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Question of double standards Living with tsunamis |
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Helping war widows Corporate sector must come forward OCCASIONAL reports of war widows being denied relief or struggling to get pension notwithstanding, the government in general and the Army in particular do take proper care of the women whose husbands lay down their lives for the country.
The Kofi Annan package
The makeover
Budget ignores Dalits Pakistan star takes cricket diplomacy a step further Why the quakes
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Question of double standards THERE are occasions when truth must be told to set the record straight. External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh found such an occasion when he was asked to address a conference on “Emerging Nuclear Proliferation Challenges” in New Delhi on Monday. He showed the mirror to those who are never tired of giving sermons to others on non-proliferation issues, but prefer to ignore the reality when it suits their interests. The whole world, including the US, knows that Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan network has been involved in providing nuclear knowhow to Libya and Iran. Pakistan’s involvement in the North Korean nuclear weapon programme is also not a secret. But the irony of the situation is that the US has accorded Pakistan the status of a Major Non-NATO Ally. This is not only a “permissive” attitude. It also reflects double standards on a matter as serious as nuclear proliferation. How else can one describe the drive for achieving a lofty objective when the focus is only on the beneficiaries of the Qadeer Khan network and not on the country which has been the source of illicit supplies? President George W. Bush wants reinterpretation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to ensure that the countries which cannot be depended upon should not be allowed to acquire nuclear technology even for peaceful purposes. Here again he conveniently forgets to mention Pakistan which has been least bothered about the demands of non-proliferation. Non-proliferation is a laudable aim and must be pursued with sincerity and without bias. Mr Natwar Singh’s stress on a “global no first use” doctrine has special significance. It deserves serious consideration by the world community. As he has pointed out, the proposal has come from a country whose role as a nuclear weapon state has been unblemished. India should have been rewarded for this excellent record. But the truth is that its peaceful nuclear energy programme has never got the cooperation it deserved from those in possession of advanced technology. This is another irony of the situation which Washington should begin to appreciate. |
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Living with tsunamis THE killer tsunami of December 26 last was the kind of calamity that just cannot be erased from public memory. But since life has to go on despite thousands of deaths, the entire Asia was trying to forget the tragedy and rebuild shattered lives. But the spectre came visiting yet again on Monday with a powerful earthquake rocking Indonesia. Hundreds of lives were lost but, fortunately, the disturbance did not generate the feared tsunamis. There was panic reaction all over in the region, but in such matters it is better to err on the side of caution. What a night it must have been for the people who went through a lot of suffering only three months ago! What was heartening was that this time the agencies assigned to tackle the emergency situation did their job far better than last time. Warnings were quickly issued. That these had to be retracted later is a matter of satisfaction. The tsunami threat which did not materialise this time should be taken as a warning signal. Earthquakes and tsunamis should now be treated as a possibility as real as, say, floods and fires and we should prepare ourselves accordingly. Contingency plans should be comprehensive and foolproof so that the kind of situation that was experienced in December is not repeated. Buildings which are constructed in future, particularly in the coastal areas, will have to factor in the possibility of a tsunami onslaught. It will not be a bad idea to carry out mock drills off and on. After all, tsunamis are no strangers in the Pacific region and with elaborate precautions, the loss of life can be made minimal. The challenge posed by such forces of nature is so gigantic that no nation can hope to tackle it single-handed. Even otherwise, the cost of doing so on one’s own will be prohibitive. India will do well to integrate itself with the global network against the menace and benefit from its expertise. In such matters, every second counts and adequate warnings can be issued only if the Indian scientists know of the impending danger the moment it arises thousands of miles away. |
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Helping
war widows OCCASIONAL
reports of war widows being denied relief or struggling to get pension
notwithstanding, the government in general and the Army in particular
do take proper care of the women whose husbands lay down their lives
for the country. The Army Wives’ Welfare Association is now setting up a special cell to ensure rehabilitation of women who have lost their husbands in action. But rehabilitation work should not be left to the armed forces and organisations like the AWWA only. Other sections of society also need to come forward to help the war widows, who are mostly young with school-going children, restart life afresh. It is in this context that the Chief of Army Staff, Gen J.J. Singh, addressing a function organised by the War Wounded Foundation of India on Monday, exhorted the captains of industry to look after the interests of the war widows and wounded soldiers. The corporate sector is known to take affirmative action, though not to the desired extent. Corporates can pool their resources through their organisations like the CII and FICCI to set up training centres for war widows and ex-servicemen to impart them skills which are in demand in the industry. Being disciplined and hard working, they can be real assets. The magnitude of the problem of rehabilitating war widows, wounded soldiers and ex-servicemen is so large that it requires concerted efforts at all levels. The war widows should not be forced to make rounds of offices, whether civil or military, to get what is their due. They can face life’s challenges much more comfortably if society treats them with respect that they amply deserve. |
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Truth exists; only lies are invented.
