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Friends forever Beas breather |
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Back to selloff
Sidhu case revisited
The rat race
Climate change can boost world economy: study Never too late for artistic wisdom US dilemma in dealing with terror
Inside Pakistan
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Friends forever THE new friendship treaty India and Bhutan have signed removes what has been an irritant in their relations. It will enable Bhutan to pursue its foreign and defence policies in accordance with the country’s national interest. The earlier treaty signed on August 4, 1949, enjoined upon Bhutan to be guided by India on such policies. It was certainly an unequal treaty. The new treaty takes into account the sweeping political changes taking place in the landlocked country. Bhutan King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who signed the treaty, himself represents the change. In one of the rare instances of abdication, his father, who was still young for a King, handed over power to his son. Not just that, he even fixed a timetable for Bhutan to become a full-fledged democracy, which will become a reality sometime next year. As the Bhutanese people become sovereign, it was only in the fitness of things that India recognised the change and took the initiative to have the treaty updated. When foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon made Thimphu his first port of call, it showed the importance India attached to strengthening the bilateral relations. To be fair to Bhutan, despite the unequal nature of the 1949 treaty, it has had the best of relations with India. In fact, on all foreign issues, Bhutan has been consistently supporting India. The strength of their relationship is also reflected in the growing trade relations between the two countries. Incidentally, India is the largest trade partner of Bhutan. One of the clauses of the Treaty makes it obligatory for the two countries not to allow their territories to be used by groups inimical to the other country. The need for such a clause arose out of the fact that the United Liberation Front of Asom had for quite some time been operating from its base in the border areas of Bhutan. Of course, Bhutan cooperated with the Indian security forces in virtually eliminating the camps of such hostile forces. However, the recent resurgence of ULFA suggests that some of its remnants may still be cooped up in Bhutan. They need to be smoked out of their hideouts, which is possible only if Bhutanese and Indian forces cooperate. The treaty seeks to answer this problem as it takes into account the democratic wind about to blow in Bhutan. |
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Beas breather THE law and order situation in the Beas constituency had been allowed to worsen to such an extent that the postponement of elections had become unavoidable. Any lesser measure would have only disenchanted the public further. In the process, the Election Commission of India has come down heavily on the state government and the police force castigating them in no uncertain terms for failing to create a peaceful atmosphere conducive to the conduct of peaceful, free and fair elections there. The commission talks of how the DGP had tried to shield the accused persons involved in the attack on the Akali workers. The police had failed to arrest the absconding culprits even after 10 days of registration of FIR. This despite the police getting the cell number of Harpinder Singh Rajan, the absconding brother of Congress candidate Jasbir Singh Dimpa, from the election observer. Ironically, Punjab Police chief
R.S. Gill has still tried to give a clean chit to his men saying that the overall law and order scenario in the state was “very good” and that the investigation into the Beas incident was moving along “smoothly”. While the postponement will send the right signal to those bent upon vitiating the atmosphere, the new date of March 11 is far too late. This will mean that the elections will be held there nearly a month after these are over in the rest of the state. While special police bandobast will of course be needed in Beas to make sure that no untoward incident takes place, it should not take so long to make it. The poll on March 11 will mean that the rest of the results will be already out. That can have a bearing on which way the Beas voters go. As it is, the counting of votes is to take place in Punjab nearly a fortnight after the polling. Punjab elections will take place on a single day but the counting can be conducted only after these are over in other states like Manipur. Despite this exigency, such a long wait can be problematic. This is one complication which should be addressed on priority during future elections. |
