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Challenge of terror Back on track |
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Wizards of Oz
Handling Iran, N. Korea
The Ravan connection
DOCUMENT Australia bans the light bulb
Rice’s Palestine diplomacy
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Challenge of terror IF the terrorists who targeted Samjhauta Express snuffing out 68 lives thought that their deed will have India and Pakistan at each other’s throat, they could not be more wrong. Quite the contrary has happened. There seems to be a realisation that terror knows no boundaries and New Delhi and Islamabad have no option but to join hands to fight it. This time, visiting Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri’s words that there should be “meaningful cooperation” on terror has a sincere ring to it. It is imperative that they marshal their resources to launch a joint campaign. That will not be easy, considering that Pakistan itself has spawned, aided and abetted the terrorists. But, now that the dangers of this policy are all to evident, there is expectation that better sense will prevail. Pakistan’s National Assembly has demanded joint investigation. Clues may be indeed shared, but at the appropriate time and provided this helps the search for the culprits. Investigations are at a crucial stage. The culprits have both Indian and Pakistani blood on their hands. They should not get away with it because of mutual recrimination. Fortunately, there have been positive gestures galore, in terms of the public helping the aggrieved families and emergency visas being issued to friends and relatives of the victims. Some Pakistani publications have tried to lay the blame at India’s door. They have got the chance to do so mainly because the security on the train was woefully lacking. Sordid details of how several persons were issued tickets without even passports and visas and how those who came to the platform to see them off were allowed to enter the train freely are nothing less than shocking. As usual, correctives are being applied after the tragedy. One just hopes that lessons learnt from the mistakes will be used to actually tighten security in future, instead of doing so in a perfunctory manner and that too temporarily, as has happened in the past. The most important lesson, doubtless, is that India and Pakistan should stay resolutely on the peace track and join hands in fighting terrorism. |
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Back on track THE beleaguered Bathinda refinery may finally take off with the Luxembourg-based Mittal group agreeing to buy a 49 per cent stake in the project for Rs 3,300 crore. Reports of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal having an eye on the Guru Gobind Singh Refinery had been circulating for the past few weeks, but a formal announcement to this effect was made by Petroleum Minister Murli Deora in Delhi on Monday. The agreement will be signed when Mr Mittal visits the country on March 2. However, there is a small problem. The present limit on foreign direct investment (FDI) in public sector refineries is 26 per cent. The Petroleum Ministry is hopeful that the government would raise it to 49 per cent to facilitate the deal, and there is no reason why it should not be done. The project was conceived in the late 1990s when the Akalis were in power in Punjab, but the Amarinder Singh government renegotiated it and got some of the tax concessions rolled back, saving part of the revenue loss to the state. Though both the Akali Dal and the Congress have been claiming credit as well as political mileage for the project, neither of the parties could do anything to get the refinery going. Having already partnered with ONGC, Lakshmi Mittal is no stranger to the oil sector and HPCL deserves the ministerial pat it received for getting the first FDI in a public sector refinery. A year ago BP had pulled out of the project, which is being set up by Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd, saying it was not attractive enough. Global oil majors like Exxon, Total SA and Saudi Aramco had shown interest in the Bathinda refinery at one time or the other. But the talks remained inconclusive. Hopefully, now the project will move on a fast track. In the past eight years the project has made little headway, though HPCL has put some Rs 500 crore in the project. Due to cost escalation over the years, the Rs 9,000-crore refinery is now expected to be operational with an investment of Rs 16,700 crore. |
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Wizards of Oz WHEN England won the Ashes playing at home, practically everyone expected that the mighty team from Down Under would grab the urn right back when they next hosted their rivals. And sure enough, they did. And as the Aussies go down 3-0 to New Zealand and lose their No 1 rank as an ODI team, it is no surprise that we still have most people expecting them to lift the World Cup again. That is a measure of the Australian cricketing mystique, which has acquired a life of its own, and has led other teams to “play them on their reputation” rather than on actual form, as authoritative veterans have described it. Considering that New Zealand twice chased down 300-plus scores, questions will of course be asked about Australia’s current bowling strength. Glenn McGrath does look like he is showing his age, and the others did not quite make the cut in the series. The Aussies missed Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist, though Ponting himself has had a run of low scores. And the batting has not exactly been found wanting, as Mathew Hayden showed with his stunning 181 not out, the highest ever for an Australian. And even the South Africans seem a little wary about celebrating their new No 1 tag. They will of course hold on to the memory of how they chased down the Aussies’ 435 not so long ago, and teams like the West Indies will also be saying, that they beat the Aussies, and they can do it again in the Cup. And as for India – who got the hiding of their lives from the Aussies in the final last time – they will be backing themselves a bit as well. So even as cricket fans are waiting for the wounded tiger to charge out of its cave and reclaim its kill, there is no doubt that the Cup feels a little more open than it was before. |
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Put all your eggs in one basket, and — watch that basket.