— Georges Braque
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The Kofi Annan package
THE
change in the back office of the UN Secretary-General since January this year has begun to make an impact on the policies and priorities of the UN. A young and debonair former World Bank official and human rights activist, Mr Mark Malloch Brown of the UK, has replaced the sedate, septuagenarian, Lonavla-born Pakistani diplomat and international civil servant, Mr Iqbal Riza, at a time when the office of the Secretary-General appeared to be at its vulnerable worst. Mr Brown, with his record of having reformed the UNDP beyond recognition and helped Ms Corazon Aquino and other Presidential candidates elsewhere to win elections, is considered the saviour of the last biennium of the Annan era. His prescriptions have unmistakably prevailed in the reform package, which he unveiled even before the Secretary-General presented it to the General Assembly. The striking similarities in the thoughts and ideas in the package to the second inaugural address of President Bush cannot be entirely coincidental. Freedom and democracy are the themes in both. The great thing about the UN Charter is that it contains thoughts which can be quoted to suit all occasions, even for its thorough revision. Sure enough, the preamble of the Charter provided an appropriate phrase, “in larger freedom”, to advocate an overhaul of its very mandate. Read in the context of the declared priorities of Mr Kofi Annan as the Secretary-General, the present package, gleaned from the panel report as well as the Millennium Development Goals, will show how much his priorities have changed. He had declared that his priorities were to “strengthen the organisation’s traditional work in the areas of development and security, to encourage and advocate human rights, the rule of law and the universal values of equality, tolerance and human dignity, found in the UN Charter.” The sequence of those priorities, which has a certain historical relevance, has been lost when development, security and human rights for all have been given equal importance as components of the larger freedom that the UN now propagates. In all likelihood, the General Assembly will put the package upside down and start work with the last section, the reform of the Security Council, and then proceed to deal with non-proliferation, human rights, and use of force and only then will come to development. Ambassadors tend to spend their energies on controversial matters and leave mother issues like development to the juniors. In any event, the package has no proposals to boost development except an exhortation to implement the old pledge of 0.7 per cent ODA, to have a new development-oriented trade round and to give wider and deeper debt relief. Such exhortations have had no practical effect in the past. The non-option of two options for the expansion of the Security Council figures in the package, together with any other option that the members may devise. The chance of acceptance of any of the options is anybody’s guess. The only bold statement that the Secretary-General makes is that absence of consensus should not be an excuse for no action. In other words, he advocates a vote in the event of lack of consensus. An agreement by vote will be a sure recipe for it to remain in limbo, pending its ratification by two-thirds of the parliaments of the world. India, Brazil, Germany and Japan are already meeting in New York to work out their strategy. They should press for permanent membership with veto, but keep the option of joining as second-class permanent members. No further compromise will be needed as no decision may be better than a bad decision on expansion. The Secretary-General would not have even proposed the Human Rights Council if he was not at the end of his second term. His own region will oppose it tooth and nail for fear that such a council will ride roughshod over national governments and justify intervention. Those who burnt the midnight oil in the Third Committee over the resolution on the creation of the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights will recall the extreme sensitivity the issue generated at that time. One African diplomat stated that the creation of the post of HCHR, however toothless it may be, would be a violation of his country’s constitution. To create a Human Rights Council, with the authority to report to the Security Council, would be unthinkable. Following non-proliferation, human rights will also become part of the Security Council agenda. If the elections to the new Council will not be on the basis of regional rotation, on what other basis, would it be? Would all the permanent members of the Council get elected to the new body by a two-thirds majority? India should, however, have no hesitation in supporting the move. We have learnt not only not to seek any redress of our grievances from the UN, but also to safeguard our system from blackmail. On non-proliferation, the main recommendation is not only to stick to the NPT, but also to universalise the Additional Protocol, which was accepted recently by Iran. We cannot accept the universalisation of