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Petrol and protest Taxing job |
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Bigamy in Bhiwani It’s subversion of law THE remarriage of Poonam of Dhanana village of Sonepat district has thrown up a whole lot of questions which the administration has, perforce, to answer. For starters, the upper caste girl was married to Surinder Kumar, a lower caste boy of Kharkari village, with the approval of both families.
Towards Asian common market
Looking backwards
A pass to trade Don’t allow Ghaggar water to
go waste UN suffers from US “stealth diplomacy”
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Petrol and protest IT is ironical that while the main Opposition party, the BJP, is no more than lukewarm in its protest against the fuel price hike, the Left parties, which are supporting the UPA government from outside, are going hammers and tongs at it. Perhaps the former has been chastened by the Sangh advice that such a protest will lack “intellectual honesty”. That honesty is all the more lacking in the case of the Left parties, considering that they are part of the government for all practical purposes. Even if they take the technical line that they are not “in” the government, this is one issue which should have been sorted out in the Left-UPA coordination committee meetings instead of being fought out on streets. In its present form, the Communist agitation looks more of a road-show. The form of protest has varied from place to place. While there was a complete shutdown in Kerala, there was no call for a strike in West Bengal. In the national Capital, they put their vocal chords to full use, but did not go much beyond that. By doing this, the Left is deluding only itself into believing that it is posing as a champion of the common man’s cause. At least the Congress-ruled states have agreed to cut tax on petroleum products. The Left has not reciprocated even that token gesture. But the price hike has come as a godsend to the Left in trying to forge some kind of a third front. It made a common cause with Ajit Singh’s RLD, the AGP, the TDP and the Samajwadi Party. All of them organised similar demonstrations in their pocketboroughs. However, just holding a protest does not mean that these disparate groupings can come together. Even if they do, it will be even more improbable that they will pull along consistently. It is high time the Left made up its mind whether it was going to turn left or right. Going around the roundabout for so long does not make a very pleasant sight.
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Taxing job IT is unfortunate that the Income Tax Department is getting unnecessary political and media attention. Ever since it asked some questions about how Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav acquired so much property in so short a time, his partymen have been targeting the department. They even went to the extent of attacking an IT office in UP and destroying government property. The notices the department has served on film star Amitabh Bachchan, his wife and MP, Jaya Bachchan, and son and actor, Abhishek Bachchan, seem to have compounded their anger. Taking a cue from the protest demonstrations in UP, his fans and Samajwadi Party workers have held dharna in front of the IT office in Mumbai. All this is totally unwarranted and amounts to nothing but pressure tactics against the department. Apart from airing innuendoes, the Samajwadi Party leaders have not been able to produce any proof that the IT department has been acting at the behest of the government. From the stance they have adopted the impression one gets is that it is sacrilegious to seek clarifications from the Bachchans on their wealth and income tax returns. Amitabh Bachchan is undoubtedly one of the greatest actors of India, who has a fan following among all Indian communities. But for the IT department, he is one among millions of taxpayers, whose income tax returns it has every right to scrutinise. After all, who does not know that the film industry is one of the few which thrives on black money? Nobody contends that the department is always in the right. In fact, the taxpayers have the right to seek arbitration and go in for appeal if its decisions are not acceptable. In the case of Mulayam Singh Yadav, all he has to do is to convince the Supreme Court and the Income Tax Department that all the assets he has acquired in the recent past were through legitimate means. Instead, he has chosen to politicise the issue. While political vindictiveness is unacceptable, seeing political motives in every action of a government department is equally deplorable. Political parties should take up people’s causes, rather than question the income tax notices to film stars.
