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K. R. Narayanan Solar-empowered |
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Children of lesser
God Court’s advisory on adoption timely The recent advisory of the Supreme Court on inter-country adoption has not come a day too soon. Its caution against indiscriminate adoptions — either within the country or abroad — is just and perfectly understandable in the context of possible profiteering and trafficking in adopted children.
The King won’t
change
Gallery communion
Building education
city US deal may delay
China’s dominance East-West violence
inevitable?
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Solar-empowered As
symbolic gestures go, the decision to install a 5-MW solar energy plant at Rashtrapati Bhavan is important. But the signal will be meaningful only if the venture is replicated in every nook and corner of the country. The attempt to harness solar energy has been going on all through human history, but it gained momentum only during the past half a century. Despite that, the instruments developed so far continue to be clumsy and costly. The reasons are two-fold. One, the developed countries get their oil fairly cheap from West Asia and do not have much inducement to tap the energy from the sun to the fullest extent. And the nations like India which need this technology desperately continue to look to these disinclined countries. Two, whatever is imported is frightfully expensive, with the result that the use of solar energy is still negligible. Solar cookers and tubelights which have been around for over four decades are only slightly better than showpieces. The situation can be remedied only if we lay stress on our own research and development. There could not be a better time to do this than now. Petroleum products are going out of the reach of the common man. The inexhaustible bounty from the sun can be the panacea for India’s energy problems. As the President has himself pointed out, the cost of generating electricity from solar energy can be brought down by as much as 60 per cent if high-efficiency photovoltaic cells are available. There is another reason for the reluctance of the developed countries to harness solar energy. Not many of them get adequate sunlight round the year. India is lucky on that count. Scientists must heed to the President’s exhortation and make popularisation of solar energy use their top priority. It happens to be freely available, clean and renewable. It is now for the scientists to make it competitively priced. |
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Children of lesser God The
recent advisory of the Supreme Court on inter-country adoption has not come a day too soon. Its caution against indiscriminate adoptions — either within the country or abroad — is just and perfectly understandable in the context of possible profiteering and trafficking in adopted children. Not surprisingly, in many cases, individuals and voluntary organisations have brazenly misused the rules and guidelines on adoption. Even the petitioner in question — St Therasa’s Tender Loving Care Home, Hyderabad — whose plea for giving away a five-year-old girl of an unwed mother in adoption to an American couple was rejected by the apex court, is already facing prosecution for offences relating to adoption. Some of its officials have also been convicted. Significantly, the court has ruled that foreigners can adopt Indian children only if their application has been duly approved by a social or child welfare agency recognised or licensed by their country’s government. Surely, this will help protect the child from being pushed into the flesh trade or being trafficked. The court has ruled that the foreigners’ application should not be entertained directly by any social or welfare agency in India. It ordered that the Government of India’s Central Adoption and Resource Agency (CARA) must act as a clearing house for inter-country adoptions. Undoubtedly, children need special protection because of their tender age and immaturity. Adopted children, in particular, will have to be brought up in an atmosphere of love and affection. While the Supreme Court’s latest advisory is a reiteration of the guidelines laid down in an earlier case, its note of caution is aimed at protecting the child from being misused. Adoption is a magnanimous act, but some anomalies in the laws need to be removed to help the children of a lesser God. The Centre would do well to get them examined by the Law Commission. |
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Passion always goes, and boredom
stays. — Coco Chanel |
The King won’t change “Gyane
chor/Desh chhod” (King Gyanendra thief, leave the country). Nepali Congress student leader Gagan Thapa was arrested in May this year for chanting this anti-King slogan prohibited by law in post-Royal coup Nepal. He was released on the orders of the Supreme Court but re-arrested and ordered to be released a second time by the highest court. When Home Minister Dan Bahadur Sahi was asked why Thapa was re-arrested after the Supreme Court order for his release, the minister, who has eight contempt of court cases against him, replied: “Supreme Court didn’t say not to re-arrest him.” Thapa was released in September and is to stand trial for anti-national activities. The latest Press Ordinance promulgated by the King which has provoked wide condemnation is a measure to preempt further criticism of the extended Royal family. The 1990 constitution debars expression of anti-King sentiments. The King is above the law in Nepal. Thapa was general secretary of the Nepali Congress Students Union, but owing to differences with NC President G.P. Koirala, he is out of office now. Thapa is likely to be defended in the court by a team of 46 lawyers, led by the President of the Nepal Bar Association, Mr Shambhu Thapa. This writer met the 33-year-old firebrand student leader in Madison, Wisconsin, US, last month. Thapa had gone there on a US State Department-sponsored visit for young South Asians, and was in Madison to