the comprehensive safeguards regime, but even India, as a non-NPT state, can sign its own Additional Protocol under certain conditions. The new mandate that the Security Council has sought for itself as a non-proliferation monitor is not consistent with the Charter as India stated at the Security Council summit in 1991. As for the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, we have expressed our readiness to negotiate in good faith. Signing the treaty is a matter to be settled after it is negotiated. The possibility of FMCT also becoming a discriminatory agreement cannot be ruled out yet. The call for the quick adoption of a Comprehensive Convention Against Terrorism is music to Indian ears as we are the main proponents of such a convention. But the momentum it acquired soon after September 11, 2001, has been lost and its inclusion in the package will not guarantee its conclusion. The Secretary-General has been careful enough not to endorse the definition of terrorism attempted by the panel. He is aware of the strong views held by the Arabs and some others like Pakistan about violence associated with freedom struggle being seen as terrorism. Defining the criteria for enforcement action by the Security Council is in the realm of possibility, but such a definition will be irrelevant whenever there is no unanimity among the permanent members. And if there is unanimity, each decision can be taken on its own merits. No particular purpose will be served by a lengthy discussion on theoretical situations when we know that we cannot dictate to permanent members. The Annan package is a red rag to developing countries as it offers nothing in return for the many political concessions they are called upon to make. What they have is a set of homilies to improve governance and to take care of their own people. The General Assembly has a record of unravelling any package, however thoughtfully prepared and presented. The Annan package for UN reforms has the added advantage of emanating from the agreed Millennium Declaration Goals and the report of the high-level panel. The Brown touch may have made it more palatable to some countries and less acceptable to others. Jean Kirkpatrick, a former conservative US Ambassador, is quoted as having said recently that we should either reform the UN or destroy it. Any reform may be better than its
destruction. The writer, a former ambassador, has represented India at the UN in New York, Nairobi and Vienna |
The makeover SHE was of undistinguished appearance — she could well have merged in a group of two and not been noticed. But there was hardly any time that she escaped notice. The wayward hair, the belligerent tilt of head, the feet-stamping and the penchant for inviting questions gave her away. She believed that the world was peopled by two kinds of species — male and female. The rest were all minor differences that could be ironed out. And she was the avowed representative of females. Even the wiliest of women could find in her a ready defender. She had the knack of discovering a grave injustice to women, even when there was no injustice and no woman. Animals, too, did not escape from her feministic glare. A burly mongrel marking his territory with raised-leg position invariably raised her temper to scalding zone, while the mongrel’s female partner, who in her heat nipped at passersby, got generous helpings of bread garnished with homemade butter. Men were mortally frightened of her. No, she was not an amazon. She was rather diminutive and a whisper could shame her voice into submission. But she had amazing perseverance that only a feminist can have. She could drill feminism into unwilling minds with crushing boredom. Sometimes, even the most chauvinistic man who talked with her for one quarter of an hour could be heard spouting a “something” on women’s rights. People said the secret of her feminism rested in her scrapbook that she had been maintaining since the age of ten. The book looked more of a cross between “believe it or not” series and “strange scientific facts” collection peppered with third-rate sensational stories. Scrawls in red and highlights in yellows with comments crammed diligently into white spaces, the book could have been a junk dealer’s delight going by its sheer weight! She was flauntingly possessive about the scrapbook. She would turn the pages with utmost care, as if the book were a delicate baby who could not stand a harsh touch. But last time when I met her, she looked different, almost unrecognisable. Her unruly hair had been tamed. In deference to her stilettos, she no longer stamped her feet. Gone was the belligerence. Instead, a cultivated sophistication greeted me. Later, someone told me that she had joined the “makeover” brigade. These days she believed that the world was peopled by two kinds of species — groomed and non-groomed. Mongrels had given way to poodles and terriers of either sex. Her untouched-since-months scrapbook now housed spider webs and crawly creatures. I have yet to fathom whether her “makeover” was the Jassi effect of the idiot box or simply the feministic ennui. I am afraid of asking her, lest I should be categorised among the