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Bigamy in Bhiwani THE remarriage of Poonam of Dhanana village of Sonepat district has thrown up a whole lot of questions which the administration has, perforce, to answer. For starters, the upper caste girl was married to Surinder Kumar, a lower caste boy of Kharkari village, with the approval of both families. After the marriage was through, some leaders of the Jat community rose up against the marriage and organised a panchayat to denounce it. They also forced the girl’s family to have Poonam married to a boy of her own caste. A move was also afoot to have the boy’s family virtually excommunicated from the village for which a mahapanchayat was called. At this juncture, the harassed boy approached the Punjab and Haryana High Court which summarily ordered cancellation of the mahapanchayat. Accordingly, the organisers themselves called off the mahapanchayat. But by then they had already punished the girl’s family for consenting to her marriage to a lower-caste person. Not only that, they had also forced the family to find, post-haste, a boy from its own community to marry her. To make everything appear legal, the panchayat leaders obtained affidavits from both families to the effect that they had voluntarily “dissolved” the earlier marriage. In effect, the community leaders have sought to cock a snook at the law of the land. Unfortunately for them, the law is not as simple as they believe it to be. It is in Suridner Kumar’s capacity as Poonam’s husband that he sought the intervention of the court in this case. Nobody can annual a marriage by simply filing an affidavit. As the law stands today, the couple will have to seek divorce before they can marry again which means Poonam’s second marriage has no legal sanctity. What’s worse, she is guilty of bigamy, a punishable crime. Those who forced her to marry again are guilty of promoting bigamy. Even if the second marriage does not amount to disobeying the orders of the court and thereby causing contempt of court it will still not stand judicial scrutiny. The administration whose inaction caused the chain of events would do well to take action against all those who flouted the law of the land in the name of upholding the “prestige” of an anachronistic institution.
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When the sun sets, shadows, that showed at noon/But small, appear most long and terrible. — Nathaniel Lee
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Towards Asian common market THE joke doing the rounds in South Block now is that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is ever so keen to visit Pakistan because he finds it easier to deal with General Musharraf than his Cabinet colleagues. If Mr Arjun Singh ambushed him and sent the entire country into a caste-driven frenzy, one of his other ministerial colleagues leaked the contents of a letter to the Prime Minister from Congress President Sonia Gandhi, expressing concern over the free trade agreement that India had signed with its ASEAN partners. As party President, it was only natural for Mrs Sonia Gandhi to privately draw the concern of farmers in India to duty-free imports from ASEAN countries. The Prime Minister is said to have replied assuaging her concerns, pointing out that the freeing of imports with ASEAN countries was to be effected over a period of time. Why is free trade with our neighbours in Asia important? The Asian region today accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s population, two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon reserves and around 40 per cent of the world’s GDP. In the next half-a-century as the population of the West ages, a younger and better educated work force in Asia will fill the void. Asia accounted for 60 per cent of the global output at the dawn of the industrial age in 1820. Asia’s share of global output fell to 20 per cent by 1940. At the present rates of growth Asia will account for 60 per cent of the world’s output by 2025 — the same level as in 1820. The twenty-first century is set to become Asia’s century, with the centre of global industrial production and services shifting from North America and Europe to Asia . India’s prosperity and influence in this dynamic neighbourhood is going to depend on how it leverages these developments to its advantage and emerges as a major player With the ASEAN countries concluding free trade agreements with other major Asian powers like China, India will find that it will have a declining role and influence in Asia unless it secures duty-free access to ASEAN markets . If it desires such access, then it should be prepared, like China, to grant products from ASEAN countries similar access to Indian markets. Our share in the booming intra-Asian trade will otherwise further decline. It needs to be remembered that India today is a marginal player in ASEAN markets when compared to China, Japan or South Korea. While our trade with ASEAN is just over $15 billion, China’s trade with these dynamic economies is around $120 billion. Japan also has a similar amount of trade with the ASEAN countries, coupled with huge investments in ASEAN economies. While our trade with Japan has hovered between $4 billion and $5 billion, trade between China and Japan reached $167.88 billion in 2004. Our policies with ASEAN and its Asian dialogue partners have thus to not merely envisage how we can reach out to expand trade, but also how we can cooperate to meet the growing energy demands of the region. Successive Prime Ministers since Mr P.V . Narasimha Rao have realised the importance of trade with the ASEAN countries as part of a new “Look East Policy”. It was in recognition of these imperatives that India has signed free trade agreements