—Mark Twain |
Handling Iran, N. Korea THE American misadventure in Iraq, which has exposed the limitations of its military power, has had far-reaching global consequences. Sensing global aversion to American unilateralism and its tendency to arbitrarily describe regimes it dislikes as "Rogue States," Russia and China are now challenging the US on its policies in Iran, North Korea and Myanmar. Russia and China recently vetoed American attempts to impose sanctions on Myanmar, with Security Council members noting that no neighbour of Myanmar shared the American perception that the policies of the Myanmar regime constituted a threat to peace and security. The Bush Administration's approach in dealing with the nuclear programmes of Iran and North Korea, however, is facing opposition not only from China and Russia. Even European NATO allies of the US are uneasy with the confrontational approach that some in Washington are advocating. During his recent visit to Iran, Mr Pranab Mukherjee made it clear that Iran would have to actively cooperate with IAEA verification efforts. He asserted that the IAEA should "play a central role in resolving outstanding issues". While Iran refuses to accept any preconditions before the commencement of any substantive dialogue, the US is determined to push for further international sanctions if Iran does not immediately comply with the provisions of UN Security Council Resolutions 1696 and 1737 and suspend its nuclear enrichment programme. This impasse can be overcome only if, as Mr Mukherjee noted, all sides demonstrate "flexibility and restraint". There are three major factors that prompt countries to develop nuclear weapons. These are fears of threats to their security, the quest for national prestige and, finally, a desire to break out of isolation and be taken note of by the international community. In the case of Iran, the driving force since the days of the Shah has been national prestige, as it cannot be seriously argued that any nuclear-armed country would attempt to invade it. The Iranian nuclear programme rattles Iran's Sunni Arab neighbours led by Saudi Arabia, which are now joining Egypt and Jordan to claim that they, like Iran, need nuclear energy. Israeli concerns of an Iranian nuclear threat are exaggerated, like Iranian propaganda that it faces an Israeli "threat". The Iranians know that any nuclear misadventure against Israel will involve a retaliation that will totally destroy their country. Unfortunately, the posturing and inflammatory rhetoric of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad about Israel have only raised regional tensions. People in Iran, however, feel that the US is determined to humiliate them and treat them like a "second class nation" by denying them the right to enrich uranium. They argue that the NPT does not deprive any country of its rights to uranium enrichment merely because it is said to have violated safeguards obligations. Russia has strategic interests in Iran, as a supplier of sophisticated military hardware and nuclear power plants and as a major power in global energy cooperation. China is emerging as a major importer of Iranian natural gas. Having seen the impact of American military adventurism in Iraq, the Europeans do not wish to see the oil-rich Persian Gulf destabilised by any American or Israeli military action against Iran. In these circumstances, the Security Council will move cautiously on any ratcheting up of UN sanctions on Iran. Moreover, if Iran does agree to give up its enrichment programme, would it not be useful to consider an arrangement under which its uranium-enrichment programme is undertaken as a joint collaboration and joint management project with the IAEA or an IAEA member-state, with provisions that enrichment will not go to levels which could result in the production of weapons grade uranium? Iran's Arab neighbours who are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council proposed at their Doha Summit that the Gulf should be kept as a zone free of weapons of mass destruction. Efforts should be made to persuade Iran to respond positively to this proposal of its Arab neighbours and agree to the establishment of an internationally guaranteed, denuclearised Gulf region. The US has found that threats did not deter the DPRK (North Korea) from pursuing its nuclear ambitions. The assertion that North Korea was a part of an "Axis of Evil" by President Bush led the North Koreans, who appear to revel in international isolation, to proclaim in February 2005, that they "had manufactured nuclear weapons for self-defence to cope with the Bush Administration's policy of isolating and crushing the DPRK". This defiance was reiterated when North Korea tested a nuclear weapon on October 9, 2006. Given the efforts that South Korea had