meet the Nepali community, Nepal-lovers and Nepalis in the US gathered for the 34th annual conference on South Asia, organised by the University of Wisconsin. The conference is one of the largest anywhere: 500 delegates and 92 panels spread over three days with at least three to four speakers and a discussant for each panel. Nepal hogged the limelight with seven panels. Madison is regarded as one of the most liveable US cities: civilised, spotlessly clean, beautiful and resting on lakes. The university has 40,000 students in a city of 150,000. Madison is mini-Kathmandu with some 130 Nepalese mainly from the Newari business community. Krishna Pradhan arrived in Madison 35 years ago and slowly brought more Newars from his village. Today he runs two Nepali restaurants : Himalchuli and Chautara. And so popular is Nepali food that he planning to start a third one: Annapurna. Kiran Shreshtha came 10 years ago with $300 in his pocket. He now works in a finance company and has made it so good that he can afford to tip in a French restaurant, $300. Many of the Nepalis this writer met were severely critical of the Royal regime, particularly the King. Almost everyone believed it was he, along with his son Paras, who masterminded the Palace massacre in 2001. In Madison code, they call him “KG” and the Maobadis, MB. Most think the days of the monarchy are numbered, a perception endorsed by all the participants at the conference. Among the paper presenters were two Nepalis, one American, and one Indian (this writer). Mahendra Lawoti, son of Padam Sunder Lawoti, a leading member of the royalist Rashtriya Prajatantra Party and author of “Towards a Democratic Nepal”, made a convincing comparison between the people’s uprising in Nepal with the Maoist movement in India and the Shining Path in Peru. The Indian Maoists drew their inspiration from Communist ideology in India and not China as is commonly believed. He’s right. Successive Chinese ambassadors in Kathmandu have blamed the Maoists, whom they call “miscreants” for hijacking Chairman Mao’s name. Only last month, the Chinese
Ambassador in Delhi offered to help India in crushing the Indian Maoists. Lawoti made the case that weak or failing states (meaning Nepal)
unresponsive to insurgent demands fail in comparison to strong and cohesive states like India which are prepared to accommodate weaker sections of society. In Peru the use of force was accompanied by land and other social reforms. The capture of their leader Guzman in 2000 led to the collapse of the Shining Path. None of the top Maoist leaders has been captured by the RNA. According to Shisir Khanal, the Maoists had a set of genuine grievances in Nepal and chose social transformation through violence. The Communist leader, Madhav Nepal, on a recent visit to Delhi, said that poverty, backwardness, discrimination and feudal structures, watered by bad governance fuelled the insurgency. The incompetence of the successive governments encouraged the Maoist movement, as did their failure to mobilise the Royal Nepal Army on time. Both the Palace and the RNA systematically discredited democracy, whose record is not as bad as is made out. The Asian-American Li Onesto is the last word in the US on Nepal’s Maoists. She is the author of the bestseller “Despatches from the People’s War in Nepal” — Pluto Press 2005. Onesto does not disguise her unequivocal sympathy for the Maoist cause. She is, after all, a member of the US Revolutionary Communist Party under chairman Bob Avakian. In 1999 she travelled deep into the guerilla zone in Nepal, lived with the Maoists for three months, had extended conversations with Maoist military and political leaders and did the first ever interview (by a foreigner) with Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda), the Maoist supreme leader. Though she has not revisited Nepal after 1999, she is in touch through email with top Maoist leaders. Her critique of the US policy in supporting the Royal regime is unabashed. America’s Nepal scholars believe that the US policy towards Kathmandu is confused. There’s policy divergence between the State and Defence Departments. Paranoid about a Maoist takeover of Kathmandu, it is the Defence Department which is driving policy. The US Army’s Pacific Command is the one pressing for the resumption of military aid to the RNA which has been blocked by Congress owing to its abysmal human rights record. The considered view of the Nepal caucus at Wisconsin was clear: it was time for action and not words. King Gyanendra, in his Dasehra message to the people of Nepal, has announced elections to Parliament by May 2007. There is no indication that any of the Big Powers or India has a plan to arrest or reverse the brewing crisis in Nepal. On the 38th floor of the United Nations Building in New York, UN Special Representative, Mr Lakhdar Brahimi, is waiting to snap up a role in Nepal sought by everyone except the King and India. The UN’s latest mandate, adopted last month, is to protect people against atrocities as well as safeguard democracy. Will the UN find a way to act? The Madison action plan is for the Foreign Ministers of the US, India, the EU and the UK to address a firm prescriptive note to the King urging him to reach out to the political parties. It should include both a warning and a threat to debar the RNA from UN Peacekeeping Operations on account of its horrific human rights record at home. That would be a body blow to the RNA and the King. Other coercive measures have also been listed. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister RN Pandey has visited Russia and Pakistan while RNA chief Gen P.J. Thapa went to China. The RNA is likely to get approximately 17000 AK 47 rifles along with ammunition. These three countries were the first to support the Royal takeover. King Gyanendra will be in Dhaka for the coming SAARC summit. India let him off the hook in Jakarta. In Dhaka, he requires to be given a tough message. Unless internal and external pressures are applied in a coordinated manner, King Gyanendra is unlikely to mend his
ways.