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Back to selloff NORMALLY, the government’s decision to dilute its stake in three public sector enterprises would not have evoked much interest had the process of disinvestment stayed on course. But the unrelenting Leftist opposition had forced the government to put it on hold. The timing of the decision to offload through public issues small portions of the government stake in the Rural Electrification Corporation, the Power Grid Corporation of India and the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation is very appropriate as the Left is embroiled in a controversy over land acquisition for the Tata car project. The Left may find it difficult to fight its battles on so many fronts: pension reforms, foreign investment in retail and insurance and PSU disinvestment, to name only a few. The Finance Minister needs to raise money for the National Investment Fund (NIF). The three IPOs are expected to yield Rs 1,500 crore, which will be put into the NIF and interest earned on the amount will be utilised for reviving some of the ailing public sector undertakings. Now whether it is wise to spend more money on making good a bad investment is a separate issue and calls for debate. But the revival of the disinvestment process through the persistent efforts of the Finance Minister is a welcome development. He could not have gone ahead without a green signal from the Prime Minister. But the Left’s role as a continuing nuisance should not be underestimated. It had compelled the government to shelve BHEL disinvestment. The DMK too had scuttled the attempts to sell the government stake in Neyveli Lignite. But the two allies of the UPA government could not form a lasting joint front as the DMK has expressed its support to the government on the pension Bill. By opposing disinvestment, the Left has made it difficult for the government to raise funds for programmes like Bharat Nirmaan and the national rural job guarantee scheme. |
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Success is shy — it won’t come out while you’re watching. — Tennessee Williams
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Sidhu case revisited
AN interesting story related to the game of cricket reads as follows. A slow bowler appealed for an LBW decision. The umpire rejected the appeal after serious deliberations in the Steve Bucknor fashion. The bowler asked the umpire, “Was the ball not in line with the stumps?” The umpire replied, “Of course, it was, but condition 6 prescribes that in my opinion the ball must have been going to hit the wicket. I thought that the ball was so slow that it would not have travelled from the batting crease to the stumps”. Navjot Singh Sidhu, perhaps, was that batsman who survived the appeal — and at least so it looks after his recent victory before the Supreme Court. As an objective cricket lover, I always consider the umpires impartial and correct whenever appeals against my favourite batsmen are rejected. Sidhu is a fovourite batsman. The question of law involved in Sidhu’s application was an appellate courts’ power to “suspend the sentencing order” as opposed to the power to suspend “the execution of the sentence or order”. All judgments of the court touching the issue are unanimous that where the execution of the sentence alone is stayed, the conviction continues to operate and the consequent disqualification to be a managing director or a public servant or an elected representative remains. But where the order of conviction itself is stayed, the effect is that the conviction will not be operative during the life of the order of stay. The source of the court’s power is Section 389 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which provides that pending any appeal by a convicted person, the appellate court may, for reasons to be recorded by it in writing, order that the execution of the sentence or order appealed against be suspended and, also, if he is in confinement, that he be released on bail. The two-judge Bench in Sidhu’s case concluded that it had the power to suspend the sentencing order in “rare cases”. The legal conclusion was founded mainly on two precedents: one was a case relating to a company’s managing director decided by a three-Judge Bench (Rama Narang v. Ramesh Narang & Ors. (1995).) and the other was a recent one -November 2006 in Ravikant Patil’s case relating to the election to the Karnataka legislature, also by a three-judge Bench. In both cases, the orders of suspension of conviction were pronounced by High Courts, which have inherent powers to pass orders “to secure ends of justice”. Who identifies a rare case? Of course, the court. On what basis? It depends on the facts of each case. Sidhu qualified for this distinction because he chose “a moral path” of resigning, says the court. Ravi Kanth Patil convicted of rape earned the status of a “rare case” before the Bombay High Court because, among others, he married the woman who allegedly was the victim. In the words of Justice Krishna Iyer, the hunch of the Bench would rule. LBW decisions are not subject to review by the third umpire. Recall the case of J. Jayalalithaa, former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (2001). She was sentenced to three years imprisonment by a trial court on charges of corruption during her tenure as Chief Minister (1991-96). On her appeal the Madras High Court in November 2000 ordered her release on bail and “suspended the sentence of imprisonment”. After fresh elections were announced, she moved the High Court for an