non-groomed! |
Budget ignores Dalits
Could these MPs ever think that despite thousands of crores of budgetary allocation for the Dalits, their situation remains more or less the same. The Budget for 2005-2006, presented by Mr P. Chidambaram, allocates Rs 1599.70 crore to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, which is not exclusively for SCs/STs but for the backwards and minorities also. The average population of SCs and STs is about 25 per cent. The total expenditure of the Budget in this year is Rs 5,14,343.8 crore and the non-Plan expenditure is kept at Rs 3,70,847.02 crore. According to the population ratio of the Dalits, if the Plan and non-Plan expenditures are put together, their budgetary share comes to Rs 1,28,496.78 crore. Let us compromise by not asking for the share out of the non-Plan expenditure. Then fund allocation of Rs 35,874.19 crore should be made for Dalits out of the Plan expenditure, but it is only Rs 6253.04 crore, including that of the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment is allocated Rs 1599.70 crore. However, the total budgetary expenditure is Rs 6,253.04 crore, which includes expenditure put at the disposal of other ministries, including Social Justice and Empowerment. To some extent, it is possible to have a watch mechanism on the expenditure of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, but there is no way to do so in respect of other ministries. It is normally conceived that the non-plan expenditure doesn’t relate to welfare schemes and, therefore, asking for Dalits’ share out of this is not justified. Under the head of non-Plan expenditure social service gets Rs 7521.99 crore, education is at Rs 2992.93 crore, the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (Rs 598.94 crore), Novodaya Vidyalaya (Rs 143.85 crore), the University Grant Commission (Rs 1218.75 crore) and other like heads. Health and Family Welfare shares Rs 986.33 crore and labour is at Rs 983.47 crore. Non-plan expenditure is that expenditure which is separate from Plan expenditure. Supposing non-Plan expenditure is mainly meant for interest payment, pension, defence and such other recurring expenditures, then also about Rs 50,000 crore can be apportioned for welfare schemes as can be understood by above allocations made under different heads. The total expenditure is kept at Rs 5,14,343.8 crore and if allocation is made out of it according to the population ratio, then it comes to Rs 1,28,58.95 crore for the Dalits. The total expenditure in the Budget is Rs 6,253.04 crore for the Dalits. The total plan-expenditure is Rs 1,43,496.78 crore and if 50,000 crore out of the non-expenditure is clubbed with this, it will be around Rs 2 lakh crore. Dividing this expenditure by the population ratio of the Dalits, it should be about Rs 50,000 crore to be spent on their welfare. In the present Budget, the expenditure meant for them is Rs 62,53.04 crore and if it is divided by the 25 crore population of Dalits, per Dalit it will be Rs 250.13 a year. From no point of view, it is even minimal to cater to their welfare. If corruption is taken into account, the situation is much worse. Once Rajiv Gandhi said that whatever money was allocated at the government level, only 15 per cent of it reached the beneficiaries. Considering this level of corruption, then per Dalit, it will be Rs 37.5 instead of Rs 250.13 in a year. There is a drastic change in the Budget as far as expenditure for the Scheduled Castes boy students’ hostel is concerned. In the previous Budget it was Rs 10 crore but it has come down to one lakh in the 2005-06 Budget. For Scheduled Castes girl students’ hostel it has been cut to Rs 1 lakh against Rs 3 crore in the Budget of 2004-05. What a joke! Making a provision of Rs one lakh for all Scheduled Castes boys’ hostels in the country, shows the intention of the government. The 2004-05 Budget made a fund allocation of Rs 169.29 crore in public enterprises meant for social security and welfare and in the current Budget it is Rs 110.70 crore. For Adivasi ashrams and schools, the budget allocation was Rs 6 crore in 2004-05, which has been totally wiped out in the current Budget. In the previous Budget, Rs 13 crore was allocated for the Scheduled Tribe boys’ and girls’ hostels but has been totally squared up in the present Budget. Similarly, the budgetary allocation discouraged the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in entrepreneurship by reducing the size of funds. This indicates that the government does not want to empower Dalits in the field of industrialisation. A sum of Rs 1599.70 crore is to be spent by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and the rest by other ministries. Most of the Dalit members of Parliament do not believe in reading and writing and there is no effort on their part. Though this is a little tough subject but if they try to understand, that is quite possible. Unfortunately, the Dalits get leaders like Mayawati and Ram Vilas Paswan, who have no understanding of such subjects nor do they try to know it. The Dalit MPs should have asked who is monitoring the implementation of schemes meant for the