made to build confidence and enhance cooperation with North Korea and the strength of North Korea's armed forces, a military response to North Korea's nuclear weapons programme can be ruled out. The Russians believe that punitive sanctions against North Korea would only lead to further acts of North Korean defiance. China recognises that such a development will cause Japan to review its nuclear options. A nuclear-armed Japan would be more aggressive in responding to attempts to isolate and contain it by constant Chinese reminders of Japan's military excesses during World War II. In these circumstances, China is sparing no effort to use the six-party talks comprising North and South Koreas, Japan, the US, Russia and China to evolve a framework for eventual denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. The February 13 Beijing statement initially involves a freeze on plutonium production and a resumption of IAEA inspections linked to US guarantees of energy supplies to North Korea. The sequencing and implementation of this process, which is ultimately leading to denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, will be prolonged and contentious. The North Koreans are unlikely to give up their nuclear weapons in a hurry and in any case not before they have obtained diplomatic recognition, security guarantees and economic and energy assistance from the US and others. Both the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programmes will remain contentious and difficult issues in the coming years. The US appears to be ready to ignore Pakistani involvement in the nuclear programmes of both Iran and North Korea. But can this selective policy address key issues like the type of weapons designs that the so-called "A.Q. Khan network" may have provided to these countries, or the important issue of whether A.Q. Khan was a "Lone Ranger," or if he operated with the approval of Pakistan's military establishment. Finally, given China's attempts to contain Japan in Northeast and Southeast Asia and India in South Asia, would it not be desirable to forge a wider dialogue and partnership with Japan, the US and other democracies in the Asia-Pacific region?n
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The Ravan connection
IF it were not the machinations of a scheming aunt, trying to take control of whatever little property that was left, me and my husband would have never managed to visit his ancestral home in Bisrak, a village in the backyard of Noida and Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh where all the hectic real-estate activity is taking place these days. Well, not so long back, my husband’s family owned substantial landed property in the village, which was disposed of systematically and methodically by different relatives, including the scheming aunt. My husband had not been in touch with the proceeding there, largely due to the nature of his job that had seen him all over the countryside in the past 25 years. Anyway, we went there, quite apprehensive and scared, thanks to the stories narrated by the scheming aunt on how ruthless people would be lurking in the bushes to do away with us if we dared to step a foot inside the village. After all, it was the matter of property, she warned. Whatever the reason, we did not have any encounter with any of such characters. But what an aunt (not the scheming one this time) told me about Bisrak village something that will now ensure that the next time I go there, I will also take along my son and daughter as well. Bisrak happens to be the village of Rishi Visarwa, father of the scholar king Ravan, thereby the name Bisrak that the village now has. Some villagers also refer to him as Bishweshwar. Anyway, the aunt also informed us that my husband’s forefathers belonged to the lineage of Rishi Visarva, making him and all his relatives distant cousins of Ravan. I passed on this information to my 15-year-old son, who was suitably shocked. After all, mythological movies and the mega TV serial Ramayan have ensured that most of us do not care much for the Lanka king, known more for kidnapping Sita than anything else. But whatever shortcomings or flaws Ravan might have had, the fact is there has been no scholar or a devotee of Shiv greater than Ravan. While digging, “shivlings” have been found on several occasions in and around the village. Locals say that there are only lingas around the village and there are hardly any other temple belonging to any other deity. More importantly, Bisrak also does not burn the effigy of Ravan on Dasehra. The Bisrak Shiva temple is believed to have been worshipped by Ravan and the linga is believed to go deeper than 30 feet. The Bisrak Shiva has been quite popular among politician, including former Prime Minister Chandreshekhar and dacoit queen Phoolan Devi. The bottom line therefore is that it is quite OK to have the Ravan link, I told my son. In these days of science and fast communication, it is better to have a great scholar as a forefather, who also flew an airplane, Pushpak (though said to be snatched from his half-brother Kuber) in those faraway