order of “stay of operation of the judgments”, obviously to avoid the disqualification from contesting the election on account of the conviction. The High Court dismissed the application with the following observation: “In this case, sentence of imprisonment has already been suspended. Under such circumstances, in my view, there may not be any disqualification for the petitioner to contest in the election” However, all her nominations were rejected on account of the conviction. But after her party was voted to power on May 14, 2001, she was sworn in as Chief Minister. This was challenged before the Supreme Court on the main ground that “the conviction not having been suspended”, she was disqualified. A five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court in B.R. Kapur v. State of Tamil Nadu (2001) examined whether the High Court had, in fact, ordered the suspension of the sentence when the learned judge said, “In this case, the sentence has already been suspended”. The Supreme Court held that the High Court had no power to suspend the order of conviction, because, “Under Section 389 an appellate court may order that the execution of the sentence or order appealed against be suspended…. It is not within the power of the appellate court to suspend the sentence; it can only suspend the execution of the sentence pending the disposal of appeal. The suspension of the execution of the sentence does not alter or affect the fact that the offender has been convicted of a grave offence and has attracted the sentence of imprisonment of not less than two years. The suspension of the execution of the sentences, therefore, does not remove the disqualification against the second respondent.” These words cannot be termed as “observations.” This was the law declared in the clearest terms by the Supreme Court on the interpretation of S.389 of the Code of Criminal Procedure binding on the nation under Article 141 of the Costitution — at least so one thought until Ravi Kant Patil’s decision was pronounced on November 14, 2006, by a three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice
Y.K. Sabharwal, who incidentally was a party to the Jayalalithaa verdict. The court held: “The decision in B.R. Kapur vs. State of Tamil Nadu, (2001) 7 SCC 231, will have no application as it was not a case of stay of conviction. In that case, only an order of suspension of sentence was made under Section 389 of the Code. In fact, the petitions seeking stay of the operation of the judgment in the criminal cases were dismissed by the High Court.” Narang’s case was not referred to in the Jayalalithaa case. However, when a larger Bench pronounces on the interpretation of a legal provision, all the contrary views are deemed to have been overruled. What is noteworthy is that the Jayalalithaa case was relied upon by Sidhu’s opponents, but the court found “the observations in
B.R. Kapur” not relevant. Often, a desire to do justice in a given case makes the court to wink at the strict rules. This happens everywhere and the consequence is confusion galore; on that the lawyers thrive. Justice Krishna Iyer, the celebrated judge of the Supreme Court, remarked after the bank nationalisation case — Cooper vs the Union of India (1970) overruled the 1950 decision in A.K. Gopalan’s case: “Poor Gopalan — if only he had come to the court after Cooper, he would have been a free man.” Ms Jayalalithas may have a better chance now.
The writer is Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India
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The rat race
A
friend once remarked that till the age of 50 or so, man lives in a state of illusion, rat race for economic survival, fight for supremacy, status and acquisition of wealth. After the age of 50 he lives in a state of disillusionment and may be inclined to shed excess baggage and material accumulations. Man fails to realise that life has a limited span. Man comes empty handed and leaves empty handed. Day follows night and night follows day and so the stands of life run away in the rat race, we call existence. Survival of the fittest and survival for existence are well known facts of life. The art of living happily, healthily and contentedly has been eroded. In the competition for supremacy there is a strain on man’s health and decline in his moral and spiritual values. Another facet of the social development is the growth of plastic goods, plastic hearts and plastic minds. There was a time when people tried to acquire things which had a solid permanency. Houses would be constructed to last hundreds of years; furniture used to be solid wood, meant for permanent fixation; the same applied to utensils, clothes and land etc., all bought to last as long as possible. With the modernisation of industry and rapid commercial growth, love for permanency and tradition has been replaced by the utilitarian approach and things of temporary, short lived value. People live, like birds nesting in the trees, in big tall blocks of cement and mortar, quite isolate and friendless from their neighbours. They change their residence several times during their lives; so too they change acquaintances, furniture, household goods, clothes, etc. Instant