The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

EDITORIALS

Not the fault of the bridge
Fix responsibility for the Kharo tragedy

BUILDING a Bailey bridge is not exactly rocket science. Rather, it is only a matter of basic engineering involving fixing of nuts and bolts to steel girders at angles. The Indian Army has vast expertise in such constructions going over several decades. That is why it appears beyond comprehension that the Kharo bridge in Kinnaur should simply collapse and claim the lives of some 42 Army men. No doubt, the terrain in that part of Himachal Pradesh is treacherous to the extreme but the Army has successfully undertaken far more complicated projects in far more inhospitable areas. It is imperative to hold a thorough probe into the tragedy and affix responsibility. If somebody has faulted, he or they deserve to be punished severely for this deadly goof-up.

The lives of so many gallant soldiers will be lost in vain if right lessons are not learnt from this nightmarish collapse. The country would like to know if adequate safety measures were in place at the construction site. From preliminary reports it is obvious that only four of the jawans were wearing safety belts, which helped them in hanging on to life. Wasn’t it necessary for the others to be similarly harnessed?

It is a harsh thing to say at this moment of tragedy but safety standards are grossly inadequate in the country. Life is considered woefully cheap and the same mistakes can be committed again. Unless the negligent wrong-doers are held responsible for their acts of commission and omission, things are not going to improve. Accidents do happen in high-risk jobs, but that does not mean that the workers should be left at the mercy of fate. What rankles the most about the Kharo tragedy is that it involved the Army which is normally more thorough in its approach than the civilians. The family members of the victims and also the rest of their countrymen should at least have the consolation of knowing that everything humanly possible was done to secure their lives while they were engaged in the task of bridging the mighty Sutlej. The bridge was to be opened after a few days. The tragedy has put a question mark on the safety of other such bridges in the area as well.

Red label
Markets cheer Manmohanomics

SEPTEMBER 8, 2005 was a red-letter day for the markets with the Sensex storming past the 8000-mark. September has special significance for bulls, and not just in the stock markets; this is the month of the famed annual bullfight in the southern Spanish town of Ronda. Nearer home, it has been an astonishing bull run in the stock market since the Left-backed UPA government came to office with Dr Manmohan Singh at the helm. Few may now wish to recall that the same Sensex crashed in May 2004, stricken by fears of what a Communist-backed coalition would mean for the economy. In the event, the market’s fears have proved to be unfounded. The Sensex has surged like never before — from that low of 4505 points to a record high of 8052 in less than 16 months. True, the Sensex is driven more by sentiment than sense; by signals rather than fundamentals. Yet, the fact that the role and influence of the Communist parties over the UPA has not been a dampener for the market, speaks volumes for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s mission control.

The turbo-charged bulls in our stock market have been on such a single-minded run since the UPA assumed office, that nothing, not even a succession of bad news — rising crude prices, the tsunami, Mumbai’s devastating deluge, the fire in ONGC’s offshore platform, the London bomb blasts and hurricane Katrina — could make them pause for breath. The momentum is driven solely by the adrenalin of liquidity, from Indian and foreign investors.

It is hard to figure out whether our communists feel celebratory. However, it is an astounding paradox that the two countries attracting huge investible surpluses today are Communist China and India under a communist-influenced government. Capitalists might bemoan the contradiction, but are not averse to raking it in. Is it then time for the markets to raise a toast to the UPA, Dr Singh and the Indian Left, too? The “red” label may not be a bad idea to keep our bullish spirits high.

Jointly with EU
Climate change worries both

THE Joint Action Plan (JAP) for an “Indo-EU Strategic Partnership” adopted by India and the EU is wide-ranging, and has been described by the parties themselves as an “ambitious” document. It will be incumbent upon both partners to ensure that what they want is actually translated into action. Apart from the boosting of economic relations and scientific cooperation in areas of space and atomic energy, two key focus areas include countering terrorism and tackling climate change, and the measures outlined should prove mutually useful if it becomes part of a sustained effort.

Much will depend on effective intelligence cooperation, preventing terrorist access to financing, and the disruption of international money laundering networks, apart from tackling terrorism on the ideological front. The envisaged cooperation between Europol on the EU side and the Central Bureau of Investigation on the Indian side must be practical and institutionalised. The idea of establishing a contact point in India for “Eurojust,” is intriguing. Eurojust is a network of judicial authorities across Europe, set up to fight against organised and cross-border crime. Some of the innovative elements in this framework may be found useful in a large and disparate country like India, but these need to be explained to the people.