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Gallery communion There
was this artist from Nagaland who would come to the art gallery almost every single day of my last exhibition. The first day, he spent about an hour looking at the exhibits, giving half an hour to one particular painting and the other half evenly distributed for all the other 71 exhibits. He said nothing that day. The second time, I arrived at the gallery in the morning to find it already open and my Naga friend in deep thought in front of the same painting. This time he did come to me and his words gushed forth in an incoherent torrential stream. I was unable to respond, as no group of words formed a whole sentence. They were like scattered, broken pearls that had come off a long necklace, viciously snapped and strewn around in bits. I was left with just an “impression” of a highly intelligent but very disturbed mind. This, till he picked up an orange felt-pen lying on the table and started drawing a diagram. About six shaky, wavy concentric circles, with no centre, on one corner of the page. He put the “centre” on the other farthest corner of the page with his first coherent comment: “These are my thoughts.” And then, pointing to the disembodied centre, “This is my mind… But that painting brought this here”, shifting the centre somewhere between the two outer circles, “It talked to me.” After that, communication hobbled on for a few minutes to get drowned by a group of schoolchildren. He came almost every day after that, made the same diagram lest I had forgotten, trying desperately to explain what I was already beginning to understand. The last day of the exhibition was a repeat of a previous occasion. He had beaten me to the gallery again in the morning. The lights had still not been turned on but Rengma was busy writing in the “comment Book” carefully covering his comment with his hand. Much later — after the closing of the exhibition — I read his comment: “I was really impressed by all your works but I weep when I see ‘Gujarat-2002’, because it talks to me.” It was signed with an underlined poignant question mark. After that I find that none of my own works has the power to disturb me as much as those crumpled white sheets with their wavy, shaky concentric circles and their disembodied centre… and the underlined question mark crying for a place in the sun… I hope Rengma finds himself in a world of peace one day, and shakes himself free of thoughts of threats to
peace-lovers. |
Building education city The
idea of creating an education city in Haryana is both a novel and classic one. The notion has extremely distinguished genealogical lineage. Oxford University, for instance, is basically a university city. Starting from the hub centre of the Oxford University, Oxford developed as a city interfacing actively with the university culture drawing immensely for its sustenance from the university economy. However, in modern times the ramifications of an education city could be a wider, deeper and multifarious. If developed intelligently with an innovative and imaginative scientific and humanistic vision, the education city could encompass into its ambit a whole gamut of economic, social, cultural and scientific dimensions of the life of Haryanavi society and people. The vision of the education city could possibly encompass the prospective of emerging as a centre of excellence, learning and cultural studies; an economic hub for the area around; a focal point of interface between learning, research, training and constant educational upgrading on the one land, and industry, agriculture, health and trade on the other. The education city, if developed imaginatively, could have far reaching positive impact on the economy of the state as a whole as it would generate job opportunities for youth. If proper infrastructural facilities like hostels, libraries, laboratories, hospitals etc could be provided, the education city could attract a substantial number of national and international learners. This could lead not only to the reversal of the brain drain and flight of capital from the country, but also it could attract and retain Indian students who could get most modern and up-to-date education in the city itself. Moreover, a considerable number of foreign students, particularly from SAARC and other Asian and African countries could be attracted to the city. This would most certainly have a salutary impact on the flow of international capital into the economy of the state. Several developmental models could be envisaged for realising the prospective goals of the city. First, the administration could make the land available at a good price to private players for developing their own educational institutions: schools, colleges, professional centres and so on. However, this model could be fraught with some long-term negative consequences. We have seen this model getting fructified in Chhattisgarh universities or even in universities like I. P. University in Delhi. Under this scheme of things the private parties convert their so-called centres into business shops which resort to fleecing of learners no end. Under such a dispensation the standards are sought to be maintained through a kind of inspector raj on the private parties with all the concomitant unhealthy practices that are inherent in the model. More often than not, the business-oriented education centres thrive by spreading the tentacles of corruption over all arteries of the controlling mechanisms. The enforcement officers are bribed no end and education centres are converted into the most wanton business enterprises. An alternative model could be a blend of classical model and the newest cost productive components. For instance, the whole of education city could be developed as a residential university encompassing the entire education process, i.e., from school to the research stage. Under this scheme of things private