foods and drinks in plastic containers in fabricated supermarkets are the order of the day. We have developed minds immune and insensitive to the feelings of our neighbours, friends, relatives, society and the world at large. The “Haves” are completely unfamiliar with the state of the “Have-nots”. Society has become bifurcated into the very rich and the very poor and man has become diabolical in his ability to ignore the misery around him. Medicine is a noble profession. People of culture with inclination to serve the suffering mankind were enrolled in the profession. They were trained by teachers of character and learning. Now the picture has changed. Many people join the profession after paying hefty donation and that only to make a lot of money later on. Thus medicine has become a trade and education standards have deteriorated. Technology has dwarfed the instincts of serenity, charity and service. The medical services have become sick. It is ridiculous to expect sick medical institutions and their products to correct the sickness of humanity with loving and tender care. Old family ties are under strain in developing countries and almost broken in developed ones. Loneliness of retired old people is written on their faces. Because of inflation and economic reasons, even the retired persons are forced to work. Marriages are short lived with the partners constantly changing. Loss of security, companionship and love have their own repercussion on adults as well as on the children of such marriages. The rat race and plastic minds have landed man in a strange dilemma. Very few realise that these are the largest killers of life’s happiness, contentment, moral fibre and faith. Leaving aside nature’s misfortunes over which man has no control, man-made problems are dominantly ruining man’s peace of mind and threatening his very existence. God has provided enough for man who can also live if he so desires and decides to do so. In God’s world, there is enough for every one’s need but not enough for their
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Climate change can boost world economy: study Climate change will boost the global economy and dominate financial markets, according to a new report that challenges the conventional wisdom that global warming will have a devastating impact on economic growth. The report from Barclays Capital believes the need to increase energy capacity by 50 per cent by 2035, while simultaneously reducing dependence on hydrocarbons, will spark an “energy revolution” reminiscent of the technology revolution which led to the dot.com boom. “If ever the time were ripe for such an energy revolution, it is now,” said Tim Bond, global head of asset allocation at Barclays Capital, and author of the report. “And like all historical adoptions of general purpose technologies, the process should prove immensely stimulative to economic growth.” Mr Bond says that those who couch the climate change debate in terms of the cost to growth are underestimating the impact of an energy revolution. Last year’s Stern Review concluded that if temperatures rise by five degrees celsius, up to 10 per cent of global output could be lost. “All of the historical changes in energy supply - from dung to wood to coal to oil - were stimulative for the economy concerned. Every major technological change was accompanied or followed by faster economic growth.” he said. Like every revolution, there will be winners and losers, with the energy sector set to reap the biggest rewards. In the meantime, current uncertainty over US climate change policy may be deterring energy investment, the report says. Until public opinion forces the US administration to address the issue, energy scarcity will intensify and prices will continue to soar. Indeed, futures markets suggest that oil prices, already at levels last seen during the 1970s oil shock in inflation-adjusted terms, will keep rising due to a worsening supply/demand imbalance. The same is true for the other hydrocarbon, coal. “The impact of the replacement, restructuring and expansion of our energy infrastructure cannot be ignored,” Mr Bond said. “Just as the personal computer cannot be un-invented, neither can the impending energy revolution.” The report is contained in Barclays Capital’s annual Equity Gilt Study, which shows that equities were far and away the best-performing financial asset in 2006, as the stock market rally continued. Last year, money invested in stocks and shares grew by 11.4 per cent, still less than the 19 per cent growth seen in 2005. In contrast, money invested in gilts shrank by 4.4 per cent as rising inflation wiped out nominal returns. Corporate and index-link bonds also suffered, falling by 4.5 per cent and 2.1 per cent respectively. Cash returns edged up by 0.4 per cent. Barclays Capital calculated than an investor who put pounds sterling 100 in the stock market in 1899 would now be sitting on pounds sterling 25,022 if all income had been reinvested and adjusted for inflation. The same money invested in gilts would now be worth pounds sterling 323. If the pounds sterling 100 had been kept in cash, it would have swelled to just pounds sterling 286, it said.