Cooperation on the climate change front has gotten off to a start with the release of the India-UK study on “Climate Change in India”. The study predicts a temperature rise of three to five degrees over the next 30 to 40 years, disrupting rainfall patterns and increasing the mean sea level. This is expected to reduce wheat and rice yields, apart from creating a dangerous pattern of floods and droughts, and epidemics. In this context, the idea of setting up an “India-EU Initiative on Clean Development and Climate Change” is an important step. The focus on facilitating alternative technologies and joint action on environment protocols is welcome. The planned India-EU environment forum can be the start of a coherent and workable approach to containing climate change and environmental degradation.

ARTICLE

Hurricane Katrina
Mother Earth strikes back
by T.P. Sreenivasan

LEGEND has it that President John F Kennedy told Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan when the latter landed in a helicopter in pouring rain on the White House lawns that the United States, despite its many scientific achievements, had not yet mastered the art of controlling the weather. Dr Radhakrishnan’s reply was that India, on the other hand, had, several centuries ago, mastered the art of dealing with the weather.

Katrina has shown that the only super power has not made much advance in either controlling or dealing with the weather. Not just New Orleans and its environs, but even the collective sense of invincibility of the superpower lay shattered in the wake of the cyclone, just as it did once before in another September. This time, the worst, rather than the best instincts of man came to the fore at the time of a national disaster.

“Did you ever think you’d see the day when the US looked like a Third World country?” asked “South Florida Sun-Sentinel”. “The United States is not a Third World country. It must stop acting like one,” advised another Florida newspaper. American press seems to be unaware that the “Third World” ceased to exist with the collapse of the “Second World”. But if the reference is to a proverbial world of chaos, racism, anarchy, poverty, rape and murder, it is not a geographical monopoly. It can be in any continent where human depravity rears its ugly head when the cloak of civilised behaviour is lifted. Why insult other countries even if it is to highlight the depth to which a civilised nation has sunk at the time of a national disaster? The irony is that even commentators in Asia, Africa and Latin America are comparing the post-hurricane New Orleans to Third World country situations. A Third World mentality may well have survived the end of the Third World.

The authorities, from the local Mayor to the President of the United States, are in the dock for inefficiency, lack of proper planning and sheer callousness. They had all the time in the world to anticipate the damage; the hurricane took long in coming and it was known that a hurricane in New Orleans would be as damaging as a bomb in New York or a major earthquake in San Francisco. The order of evacuation was flawed as the presumption was that everyone had the wherewithal to find his way out of danger. Those who either did not have the means to leave or were not willing to leave were asked to take refuge in the Superdome or the Convention Centre without a thought as to how they would survive without food and sanitation. Implicit in that action was a sense that those who did not have the means to leave did not deserve to live. The responsibility of the state to help the helpless was a hurricane casualty.

The US press has been critical of the government and several questions have been asked. But the one obvious question that many seem not to ask is the cost per day of relief as compared to the cost of war in Iraq. Perhaps, this is because fight against terror is a holy cow and questioning it will be deemed unpatriotic or worse. If only the soldiers were deployed a few days earlier, much of the havoc that was caused to life and property by human hands, if not by the hurricane, could have been averted. The soldiers could have done greater service to the homeland at much less risk to themselves. No natural hazard is more dangerous than suicide bombers lurking in Baghdad streets.

The advent of Homeland Security and its overarching role may well have diminished the importance of other relief agencies. Warnings of hurricanes do not raise the alert level in the United States as a scare about a terrorist attack does even if the havoc caused may be more severe. Nature’s fury and the energy released by it are often much more than any man-made explosion. Someone had attributed an earthquake in Maharashtra to the Pokhran explosion of 1974, but it was soon clarified that the power of the earthquake was many times more than the energy released when the Buddha smiled in the desert. A nation gripped with the fear of terrorism had ignored warnings of a natural disaster at its own peril. As Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times on September 7, 2005, “9/11 distorted our politics and society”.

Of course, no one is sure that tsunamis and hurricanes are not man made. If climate change scenarios are to be believed, human consumption of the earth’s resources has depleted the earth so much that the globe has lost its natural immunity against such convulsions. The warnings sounded in 1972 in Stockholm went unheeded and it was too late and too little when the Rio declaration took note of the plunder and decided to do something to halt the damage and to reverse it. Even after Rio, the richest countries of the world are in no mood to change their consumption patterns to replenish the earth. They are making deals that save them the bother of having to find the incremental cost of environment friendly industrial growth.