with its South Asian neighbours in SAARC, the countries of the Bay of Bengal Basin (Myanmar, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan) and a framework agreement for free trade with ASEAN. All these agreements will come fully into force between 2016 and 2019, unless Pakistan chooses to stall free trade in South Asia under SAFTA. It was this approach, which conforms with the trade and investment policies of virtually all other Asian countries that led to India being invited to participate in the East Asian Summit in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005. Dr Manmohan Singh eloquently proclaimed in Kuala Lumpur: “I believe that the objective basis for the economies of our region to come together exists. The subjective desire to create an East Asian Community bringing together ASEAN, China, Japan, Korea and also Australia and New Zealand is manifest. Like the North American Free Trade Area and the expanding European Union, a Pan Asian Free Trade Area will be a dynamic, open and inclusive association of the countries of our region.” Despite Dr Manmohan Singh’s assertion, the fact remains that India is today seen in Asia as a country with an inefficient and uncompetitive economy protecting the inefficient sectors with massive tariff and non-tariff barriers. Despite a free trade agreement with Sri Lanka, we have imposed all kinds of non-tariff barriers on the imports of tea, spices and rubber from a friendly neighbour. A logical question one could ask is why consumers across India should have to pay higher prices for tea, spices and rubber merely to protect inefficient and populist agricultural practices and policies in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Similarly, why should Indian consumers have to pay higher prices for cooking oil while palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia is available at cheaper rates? Over the past 15 years we have steadily lowered tariff barriers on industrial products and forced Indian industry to become globally competitive. Is it not time to treat the agricultural sector similarly? It is true that there may be some temporary dislocation in our agriculture sector as we move in this direction. But, in the long term, our farmers can compete with confidence with their counterparts in Asia who do not enjoy agricultural subsidies like farmers in the European Union. These challenges can be met only if we recognise the infirmities in our agriculture sector where wheat output peaked in 1999-2000 and then stagnated. The output of pulses has also stagnated, with Myanmar emerging as an important supplier of pulses for meeting the growing demand. We had a buffer stock of 63 million tonnes of foodgrains in 2002. We are now heading for a situation wherein wheat imports (hopefully without kickbacks) are likely to become a regular feature. While the yield per acre of wheat in India has been around 2.5 to 3 tonnes, the yield in China is reported to be around 5 tonnes per acre. India can thus be an emerging power of some consequence in Asia only if it seriously undertakes a process of agricultural reform similar to the industrial and service sector reforms of the 1990s. This cannot happen if individual ministers in the government try to snipe at and undermine a larger national vision articulated by the Prime Minister.
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Looking backwards IN old age, one is prone to ponder the past, for the future is so uncertain, so unclear. And so, now that I’ve turned 86, whenever I cast a cold eye on my crowded past, a whole school of images rises to capture the mind. Nostalgia then becomes an abiding condition. And thus, now that I feel exhausted at the end of a long teaching and literary career, the past alone abides. In nearly 50 years of teaching and writing which took me to Harvard as a Visiting Fulbright Professor (1969-70), and to New York University as a Visiting Professor for two years (1988-90), I seem to have arrived at the
dead end. And, thus, whenever I cast a longing, nostalgic eye on my past, a whole school of images rises before the mind’s eye, and a certain kindness of longing abides. It was said of Yeats, the great Irish poet, that his “muses grew younger as he grew older”. I wonder if such a rare phenomenon is to be encountered often in the world of letters. As a rule, in old age, one feels exhausted, drained of intellectual energies, as it were. And that’s, more or less, my condition today. Having published several volumes of literary and political interest, besides four volumes of poetry, I feel exhausted and ennui is, then, the dominant emotion. Even otherwise, I have been confined to my own house for over 12 years now, following an operation which, indeed, was unnecessary, as the doctors concerned confirmed later. But the inevitable had happened and, thus, unable now to travel long distances, I fall back upon memories of my past life. And, then, a feeling of despair begins to cast gloom over my musings. Since, with each passing year, my physical and intellectual energies are getting diminished, the mind, inevitably returns to moments of felicity and ease. And, thus, during the long hours of each night when sleep eludes me, I begin to recall my past years, and the mind traverses a whole continent of experiences — the IAUPE Conferences aboard, the countries I visited, the friends I made. And it’s thus that I muse during the long hours of the night. Some experiences in India and abroad, which have somehow remained lurking in my memory, then, begin to rise like a school of birds, and I begin to chase those vanished images, the mind darting from country to country, from continent to continent. And thus, the long hours of the night see me slipping into troubled
sleep.