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Never too late for artistic wisdom AT 76, Clint Eastwood is making the best films of his career. “Letters from Iwo Jima” has been nominated for four Academy Awards - including best picture and best director. (“Flags of Our Fathers,” which Eastwood also directed last year, received two nominations.) New York Times’ film critic A.O. Scott recently named him “the greatest living American filmmaker.” Such accolades are the latest development in Eastwood’s creative ascension. Two years ago, his “Million Dollar Baby” won best picture and best director, a repeat of his success with “Unforgiven” at age 62 - his first Oscar after making movies for more than 20 years. Sculptor Louise Bourgeois is 95. Later this year, she will be honored with a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern museum. Last November, her “Spider,” a sculpture she made at the age of 87, sold at auction for more than $4 million, the highest price ever paid for her work and among the highest ever paid for the work of a living sculptor. Is such creativity in old age rare? Eastwood and Bourgeois often are considered anomalies. Yet such career arcs - gradual improvements culminating in late achievements - account for many of the most important contributions to the arts. That society does not generally recognize this fact suggests that many are missing a key concept about creativity. We often presume creativity is the domain of youth, that great artists are young geniuses, brash and brilliant iconoclasts. Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jasper Johns all revolutionized their artistic disciplines in their teens or 20s. Picasso created the first cubist paintings at 25, and Welles made “Citizen Kane” at 25. These artists made dramatic, inspired discoveries based on important new ideas, which they often encapsulated in individual masterpieces. But there’s another path to artistic success, one that doesn’t rely on sudden flashes of insight but on the trial-and-error accumulation of knowledge that ultimately leads to novel manifestations of wisdom and judgment. This is Eastwood’s and Bourgeois’ path - and it was the path for a host of other artists: Titian and Rembrandt, Monet and Rodin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Mark Twain and Henry James, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few. Twain wrote “Tom Sawyer” at 41 and bettered it with “Huckleberry Finn” at 50; Wright completed Fallingwater at 72 and worked on the Guggenheim Museum until his death at 91. Paul Cezanne is the archetype of this kind of experimental innovator. After failing the entrance exam for the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he left Paris frustrated by his inability to compete with the precocious young artists who congregated in the city’s cafes. He formulated his artistic goal, of bringing solidity to Impressionism, only after the age of 30, then spent more than three decades in seclusion in his home in Aix, painstakingly developing his mature style trying to represent the beauty of his native Provence. Finally, in his 60s, he created the masterpieces that influenced every important artist of the next generation. Frost also matured slowly. He dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, and in his late 20s moved to a farm in rural New Hampshire. His poetic goal was to capture what he called the “sound of sense,” the words and cadence of his neighbors’ speech. He published his most famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” at 49. At 63, Frost reflected that young people have flashes of insight, but “it is later in the dark of life that you see forms, constellations. And it is the constellations that are philosophy.” These two creative life cycles stem from differences in goals and methods. “Conceptual innovators” aim to express new ideas or particular emotions. Their confidence and certainty allow them to achieve this quickly, often by radically breaking rules of disciplines they have just entered. In contrast, “experimental innovators” try to describe what they see or hear. Their careers are quests for styles that capture the complexity and richness of the world they live in. Perhaps the most important lesson is for experimental innovators themselves: Don’t give up. There’s time to do game-changing work after 30. By arrangement with
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US dilemma in dealing with terror THE reported offer of a ceasefire by one of the main Sunni insurgent groups will be received with interest in Washington. But there is scant chance it will be accepted by the Bush administration as a serious basis for a negotiated exit from Iraq - or that such talks are even practical amid the current chaos in the country. Feelers between the two sides are not new. Over the past two years, as the depth and scope of the insurgency grew, reports surfaced of back-channel contacts between US military representatives and the insurgents - including the “1920 Revolution Brigade”, a wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement that is behind the latest offer. Details of the talks, never officially confirmed by the US, were sketchy. But insurgent leaders were said to have been willing to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force, as the US forces pulled out. Then as now, however, Washington refused to accept anything resembling a fixed timetable for a pull-out. The goal of the US in these talks was to detach home-grown insurgents - the “deadenders” from the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein, as the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld once called them - from the foreign fighters who had joined the war against the occupiers, above all al-Qa’ida. But while Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qa’ida commander in Iraq, was killed by the US in June 2006, insurgent attacks on US troops have continued and, if anything, become more sophisticated. The new offer has some points acceptable to the US, notably the involvement of the UN and the Arab League in any deal. But the US would be required to sit down publicly with “terrorists”. Implicitly, too, it would be siding against the Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki, to which the Bush administration is still committed. The demands for the current Baghdad government to be disbanded, and past elections to be nullified, would moreover repudiate the only concrete achievements the Bush White House can claim in its efforts to bring “democracy” to Iraq. But the main problem is that the offer has been overtaken by events. The war may be more unpopular than ever here (two thirds of Americans now want the troops home). But the problem is less fighting against US and coalition troops than the country’s slide into a civil war in which the latter are virtual bystanders. The latest proposal talks of an American withdrawal “that would leave our people to live in peace”. But how that would happen, as Sunni radicals and suicide bombers continue to carry out attacks on Shia, seemingly with the express purpose of provoking civil conflict, is unclear. As December’s report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and the bleak assessment of the latest National Intelligence Estimate both made clear, an early US departure would only lead to an increase in sectarian violence. The insurgency is only one facet of a war that pits Sunnis against Shia and some Shia factions against each other.