Dalits. In the present situation, neither the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment nor the Planning Commission has any mechanism to monitor the expenditure. How can it be ensured that other departments will necessarily spend on dalits? Who is to be held responsible for misutilisation and non-utilisation of funds? Even the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment does not have a mechanism to ensure proper utilisation of funds. For instance, a proposal was sent to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to clear the scholarship funds for 2,000 Dalit students. Bureaucrats in the ministry sat on the file so that it could lapse after March, 2005. The writer is the National President of the All-India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations |
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Pakistan star takes cricket diplomacy a step further WITH Pakistan’s cricket team touring India, Pakistani fans staying at Delhi to watch one of the matches, the subcontinent is abuzz with talk of cricket diplomacy. But one Pakistani cricketer appears to have taken it further than everyone else - he has married an Indian woman. Yet the story of the Pakistan off-spinner Shoaib Malik’s marriage to Maha Siddiqui reads more like a south Asian Romeo and Juliet. The two married in secret almost three years ago, because they were afraid that Maha’s nationalist parents would not allow her to marry a Pakistani. So fraught is the issue of cross-border marriage that the two recited their wedding vows to each other down a phone line, which is allowed in Islamic marriages. Malik was in his home town of Sialkot in Pakistan, while his wife was at her home in Hyderabad in India. Each had witnesses standing by the phone. But there is a happy ending. Next week, when the Pakistani cricket team travels to Hyderabad for a practice match, Malik will meet his parents-in-law for the first time. Kept in the dark about the marriage for almost a year, they have finally given their consent. Although the couple are already married, they are planning on throwing the lavish wedding ceremony they missed out on, and are leaving for Pakistan together as soon as the cricket tour is over. Their story tells a lot about the difficulties young Indians and Pakistanis can face if they want to marry across the divide between the countries — and the extent to which politics enters everything where India and Pakistan’s troubled relationship is concerned. Although arranged marriages across the border are not unheard of, because of the extended families that live on both sides love matches are rare, simply because it’s so difficult for Indians and Pakistanis to meet each other. Only those with genuine business across the border or relatives to visit usually get visas - and thousands of Pakistanis have taken advantage of visas to watch the cricket just to get a glimpse of India. Malik and his wife met because she was living outside India at the time, in Saudi Arabia, where she was working as an administrator at a school in Jeddah. The Gulf has a huge population of expatriate south Asian workers there on short-term visas, and gives Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis a rare opportunity to mingle. Ms Siddiqui travelled to neighbouring Dubai in the United Arab Emirates with friends for a shopping festival, and the Pakistan cricket team happened to be in the country at the same time for a tournament. The hotels in Dubai were full so Ms Siddiqui and her friends went to stay in Sharjah - where the cricket competition was being held - and ended up in the same hotel as the Pakistan cricket team. “One day, my friends and I had just finished our meal at the hotel coffee shop and as we were leaving he came up to me with a room key that we had left behind,” Ms Siddiqui told the Indian press. Although Malik was already becoming instantly recognisable to millions of south Asian cricket fans, Ms Siddiqui did not know who he was. “I was quite rude actually,” she said. “I thought he was trying to get to know us.” But the two started talking over the hotel’s internal phone, and when she returned to Saudi Arabia, kept in touch over the internet. Eventually they decided to get married, but Ms Siddiqui kept the marriage secret from her parents. “My father is very pro-India and he always believed that we should marry Indians,” she said. “Shoaib said: ‘Let’s get married and make everything legal first. Then you can tell them.’ His parents knew about it though, and they were fine with it.” Because marriage is a contract between two people and not a sacrament in Islam, they were able to make their wedding vows over the phone. Eventually, with the media full of stories about Malik’s Indian wife, whose identity remained a secret, Ms Siddiqui decided she would have to tell her parents — but got her cousin to break the news while she was away in Saudi
Arabia. To her surprise, they accepted the marriage. Now Ms Siddiqui’s only problem is which cricket team to support. “I am very pro-India,” she says, but adds: “If Shoaib is playing I want Pakistan to win as he is so passionate about his game. Otherwise India.”