parties may be allowed to set up their education, training, research and development centres on the campus. They may have the autonomy in day-to-day management of their institutions. But the academic programmes, including the course content and syllabi of the courses and examination processes, have to be designed and executed by an authoritative body like a university or deemed university. Moreover, private educational shops inevitably resort to malpractices in the matters of employment and maintaining academic standards. Any respectable organisation could not leave this important domain solely to the vagaries of profit motivation. Under this dispensation stringent standards have to be laid down for the recruitment of academic staff and their service conditions have to be defined and monitoring mechanisms for the same have to be in place. One of the most important components of the city could include the production of educational goods like sports items, scientific instrumentation, stationary, book publication and other such items. The administrative mechanism could make the production sites available to the private parties on the prevailing competitive market rent. Many universities in the world, e.g, Sheffield Hallam University, England, are undertaking such activities (like production of sports items and equipment). Any state-sponsored scheme cannot overlook the welfare aspect of the proposal. In the modern and fast-developing world it would be imperative that an egalitarian fee structure is evolved and followed. The amounts competitive with the existing practices should be charged from foreign students and the wards coming from an affluent background. Adequate resources should be earmarked for students coming from rural background (Haryana) and for economically and socially disadvantaged students. The grants to be given to such students should be enough to cover all expenses to be incurred on teaching, research and residential aspects. Youth could be helped in acquiring application-oriented faculties and skills in script writing, media writing and production processes, film art, including the art of acting, dramatics, mimicry, rhetoric, music and other performing arts. The young generation of Haryana should be helped in realising its potential by imparting remedial and supplementary teaching with a view to facilitating the development of personalities through a programme of wholistic career guidance and training. World-class coaching and training be given to Haryana’s youth in sports. The existing sports school at Rai could be made a constituent part of the education city itself. Thus, we can see that sky is the limit for the futuristic idea of setting up of an education city. Only if we could have a caring, sensitive and imaginative parentage which could nurture the idea to life. The writer is a Professor of Russian Studies, University of Delhi, South Campus |
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US deal may delay China’s dominance The
U.S. textile industry got its heart’s desire on Tuesday — an agreement limiting the amounts of shirts, slacks, underwear, fabric and other textile produces that Chinese companies can ship to the US over the next three years. But it is far from clear that the agreement will do much to halt the steady erosion of jobs in the battered U.S. sector, much of which is concentrated in the Southeast. According to some trade and industry experts, the deal could even hasten the industry’s decline, by giving China’s export machine greater incentives to move into the higher end of the market, on which U.S. companies have staked their futures. For U.S. consumers who have become accustomed to the rapidly proliferating “Made in China’’ labels on the clothes they buy, the agreement will at least slow that phenomenon for a while. Imports of Chinese textiles and apparel will be allowed to rise at annual rates ranging from 8 percent to 17 percent, depending on the product and year, beginning on Jan. 1, 2006, and lasting until the end of 2008. Winning such an accord with Beijing has been the top goal of the U.S. textile industry since the demise of a decades-old system of global quotas restricting the amount of clothing that individual countries could export. Once that system disappeared on Dec. 31, 2004 — freeing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America to ship as many sweaters, bras and bedsheets as the market would bear — China’s network of factories, with its bottomless reserve of low-cost workers, threatened to dominate global markets. But while Tuesday’s agreement will prevent the Chinese from dominating their competitors with the swiftness many had feared, the deal’s three-year duration means that a day of reckoning still looms. And after the pact ends, Washington will no longer have the leverage it has exercised over Beijing in recent months: the right to impose annual caps, known as “safeguards,’’ on Chinese textile and apparel imports. Beijing agreed to such restraints until 2008 as part of the price of its entry into the World Trade Organization. Imports of clothing from China surged 71 percent over the past year, to $8.2 billion. Imports from India have risen 34 percent, to $2.7 billion; Bangladesh’s shipments have increased 24 percent, to $2.23 billion; Indonesia’s have risen nearly 17 percent, to $2.7 billion; and Sri Lanka’s have increased nearly 18 percent, to $1.7 billion. None of those caveats has stopped industry officials from crowing. Chinese competition, they said, is far more unfair than that of other countries. They voiced delight that after five months of tough negotiating, the administration induced the Chinese to accept caps on most apparel products of 10 percent growth in 2006, 12.5 percent in 2007 and 15 to 16 percent in 2008. All told, China’s shipments will increase only about 4 percent more over the life of the agreement than they would have if the administration imposed safeguards each of those three years, according to the industry’s calculations. The U.S. industry lost jobs at a terrible clip even when the global quota system was in effect, noted Edward Gresser, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute. Employment in U.S. textile mills has fallen from about 1 million when the quota system was established in 1974 to about 400,000 when it ended last year. The number of jobs in garment factories has plunged even more steeply. — LA Times-Washington Post |