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Inside Pakistan There has been a spate of suicide bombings in Pakistan for the past few days. The malaise, earlier confined to mainly the North-West Frontier Province, seems to have taken the entire country in its grip. Terrorists have proved that they can cause death and destruction even in areas like airports, as they did in Islamabad a few days back. As Babar Ayaz points out in his excellent article in Business Recorder, February 5: “Unfortunately, Pakistan is in the conflict zone and its rulers have sown a crop of cactus for the last many years. It’s now time to reap the harvest. For years Gen Zia-ul-Haq and his successors trained a large number of people in the name of Islamic jihad in Afghanistan and India. Together with the CIA, they took pride that they had created techno-guerrillas. Hundreds of people were trained in making and planting bombs.” Ayaz then says, “Now that the present establishment has realised that it is dangerous for the country to continue with the old policy of aiding the militant jihadi organisations to destabilise Afghanistan and India, the militants have turned their guns to Pakistan. This was inevitable.” The News (February 6) says: “If the recent string of suicide bombings is, according to a spokesman of the extremists quoted in a report in this newspaper, a response to President Musharraf’s policies, then this reaction is so insane that it is linked with neither politics nor religion.” The paper suggests, “The only option for the government remains the pursuit of its policy to subdue all forms of extremism, regardless of the accusations by the fanatics.” A Dawn editorial (February 8) has it that “a greater, often neglected task is to analyse the minds that plan such attacks and those who carry them out.. On a deeper analysis, it would appear that it is not the activist or the ‘agent’ --- the suicide bomber --- but the brains and the ‘ideologies’ behind the fiendish deeds that must be ferreted out, exposed and punished.” In the paper’s opinion, “The government’s fault lies in putting too much emphasis on force in dealing with terror and doing little to have heart-to-heart talks with those who think killing innocent people is the only option they have.”
For the past few years Basant celebrations have rarely been free from controversies over kite-flying. If this cultural festival leads to the generation of revenue in crores of rupees, it also results in deaths and injuries involving mostly youngsters because of the use of metallic strings by many kite-fliers. People have sought judicial intervention to prevent the loss of innocent lives, yet fatal accidents have been occurring almost every year. A few days back the Pakistani Punjab government approached the Supreme Court, which had banned all kinds of kite-flying activity last year, with a request to allow kite-flying for two days only. The matter was taken up by a Full Bench of the court, which again said “No”. According to Nawa-i-Waqt, the court observed, “Children get their necks slashed by metallic strings, and abuse is hurled on the courts”. The rules, however, are not meant to prevent kite-flying. The kite-fliers will only have to fulfil certain conditions. The provincial government has high stakes in Basant and, therefore, it has found its own way out to allow kite-flying despite the ruling by the Supreme Court. For most people in Lahore and elsewhere in Punjab there can be no Basant without kite-flying. Despite the efforts of those opposed to Basant, it is getting more and more popular every year. It is not without reason that even most of the ruling politicians and other important people prefer to stay in Lahore during Basant.
Gwadar port, a mixed blessing?
Finally, the Gwadar Port Authority and the Port of Singapore Authority have reached an agreement for the operation of this deep seaport, expected “to change the destiny of the people of Balochistan.” The Singapore company will invest $ 550 million in five years to make Gwadar, built in collaboration with China, like any other modern port in the world. Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz was quoted by The News as saying: “Gwadar port is gradually becoming a reality and will be formally opened by the end of March by the President of Pakistan when the first mega-ship will berth at this port.” If what he says proves to be true, there will be no dearth of jobs for the people of Balochistan. “We are training people so that they can get jobs here at the state-of-the-art port. Gwadar port will brighten up the future of this area and the region and people will see development”, Mr Aziz said. However, only time will tell how far the port comes up to the expectations of the people of Balochistan. They have been scared of it as they see in it an undeclared aim of bringing about a demographic change in the tribal province.
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