— The Independent
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Why the quakes MONDAY'S massive earthquake occurred in a region that is prone to temblors because large segments of Earth’s crust are colliding there, creating enormous pressures that are released periodically in cataclysmic jolts, geologists said. Scientists had been expecting that another large quake might strike soon in the Indian Ocean region because the massive undersea upheaval that triggered December’s tsunami generated even more pressure on the region’s already volatile geology, experts said. “What happened Monday was not a surprise. A number of scientists have been talking about an increased likelihood of more earthquakes in this area because of the rupture that happened in December,” said Lori Dengler, a geologist at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. “And it may not stop here.” Earthquakes occur along the boundaries between sections of Earth’s surface known as plates. These plates are constantly moving, slowly but inexorably pushing against one another. “They are squeezing together over geologic time at about the rate your fingernails grow,” Boston College geophysicist Alan Kafka said. “The movement causes tremendous amounts of force to build up and up and up.” Eventually, rock in one of the plates gives way under the pressure, causing a section to snap and the plates to suddenly lurch. “It’s on these plate boundaries that we have the world’s largest earthquakes,” said Bruce Presgrave, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center. “The rocks are stressed and stressed and stressed until finally they can’t sustain it anymore and they snap, shifting to a new position. That’s what we feel as earthquakes.” The area where Monday’s quake occurred is particularly troublesome because of the speed at which plates there are converging, and their relative positions. Unlike the San Andreas fault in California, where two plates are moving past each other horizontally, the region west of the island of Sumatra is a “subduction zone,” where plates are sliding over and under one another. “These are the places where we have most of the world’s earthquakes, and lots and lots of volcanoes,” Dengler said. In December, a section of one plate about 700 miles long suddenly plunged about 30 feet beneath another, causing a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that created the devastating tsunami. That event probably increased pressure on the next section of the plate boundary just to the south, causing Monday’s similar sudden thrust of one plate beneath the other, this time apparently involving a smaller section of perhaps 200 to 300 miles.
— LA Times-Washington Post |
Never seek to stain a woman with deep and dire disgrace. Her ill will and her curses can destroy a hundred brothers and all their sons. — The Mahabharata Be kind to each other: it is better to commit faults with gentleness than to work, miracles with unkindness. — Mother Teresa It is because of his will that they perform good and bad actions and accordingly experience pleasure and pain. — Guru Nanak There are three steps which bring you closer to happiness. And these are open to all. Speak the truth. Do not yield to anger. Give, when asked, though it may be a little only. — The Buddha A man who thinks that the effects of his actions are temporary is only deluding himself. You must know that whatever you do today will shape this life of yours ad the many other future lives that you will have. — The Bhagvad Gita To perform the holy sacrifice and show off his kingdom, the king needs a very strong ally, equally if not more powerful. The ally’s influence protects the king from the wrath of his fellow kings. — The Mahabharata Discover your possibilities. — Dr Robert Schuller  |
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ON no occasion 119 Dalit MPs have ever debated the fund allocations made for Dalits in the Central Government Budget, and if it was done by someone, replies prepared by bureaucrats and the answer of the Finance Minister would have silenced him.