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A pass to trade The re-opening of the 4,310 metre-high pass, which remains snow-bound during winter months, marks an important landmark in relations between the two countries and holds out the prospect of reviving a mutually beneficial overland trade and commercial link. The Lhasa-Kalimpong trade route via the Nathu la, about one-third shorter than the Lhasa-Kathmandu road, offers the best possible linkage between Tibet and the world outside. It promises enormous potential benefits for both the Himalayan border regions and the local economies in what the Chinese now call the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), as well as northeast India. For more than a hundred years since the early 1890s, if not indeed farther back in time, the trade route has been a major axis of Asian trade. Together with its linkages north and eastwards towards China and Central Asia and its extension towards Kolkata, it has historically promoted considerable commercial activity in central Tibet as well as northeast India. Thanks to this route and the rich variety of goods it carried, travellers to Tibet until the mid-20th century were able to find en-route, and in Lhasa itself, almost all they needed for their every day needs. Again, once the Nathu la is open, it would be incongruous to keep the neighbouring Jelap la closed; its re-opening would directly help Darjeeling revive its stagnant economy. Unlike Sikkim, it receives no central largesse; and for lack of trade avenues, the district’s health and prosperity have long been on the decline. Understandably, the re-opening of Nathu la has been a key demand of the local authorities in Sikkim, the adjoining Darjeeling Autonomous Hill region and the TAR since the 1980s, in the wake of a modicum of normalcy returning to New Delhi-Beijing relations. A major obstacle was the political status of Sikkim. Long a tributary state of Tibet, it had in the 1890s become a British protectorate, a position independent India, the Raj’s political legatees, inherited in 1947. The status quo continued until 1974 when following some local disturbances New Delhi formally annexed the state. Beijing was not amused, and took another thirty long years to accept the ground reality. Negotiations over border trade and other details were not a cakewalk and the actual re-opening of the pass, often times promised, was repeatedly postponed. Three earlier deadlines may be of interest. First mentioned in the wake of Prime Minister Vajpayee’s visit to Beijing in June 2003, at least two other dates were later officially announced October 2005 and as late as April 2006. Even as of date, the actual re-opening is scheduled in ‘about’ a month time! Sadly the March 1959 Tibetan rebellion followed by the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict converted the Himalayan region into a super-sensitive border area replete with travel restrictions, road-building and the presence of large numbers of security forces. The closure of the border created dead-ends on both sides and ushered in a period of economic atrophy in Tibet and the whole Himalayan region. Another consequence was militarisation of the region and its societies, especially in the northeast, which further complicated their internecine conflicts and disputes with New Delhi. One would hope that with local tensions dissipating with the re-opening of a number of other passes in this Tibetan-speaking Himalayan rim of south Asia, the long-standing antipathy in New Delhi for Kathmandu’s desire for north-south roads within Nepal may also be finally overcome. The re-opening of Nathu la may thus herald the cementing of economic and human relationships across the northern frontiers of South Asia. A word of caution though may not be out of place. The nature of the traffic in goods and services that the re-opening of Nathu la generates remains a moot point. All along, before its ‘liberation’ in October 1950, Tibet’s staple export was wool, which it traded for all kinds of consumer goods, for most part textiles. Not long after, by the mid-1950s for sure, the traffic in wool nearly dried up for the Indian monopoly quietly yielded place to a Chinese stranglehold. What China’s Tibet needs today is access to the sea promised by Highway 31 which leads towards Siliguri and on to Calcutta. More, there is its desperate need for such hardware as steel, kerosene and other petroleum products, above all for rice and other food grains in which Tibet is abysmally deficit. And all of which Beijing brings into TAR at enormous expense — thanks to the intervening distance and the lie of the land. What we will get in return for our hardware will be a glut of cheap Chinese goods hitherto confined to the grey market in these hilly and inaccessible regions. A fair exchange that could only multiply with more avenues of ingress and egress! The writer is a former chairman of the Departments of History and Central Asian Studies at Panjab University.