Katrina will not change the trend. There will be enough studies to show that global warming had nothing to do with the breaching of the levee in New Orleans. More resources of the earth will be used to strengthen the levee and to make the city even more gleaming than before. The phoenix that rises from its own ashes will dazzle us so much that the ashes will be forgotten soon enough. Someone said that New Orleans had already become old fashioned and that this should be seen as an opportunity to rebuild the city with new attractions. If thousands of lives had not been lost, it would have been a benign remark. Some island states in the South Pacific have been rebuilt with the insurance money after devastating hurricanes.

The outpouring of grief and sympathy for the victims has been overshadowed by criticism of relief work. Several countries, including India, have made cash contributions and expressed readiness to help in other ways. Unlike India at the time of the tsunami disaster, the US has welcomed foreign assistance despite the vast resources at its command. Our high profile quest for permanent membership of the Security Council at that time may have been a factor in our decision not to accept foreign assistance for tsunami victims. A permanent member of long standing had no qualms in accepting foreign assistance. In fact, acceptance of assistance has blunted some of the criticism about mismanagement of relief.

Do the gods kill us for their sport like wanton boys torture flies, as Shakespeare says, or is there a scheme in all this? Mother Earth is the embodiment of patience and she is supposedly capable of withstanding any onslaught. But when she chooses to strike back, the fury is beyond all measure. Katrina was undoubtedly one of the deadliest weapons in her arsenal.

MIDDLE

The legend of history
by Rajesh Kochhar

THE real Mangal Pandey cannot stand up because he is dead. What he means to us today depends on today. It also depends on who “us” are.

The past has no independent existence. It exists because of the present. The neutral question What happened? cannot be decoupled from loaded questions such as What it meant? , What it led to? , And What it means. Thus our interpretation of the past depends upon our perception of the present. It is not possible to write history without implicating the historian. The power of history lies not in the assemblage of sterile truths but in the narrative.

On the rare occasions when truth is stranger than fiction, the truth speaks for itself. But very often the truth is laborious. In that case it asks the legend to drive home the point.

In the spectacular period film “Mughal-e-Azam”, Anarkali is not entombed alive, but exiled from the kingdom through a tunnel (It was not shown how she survived suffocation). When the film was released in August, 1961, the director, K. Asif, put up posters at least in Uttar Pradesh, saying that the Salim-Anarkali love story was not history but legend, and that one had a right to take liberties with a legend.

K. Asif would have been in good company if he had taken liberties with the history itself. History has always been called upon to lend legitimacy and support to contemporary ideologies and actions. If there have been uncomfortable facts in the way, they have often been sacrificed at the altar of expediency.

The wild horses so famously tamed by the American cowboys were not wild, but feral, that is offspring of released domesticated horses brought from Spain. Selective suppression of facts was developed into a fine art by the English during the colonial period. The British told the upper-caste Hindus that they like the new rulers were Indo-Europeans while the Muslims were Semites. Except that Saladin (correctly Salah-ud-din), well-known as the 12th century Muslim general who fought against the Christian Crusaders, was not a Semite. He was a Kurd and thus an Indo-European himself.

The English like everybody else create myths when they are needed (Lawrence of Arabia; Churchill). But it goes to their credit that they deconstruct them when the need is over. We also create myths but unfortunately we insist on perpetuating them at great cost even when they have become irrelevant.

It would, of course, be interesting to know what the historical facts on Mangal Pandey are and how the movie departs from them. But it will perhaps be far more interesting to ascertain who needs the legend and why.

OPED

Taking governance to the doorsteps
Poor women benefit from the “jan sunvai”
by Vichitra Sharma

FOR once, Sukhadia Rangmanch, the auditorium for performing arts in Udaipur, was transformed into a platform for sharing real-life injustices. There were no actors but simple rural women who had till then suffered in silence.

They came in their hundreds; the victims, relatives, friends and children from various villages, some as far away as 90 kilometres, to participate at a “Jan Sunvai”, a public hearing of women’s problems.

The “open hearings” give women an opportunity to air their grievances and seek redress on the spot. The Rajasthan State Commission for Women, with back-up support from UNICEF, is providing a unique opportunity that bridges the gap between government and civil society. This was evident at the two recently held sessions in Udaipur and Jaipur.