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DOCUMENT THE situation of children has remained vulnerable with the lack of effective programmes against child
labour, recruitment as child soldiers, sexual violence against the girl child and deplorable conditions of juveniles in conflict with the law. According to the 2001 census data of the government of India, there were 1,26,66,377 child labourers across the country with 19,27,997 in Uttar Pradesh alone, followed by Andhra Pradesh with 13,63,339, Rajasthan with 12,62,570, Bihar with 11,17,500, and Madhya Pradesh with 10,65,259. Of the total of 604 districts across the country, only 271 districts were covered by the government’s rehabilitation process. While 250 districts were covered under the National Child Labour Project and 21 districts under the Indo-US Child Labour Project, the child labourers in rest of the districts were left to fend for themselves. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded a total of 3,518 cases of kidnapping and abduction of children during 2005. It also recorded 28 cases of buying of girls and 50 cases of selling of girls for prostitution during 2005. The figures of the NCRB, however, do not reflect the reality. In Jammu and Kashmir, while the security forces used children as human shields in the guise of taking them as guide during raids and combing operations, the armed opposition groups recruited children as combatants. The state government of Chhattisgarh earned notoriety for recruiting Adivasi children as Special Police Officers to fight with the Naxalites. The Naxalites too have been using a large number of children as combatants. Over the past 17 years of armed conflict, about 40,000 children were reportedly orphaned in Jammu and Kashmir. According to the Iqbal Memorial Trust, which has been reportedly helping the orphans through its social service
programme, “Sakhawat Centre”, these orphaned children have been facing miserable conditions. The State Government of Jammu and Kashmir failed to provide any help to the orphaned children except a monthly stipend of Rs 200/- sent to each by post. The population of destitute children kept on increasing each year. However, the J&K Government ran only nine male (Baal Ashram) and five female (nari niketan) homes across Kashmir having a total inmates population of 600. Even these 14 destitute homes were not managed properly and most of them did not have the basic facilities. Barring the female-homes where the grown up inmates take care of kitchen, cleanliness and other basic tasks, the male homes were reportedly in shambles almost everywhere. According to Annual Report 2005 of the National Crime Records Bureau, a total of 4, 026 cases of child rape were recorded during 2005. Many of the cases of child rape were committed by law enforcement personnel. Law enforcement officials often try to shield the guilty, especially if the accused are government servants. On 1 January 2005, two persons, including a Naib Tehsildar of the state government posted at Palwal town in Faridabad district of Haryana, reportedly abducted a 15-year-old girl student of Government Girls School, Palwal. In her statement, the victim reportedly claimed that her captors raped her and the medical examination also confirmed rape. The police officials allegedly forced the victim to change her statement. On 6 January 2005, lawyers staged a demonstration alleging that a senior police official posted at Palwal called the victim to the police station on the pretext of personally hearing her and thrashed and forced her to change her statement. Despite the enactment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act in 2000, by and large, the Act remained unimplemented. Many states did not establish adequate number of Juvenile Justice Boards as provided under the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000. Proceeding in a Public Interest Litigation petition on 15 July 2005, a division bench of the Jharkhand High Court directed the government to speed up the process of constituting the Juvenile Justice Boards to look after the welfare of juveniles lodged in the different remand homes of the state. Children were also subjected to torture by the law enforcement personnel. In February 2005, a 12-year-old boy was allegedly tortured in police custody by N Islam, Officer-in-Charge of Hallydiganj police outpost in West Garo Hills district of Meghalaya without any reason. The boy reportedly sustained a fracture in his right leg due to the beating. Salwinder Singh, Sub-Inspector of Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) of Amritsar, Punjab, was suspended for giving electric shocks to 10-year-old Sumit, a student of Class IV in January 2005. The boy was released after his father allegedly handed over a cheque of Rs 2.35 lakh - signed under coercion - to the Sub-Inspector. Sub-Inspector Singh was later suspended. Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda ordered a probe after a television news channel showed a clip of a 14-year-old boy being tortured by the police at the CIA police station in Panchkula on 13 March 2005. The boy was accused of theft from the Mansa Devi temple. He was also hung upside down from a tree as punishment. In January 2005, a city court rejected the bail plea of Delhi Police Sub Inspector Parveen Kumar, who was accused of assaulting a boy by injecting petrol and thinner into his rectum for refusing to pay Rs 50,000 as bribe for his release at Ambedkar Nagar Police station in Delhi on the intervening night of 13 and 14 June 2004. India has been given lowest negative ranking because of the existence of institutional checks and balances. There were consistent reports of gross human rights violations in India but the democratic institutions remained intact and
operational. Excerpted from the SAARC Human Rights Report 2006, Asian Centre for Human Rights, New Delhi
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Australia bans the light bulb Q. How many Australians does it take to change all the light bulbs? A. One – Prime Minister John Howard.After almost a decade as a pariah in the battle against global warming because of its refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, Australia scored an environmental first yesterday by becoming the only large economy to ban the traditional incandescent lightbulb. In a move that environmentalists hope will spark a similar move in Britain, the government Down Under said the sale of all incandescent bulbs will be phased out by 2010 and replaced with low-energy versions to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The enforced switch to new high-efficiency fluorescent bulbs will cut Australia’s carbon emissions by four million tons by 2012 and reduce domestic power bills by up to two-thirds, the Environment Minister, Bill Turnbull, claimed. Mr Turnbull, whose right-of-centre government is a recent convert to action on global warming, said: “It’s a little thing but it’s a massive change. If the whole world switches to these bulbs today we would reduce our consumption of electricity by an amount equal to five times Australia’s annual consumption of electricity.” The initiative follows a study by the International Energy Agency last year which found that a global switch to fluorescent bulbs would prevent 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the world’s atmosphere over the next 25 years. It would also save £1,300 billion in energy costs. Traditional incandescent bulbs, based on the 19th-century designs of Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, produce light by passing electricity through a thin wire filament. They are inefficient because up to 90 per cent of the energy is wasted in the form of heat. The new generation of compact fluorescent bulbs are more expensive that the incandescent version but use only 20 per cent of the power to produce the same amount of light. Manufacturers say economies of scale mean they will soon be comparable in price to traditional bulbs and last much longer. Artificial light accounts for almost 20 per cent of world’s electricity consumption, significantly more than the output of all nuclear power stations in the world. Overall, lighting generates 1.9 billion tons of carbon a year, about three-quarters of the amount produced by all cars on the planet. Australia is the first major economy to ban incandescent bulbs, although the American state of California is also considering a similar move. But it is not first time a country has made an enforced switch to energy-efficient lighting: Cuba launched a similar scheme two years ago. In Britain, the Government has yet to move far beyond a symbolic gesture to low-energy lighting by Tony Blair when he ordered the bulb in the lamp outside Number 10 to be changed to a fluorescent one. