the IAEA nuclear watchdog agency in Vienna until two weeks ago.

In a letter dated 10 October 2004, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the interim Iraqi government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi detailed the losses to the IAEA, which it ascribed to “theft and looting”. Five days later, the agency sent the letter on to the Bush administration.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the IAEA, is said to be “extremely concerned” about the “potentially devastating consequences” of the vanished explosives. Yesterday, the agency made clear that the US, as leader of the coalition in Iraq, had been repeatedly warned of the importance of making sure the stockpiles were safe. “The coalition was responsible” for looking after the weapons, an IAEA spokeswoman said. “We had hoped that they would be protected.”

After the news was disclosed, Mr ElBaradei formally informed the UN Security Council in a letter yesterday. Agency officials denied suggestions that the IAEA director had been under pressure from the administration to keep the news quiet until after the presidential election next Tuesday.

The White House immediately moved to contain the possible political damage, playing down the threat posed by the explosives. The material did not constitute a risk in terms of nuclear proliferation, said Scott McClellan, Mr Bush’s spokesman.

As soon as US officials in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, had been told of the disappearance, the news was passed to Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, who then informed the President. Dismissing complaints that the news should have been made public earlier, the White House said the Iraq Survey Group — which reported last month — would try to find out what had happened.

It remains to be seen whether the episode is lost in the swirl of the campaign, or whether it becomes the “October surprise” — the unexpected event dreaded by both parties, capable of tipping a close election to the other side.

Democrats see the debacle as a perfect means of discrediting Mr Bush’s claim that he is the commander-in-chief best able to protect America from terrorists. “The unbelievable blindness, stubbornness, arrogance of this administration to do the basics have now allowed this President to once again fail the test of being the commander-in-chief,” Mr Kerry said.
— By arrangement with The Independent, London

Tackling shortage of water, power
by R.N. Malik

The Pong dam and Ranjit Sagar reservoirs are seldom full to the brim during the monsoon. This year the reservoirs were hardly half full.

Four MAF of the Beas water has already been diverted to the Gobind Sagar reservoir to facilitate the running of the right power plant during a lean period, thus depriving the Pong dam reservoir of the entire flow from snow melt. Small catchment areas of the Ravi and the Beas also add to the problem.

The war-like water disputes among Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan immediately call for outsourcing of additional flow.

It was with this anxiety that I looked at the map of Himachal Pradesh and observed that the flows of the Chandra and Bhaga rivers or even of the Chenab (up to Such-Khas stretch) can be easily diverted through short tunnel links (5-7 km).

I travelled along these rivers up to Keylong to study their morphology. To my utter delight, it was found that gravity flow from these two rivers towards the Ravi-Beas basins is possible through tunnels underneath the hill ranges that separate the two valleys.

The bed level of the Chandra river at Koksar township is 3155 m while that of the Beas near Solang or Kothi is around 2500 m. The diversion of flow will also result in to 2,000 MW of power generation like the Beas-Satluj link project at Slapper.

A diversion of 5 MAF of flow will greatly mitigate the problem of shortage of water in the Pong dam or Ranjit Sagar reservoirs. The GREF (General Engineer Reserve Force) has started constructing the 11 km long all-weather transport tunnel, which will be completed by 2012 Completion of this tunnel will reduce the distance of Manali-Keylong-Leh route by 51 km.

The Chandra and the Bhaga flowing in the Lahaul valley originate from two very close points (7 km apart) at Baralacha La glacier and flow in two opposite circuitous routes and join at Tandi, 8 km downstream of Keylong. Thereafter, the river is named as Chenab. Their trajectories look like a necklace around the neck of high mountains. These rivers run only from May 15 to September 30 and the flow is entirely due to snow melt.

The problem of diversion of this water is more political than technical. Under the Indus Water Treaty (1960), the exclusive use of water (except for irrigation of 7,00,000 acres) flowing in the Chenab and Jhelum rivers was granted to Pakistan. India can use this water only for hydro-power projects after obtaining the concurrence of the Government of Pakistan on a case-to-case basis.

Some engineers at that time had opposed this treaty on the ground that the usage allowed to Pakistan was more than its share (43:57). But the government at that time probably thought that the waters of the Chenab and the Jhelum could not be used for irrigation due to topographical reasons.

People of J&K feel that the water rights of the rivers passing through their state were traded for protecting the agrarian interests of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan.

Some engineers feel that the Chandra and Bhaga rivers do not fall under the Indus Water Treaty as the Chenab starts after the point of confluence and the two are independent rivers in the upstream (these are not even tributaries of the Chenab) and so come under an exclusive control of the Indian Government.

Another group says that the Chandra and Bhaga waters taken into account while calculating the share of each country and so were covered under the treaty. Since the Indus Water Treaty is not a public document, one cannot speak confidently on this issue. If it is finally observed that the Chandra and Bhaga rivers are not covered under the treaty, then their entire flow can be easily diverted to the Beas.

Diversion of 5 MAF water from the Chenab river to Ravi and Beas basins would solve all problems of water and power shortage in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Pakistan will also get huge irrigation benefits from this project. Development of hydro-power in J&K too would become easy. This project, therefore, carries immense benefits both for India and Pakistan and should be given a try.

REFLECTIONS

Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails I manifest Myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from Yuga to Yuga.

— Sri Krishna

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

— Pope

Ignorance causes the ruin of the world. Envy and selfishness break off friendships. Hatred is the most violent fever, and the Buddha is the best physician.

— The Buddha

I consulted my Master and He convinced me that there is no other place but God’s.

— Guru Nanak

It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.

— Theodore Parker