The hearings are held by the Rajasthan State Commission for Women, an autonomous body set up by the Government of Rajasthan, which has the status of a civil court. It has the power to investigate complaints brought before it by women and recommend to the government to take action on it. The Commission can also recommend the line of punishment. The government on its part is bound to look into the matter brought to its notice and inform the Commission within three months on the action taken.

Ganga Bai complained to the Chairperson of the Commission, Dr Pawan Surana that for the past three months, the local nurse (ANM- Auxiliary Nurse Midwife) had not made a visit to their village. As a result, no one had been vaccinated. The Chairperson called for the Chief Health and Medical Officer and asked him to look into the matter. “If the ANM is on long leave find someone else to fill in. The PHC (Primary Health Centre) should have an ANM soon,” she pronounced a quick verdict with the instructions to her staff for a follow-up review.

Among others who were present at the hearings were the District Collector, the Superintendent of Police, Deputy Director Social Welfare and other Commission staff. Senior officers from other social sector departments and representatives of a few banks were also instructed by the Commission to attend the public hearing, just in case the women have questions pertaining to their area of work.

Champa Bai from Sarli village sought protection from the village’s power group as she had been declared a “dayan” (a witch) by them. She feared for her life and that of her children. Two Muslim girls wanted child support and maintenance according to the law of the land and not by a Shariat decree; in another village the school had been locked for months, yet the teacher promoted all the students to the next class; somewhere else a group of girls wanted to continue education but could not as the local school was only up to the VIIIth Class; there were incidents of sexual harassment at the workplace; and a case of charging for medicines even though it was supposed to be free for those below the poverty line (BPL).

But far exceeding most other representations were those relating to failed matrimony because of violence, alcohol, abuse and dowry. While Manju Joshi’s husband had chopped off both her hands because she could not get more dowry, Lata Jhawar, a first class- BA from Jaipur University was abused and tortured by her husband and his family in Karnataka, and repeatedly sent away to get more “presents” at the same time being subjected to a hostile atmosphere at home.

The sufferings were endless. The narrations, punctuated with muffled sobs or a complete breakdown, left very few eyes dry in the hall. This was the darker side of small towns and rural areas. The common thread binding them all was a sense of total helplessness and the silent pain they had gotten used to living with for being the subordinate sex.

The public hearing provided an opportunity and a faint ray of hope that encouraged these women to travel all this distance, assisted by an NGO and the Women and Child Department.

The indomitable Dr Pawan Surana, Chairperson of the Commission is partly responsible for the power and strength the Commission has acquired. “We hold three types of hearings. One, at the district or bloc level as most rural women find it difficult to travel to the State Capital; two, individuals who don’t want to air their problems in public often come direct to the Commission’s Office for a personal hearing; and finally, there is also the option of sending a note by hand or through the mail for seeking redress of the particular problem,” she explains. The Commission is also empowered to call for official records to assist it in its inquiry.

Dr Surana say that with each hearing, the rural women are getting more empowered. “Once they hear that the redress is announced immediately to the aggrieved woman, the others who are watching as audience gain more confidence in the process, feeling encouraged that their voices are heard and steps are taken to provide justice.

“There was this case last month when an ANM came weeping before us to inform that the Sarpanch (head of the local self-government) was “troubling her” and threatened her with a poor report that would lead to loss of job, ‘if she did not compromise’ “.

Dr Surana wanted to summon the Sarpanch to the hearing but as the distance was too much, she directed the District Magistrate to look into the complaint and help out the ANM. “There are quite a few complaints by ANMs, especially if they are young girls, of being harassed by the doctors or the elected representatives in the Panchayat”, she said.

The preparation for a hearing starts a couple of weeks before the public meeting. A reputed NGO working in the specific district is mobilised to support the women and encourage them to bring their problems to the Commission’s hearing. If the NGO is unavailable, the department of women and child development is co-opted to assist the process.

The public hearing also acts as a forum where people are made aware of the rights of women and children. On the occasion the District Magistrate and the Superintended of Police explain to the large gathering all the government schemes and the process of benefiting from them.

Since the past 3-years, public hearings have been conducted in 30 districts of Rajasthan. Almost all of them have been covered so far. Last week saw the start of the second round in Udaipur and Jaipur. Out of a total of 5,246 petitions heard so far, 5,168 issues have been resolved. Pending cases total 728.