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Don’t allow Ghaggar water to
go waste THE Ghaggar river basin, measuring 42,174 sq kms, is located between the two mega basins of Indus and Yamuna river systems. The Ghaggar originates in the Shivalik hills some distance above Kalka and enters the plains near Surajpur. After flowing through Punjab and Haryana, it disappears in the sand-dunes of the Thar desert. During the British rule the waters of the river Ghaggar were considered to be a boon and were used for irrigation. But the situation underwent a complete change after independence, when planning for the Bhakra-Nangal Project was taken up and it was thought that non-perennial irrigation should be replaced by perennial irrigation. So we went in for the gradual “freeing” up of the Ghaggar waters of the duties assigned to it earlier. In the head reach of the river Ghaggar, near Nada Sahib Gurdwara, there existed a set of Khuls, which irrigated large areas in 1947. These Khuls were privately operated and maintained and there existed a fine set of rules for fixing the share of each Khul. The dispute resolution was quite effective. In the 1960s East Punjab decided to investigate a proposal for building a 290 ft high ‘Earth Dam ’ on the river Ghaggar and the axis of the proposed Ghaggar Dam was located near Chandi Mandir. The project report was completed with the estimated cost of the dam put at Rs 28 crores. Most of the benefits were to be reaped by the area below Mubarakpur and the upcoming capital township of Chandigarh. Before formal submission of the Ghaggar Dam report, the reorganisation of the Punjab state took place and the dam site fell in the area going to the new state of Haryana. The new State had different priorities, the Ghaggar Dam project came to be shelved and the catchment area of the dam came in for colonisation at a very fast rate. A military station came to be established near the dam site, so it became clear that there was no chance of building a dam on the river Ghaggar as proposed in the report. The net effect of the above was that the irrigation through Khuls came to be discarded and the area handed over to contractors responsible for supply of building materials, sand and gravel. The mining of the bed material went on at an uncontrolled scale and this provided additional destructive potential to Ghaggar waters to flow in any direction and attack anywhere. Engineers were enthused with the benefits of large dams like Bhakra and took steps to takeover the non-perennial canal systems and tried to convert those areas into perennial irrigated areas. This resulted in a complete “Shifting of load” from the Ghaggar to the river Sutlej. This resulted in an increased flood potential of the river Ghaggar. The boon of the
pre-independence era has become a bane. In the current scenario of states squabbling over utilisation of precious and limited water resources, it is a shame to let the Ghaggar waters go waste.