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East-West violence inevitable? It’s Baghdad here.’’ So say the rampaging Muslims of Paris, according to Newsweek. Those words are a reminder that the West and Islam are engaged in a worldwide struggle, along many different flashpoints — a clash of civilizations. That’s right: a clash of civilizations. From the Euro-jihad in Paris, to the anti-American violence in Iraq, to the intifada in the Palestinian territories, to the recent threat of the President of Iran to “wipe Israel from the map,’’ to the string of terror-bombings in India and Indonesia, the common thread is a basic hostility between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East. That was the argument made by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor, in his 1996 book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order,’’ in which he argued that different civilizations naturally find themselves in conflict. When the book appeared, many critics lambasted the author’s cultural-historical pessimism. After all, didn’t the experience of multicultural New York City in the `90s prove that everybody could get along, at least most of the time? Well, the last 10 years — most notably 9/11 in that same New York — have vindicated Huntington. Indeed, this particular clash of civilizations has been going on for 14 centuries, since Islamic armies first swept over the Middle East, which at the time was mostly Christian. In A.D. 732, a Muslim army nearly reached Paris before being defeated. Other
civilisational clashes go back to the beginning of recorded time. Herodotus, the ancient Greek chronicler known as “the father of history,’’ wrote that Xerxes, king of the Persians, convened a war council in which he told his nobles and generals about his plans to invade in 480 B.C.: “By this course, then we shall bring all mankind under our yoke, alike those who are guilty and those who are innocent of doing us wrong.’’ Different cultures fight about everything, including their separate versions of historical truth. So how do we ever reach peace? How do cultures ever stop clashing? There’s never been a satisfactory long-term solution, but in the shorter term, the best way of avoiding conflict has been to avoid contact. That’s a lesson that the French didn’t learn, since they spent the last two centuries exporting Frenchmen to Muslim lands, even as they imported Muslims into France. In 1830, France began colonizing Algeria. The Algerians resisted, but the French prevailed after 42 years of fighting. Since they were convinced that the Algerians were naturally subservient, they brought many back to France to do menial labor. The French colonizers were eventually ejected from Algeria, in a war that killed hundreds of thousands from 1954 to 1962. Now the only enduring legacy of France’s colonial venture is the millions of Algerian and other African Muslims who live — many of them unhappily — in France. Other countries are having a tough time with their Muslim populations. Like France, Spain and Britain brought home many ex-colonials, and as the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 prove, the relationship has been rocky. And the Israelis, after decades of trying to subdue the Palestinians, have moved to a far wiser strategy — total disengagement from Gaza and a big wall across the West Bank. Oh, and by the way, Americans have had a hard time pacifying Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s tempting to assign blame for all these conflicts. But the deeper lesson is that violence inevitably erupts when civilizations, West and East, collide. That may change some day, when the lion lies down with the lamb. But until then, the better answer for the two civilizations is to keep their distance. — LA Times-Washington Post |
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From the pages of The “Baby” province
The first blue-book to be issued by the one-year-old province of Bihar and Orissa is that on land revenue administration. It would appear that but for plague, the condition of “raiyats” was generally satisfactory. Good harvests were the principal contributory causes and in the Patna, Tirhoot and Bhagalpore divisions considerable improvement in the material condition of the “raiyats” was marked. Plague did its work of ravage and seriously handicapped the peasants in Bihar proper; although its virulence is reported to have been less severe than in former years. We find that the Local Government have made large grants for combating plague and improving sanitation generally, and it is to be hoped that when next year’s stock taking comes on the Government will have a more cheery report to present. |
By the epoch humanity is indeed at a loss, except those who have faith and do good works, and enjoin truth and justice upon one other and enjoin patience upon one another. — Islam Those who cannot give up attachments to worldly things, and who find no means to shake off the feeling of ‘I’ should rather cherish the idea, ‘I am God’s servant; I am his servant; I am his devotee.’ — Ramakrishna Work is the best way to achieve happiness But not all work can do so. Only when we work with dedication, care and willingness, we get the pure joy of satisfaction. The effort and sincerity we put in is proportionate to our happiness in its completion. — Bhagvad Gita |
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