Complaints received by mail numbered 5,770, far more than those for the open court of public hearing. But only 3,965 of these have been processed so far, informed Dr Surana. At the recently held one-day hearing, in Jaipur alone, the Commission received 183 cases from the two districts. It was able to hear 60 petitions in Jaipur, while the remaining cases, most of which required counselling, would be taken up in the Commission’s office.

A case in point is Somli Bai’s experience that shows that health services are not just poor and inefficient but also that the pregnancy monitoring protocols are being flouted. Somli, a thin-built, anaemic woman was expecting twins. She reached her neighbourhood PHC late in the evening with labour pains. In spite of repeated requests the doctor who had been examining her came to the centre the following morning.

After examination, he informed the family that as this was a risky delivery, it would be better if they took Somli to the City hospital, an almost eight-hour drive by road. It seems before they could take a decision either way, the twins did not wait and were delivered in the PHC. Only one survived. The family bundled the new born and Somli for the long journey back home but the second baby too died on the way. Somli wept all the way back. All that was now left was to claim her Rs. 500 for the delivery.

Says Somli, “I went to the Sarpanch; he wanted some money for the form. This had to be filled by the PHC. Here the doctor asked for Rs. 50. I could not pay. I told them that I was from the BPL class. I was asked to prove this. I went to the Collectorate to get my BPL card. I have the card now but still no compensation. We’ve spent a lot of money travelling and on medicines. In spite of being poor everyone asks for some money for the medicines,” said an exhausted Somli.

Dr Surana gave directions to the officers on the spot for assistance to the victimised woman. Both the doctor and the sarpanch were summoned to the Commission’s office and the DM was asked to seek them out.

Dr Satish Kumar, Unicef State Representative, says that the Women’s Commission has become a trustworthy platform for sorting out issues on the spot. UNICEF helps in identifying NGOs working at the grassroots level and provides funds.

In just one session of “Jan Sunvai”, the information gap is bridged for the senior officers that would have otherwise got distorted under the labyrinthine ways of government reporting. This is another way of taking governance to the doorsteps.

The thin veneer of civilization
by Timothy Garton Ash

THE big lesson of Katrina is not about the incompetence of the Bush administration, the scandalous neglect of poor black people in the United States or our unpreparedness for major natural disasters, though all of those apply. Katrina’s big lesson is that the crust of civilization on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor and you’ve fallen through, scratching and gouging for your life like a wild dog.

Remove the elementary staples of organized, civilized life — food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security — and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels; most revert to being apes.

The word “civilization,” in one of its earliest senses, referred to the process of human animals being civilized — by which we mean, I suppose, achieving a mutual recognition of human dignity, or at least accepting in principle the desirability of such a recognition. Reading Jack London the other day, I came across an unusual word: decivilization. That is the opposite process — the one by which people cease to be civilized and become barbaric.

There are intimations of this even in normal, everyday life. Road rage is a good example. Or think what it’s like waiting for a late-night flight that is delayed or canceled.

Obviously, the decivilization in New Orleans was 1,000 times worse. I can’t avoid the feeling that there will be more of this, much more of it, as we go deeper into the 21st century. There are just too many big problems looming that could push humanity back. The most obvious threat is more natural disasters as a result of climate change. If this cataclysm is interpreted by politicians as a “wake-up call” to alert Americans to the consequences of the United States continuing to pump out carbon dioxide as if there were no tomorrow, then the Katrina hurricane cloud will have a silver lining. But it may already be too late. We may be launched on an unstoppable downward spiral. If so, if large parts of the world were tormented by unpredictable storms, flooding and temperature changes, then what happened in New Orleans would seem like a tea party.

Almost having the force of a flood is the pressure of mass migration from the poor and overpopulated South of the planet to the rich North. If natural or political disasters were to put still more millions on the move, our immigration controls might one day prove to be like the levees of New Orleans. Even with current levels of immigration, the resulting encounters are proving to be explosive. How civilized will we remain? And then there is the challenge of accommodating the emerging great powers, especially India and China, into the international system. Especially in the case of China, where communist leaders use diversionary nationalism to stay in power, there is a danger of war. Nothing decivilizes more quickly and surely than war.

So never mind Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.” That, as the old Russian saying goes, was long ago and not true anyway. What’s under threat here is simply civilization, the thin crust we lay across the seething magma of nature, including human nature.

(Garton Ash is a professor of European Studies at Oxford)

— LA Times-Washington Post