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UN suffers from US “stealth diplomacy” THE United Nations is at death’s door. That’s not news; the UN always seems to be on the brink. This time, US ambassador, John R. Bolton, is preparing to unplug the respirator. After a senior official of the UN Secretariat gave a speech recently calling for more consistent and less hostile engagement from Washington, a furious Bolton predicted that the institution would suffer “grave harm” unless Secretary-General Kofi Annan “personally and publicly” repudiated his colleague’s remarks. Annan, to his credit, refused. We have, of course, been here before. During the late 1990s, US Congressional conservatives led by Republican Senator Jesse Helms vowed to starve the UN unless it acceded to a long list of “reforms.” In September 2002, President Bush asserted that the United Nations would become “irrelevant” should it fail to join the US in disarming Iraq. You have to wonder why the UN is still in business. The short answer is: Because the US can’t do without it. I spent the period from June 2004 to September 2005 inside the UN while writing a book about it, and I was always struck by how much business the US and the UN transacted with one another, and how routinely they did so. Crisis brewing in the Horn of Africa? Let’s bring in the State Department because only the US can talk sense to both Ethiopians and Eritreans. And the need ran both ways. In December 2004, with the right-wing press baying for Annan’s blood over the Iraq oil-for-food scandal, Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of State-designate, met with Annan and thanked him profusely for organizing a peacekeeping force in Haiti and elections in Iraq, neither of which the White House could have done by itself. This is, ironically, precisely the point that Mark Malloch Brown, deputy secretary-general, made in his now-notorious speech. Malloch Brown, who over the last year has absorbed tremendous abuse inside the UN for championing Washington’s point of view, accused the White House – but not only this White House – of practicing a “stealth diplomacy” that kept the American people in the dark about the UN’s day-to-day utility, because “to acknowledge an America reliant on international institutions is not perceived to be good politics at home.” This formulation seems to me exactly right. Why else was Rice willing to generously thank Annan in private while remaining publicly mum as his career hung by a thread? The UN, as Malloch Brown also noted, is a cherished whipping boy for right-wingers. Why take on those who hold the whip in order to defend an organization with no constituency of its own? This time around, the confrontation involves reforms, originally proposed by Annan himself, which would liberate the secretariat from the micro-management of the 191 members and allow the members to hold managers accountable for their performance. The reform process has dissolved into an unsightly mess owing in part to deep differences among members over what the UN is for. But the America’s dismal standing in world opinion has tempted otherwise moderate nations to play to the gallery at home by twisting the lion’s tail, and Washington’s grudging or uncompromising position on issues has almost invited defiance from others. Lest anyone think that he was kidding, Bolton insinuated that the administration was prepared to withhold a portion of US dues to the organization. In the past, Rice has quietly intervened to defuse crises provoked by her bellicose UN emissary. Will she do so this time? Or will she provide the definitive proof that Brown was right?
By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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From the pages of Pak threat to E. Bengal
Having
failed to win over the United Front of East Bengal, one of the two constituent units of the Coalition Government, on certain issues in the framing of the future constitution, the Pakistan Prime Minister, Chaudhri Mohammed Ali, has started the game of browbeating Mr Fazl-ul-Huq and members of his group. He has threatened that, in case members of the Coalition Party do not come to an agreement on the controversial issues at an early date, the Constituent Assembly will be dissolved. He and his Party, the Muslim League, are not prepared to yield on the question of the relative powers of the Centre and the provinces and the method of elections. Perhaps Mr Mohammed Ali thinks that by raising the issue of Kashmir and of cold war, he can win over the people. But the electors are too shrewd to be taken in so easily. Even if the League wins the elections in West Pakistan, its position in East Bengal will be precarious.
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Do not insult a woman nor ever pull her hair. With that one act a king’s righteous glory is lost for ever. His ancient and glorious name is stained for ever. —The Mahabharata When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does not trick. —Kabir The wise man blows impurities off himself as a silversmith cleans silver. One by one. Little by little. From moment to moment. Untiringly. Unerringly. —The Buddha God, the true sovereign, himself unites the believer with himself. — Guru Nanak |
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IN the course of his two-day visit to Beijing early this month, which the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao hailed as ‘successful’, the Indian defence minister reached an agreement with his Chinese counter-part on a number of security matters. Among these is the prospective re-opening of the Nathu la (in Tibetan ‘la’ stand for pass) on the Sikkim-Tibet border for trade.