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it was working within a European Union scheme to promote the use of low-energy products within the home. The reductions in greenhouse emissions from moving to low-energy bulbs are nonetheless small. The four million tons of CO2 that the Australian government expects to save must be compared with the 565 million tons that it produces annually. Despite the recent conversion of the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to environmental issues, he has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Mr Howard said the deal would do too much damage to Australia’s coal-based energy production. But campaigners welcomed the ban on incandescent bulbs as one of a number of concrete measures which all countries, including Britain, should be taking as part of their response to global warming. Friends of the Earth (FoE) said a wholesale conversion to fluorescent bulbs would cut UK electricity consumption by 2 per cent – equivalent to a large power station. Nick Rau, FoE’s energy campaigner, said: “We would certainly like to see Britain follow the Australian example. There is no magic bullet for global warming and switching to low-energy bulbs is one significant step among many that we would like to see the Government take.” The failure to achieve a global swap from incandescent to fluorescent bulbs has been a source of frustration and bemusement to experts and campaigners. The Lighting Industry Federation in Britain estimates that the majority of lights in this country still use inefficient bulbs despite an average reduction of 30 per cent in electricity bills from using low-energy bulbs. By arrangement with
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Rice’s Palestine diplomacy
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had recently taken home a three-foot stack of reports written by the State Department historian on previous efforts by the United States to forge Middle East peace. Rice had read memoirs by her predecessors, but as she embarked on her own effort to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she decided she needed to study a day-by-day diplomatic narrative of what had gone wrong in the past. Her conclusion: A diplomat needs to quietly build support behind the scenes in informal talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, seeking the right combination of leverage and circumstance to make an impact. In her mind, Rice and her aides say, the moment is now. But the lacklustre outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian summit brokered by Rice in Jerusalem on Monday suggests her optimism may be misplaced. Diplomats and Middle East experts applaud her willingness to invest her prestige in trying to solve an intractable problem, but some wonder whether her efforts are six years too late. Rice is pushing the Israelis and Palestinians to sketch the contours of a Palestinian state, much as President Clinton did before he left office. But diplomats say the prospects have dimmed with years of violence, weak leadership in both camps and the rise of the militant group Hamas, which is dedicated to Israel’s destruction and won Palestinian legislative elections last year. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday described the summit as “tense and difficult,” while the Israeli government ruled out discussions on the diplomatic endgame if Abbas goes through with plans to form a unity government with Hamas. Rice’s confidence reflects her central role in developing and implementing U.S. policy toward the conflict for the past six years. “I think on paper there was a lot that was close” in 2000, Rice said last month. “But the underlying circumstances are better now.” The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was never going to accept a peace deal, Rice argues, but he has been replaced by Abbas. She adds that the Likud Party was not going to support Clinton’s proposals, but now much of the Israeli right accepts the idea of a Palestinian state after a Likud-led government, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, took the dramatic step of withdrawing from Gaza. “The breadth of the Israeli political system that is actually united behind a two-state solution is very different than in 2000,” Rice said. One Rice aide conceded there is “diplomatic risk” to Rice forging ahead, but European officials are thrilled that she is now trying ideas they have long urged. A senior European official said Tuesday that just the fact that Rice did not cancel the meeting in the face of Israeli resistance was a signal, because the administration has had a pattern of halting peace efforts at the first sign of trouble.
By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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Love always unites. It does not divide.
— Mother Teresa Make everyday of your life an effort to reach God. Make all your actions selfless and caring towards others. Each good deed is a step towards heaven. So keep adding up your good deeds. — The Buddha God loves those who do good. — The Koran Where is the real Brahmin today, content with a bare living and giving all his time to study and teaching?. — Mahatma Gandhi |
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