 |
|
Quattrocchi’s arrest UK troop pullback |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Bill to help elders
Who bothers about Parliament?
Humour in misprint
The dangerous dilution of memories United colours of capitalism Chatterati
|
Quattrocchi’s arrest Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi had left India in 1993 at the height of the probe into the Bofors scandal. Ever since, he has been proving to be elusive, despite the red-corner notice issued in 1997. No wonder, his arrest in Argentina has enlivened the political scene. He is the prime accused alleged to have received kickbacks from the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors for the contract to sell Howitzer guns to the Indian army. The sum of Rs 64 crore involved in the scandal may appear to be small change today, but the ghost of Bofors has been haunting the Congress in general and the Gandhi family in particular all along and his extradition will go a long way in exorcising it. But the circumstances of the arrest are intriguing. It took place on February 6, but was announced on February 23 — full 17 days later. Could it be that the Argentine authorities took so long to inform the CBI? On February 12, the CBI had informed the Supreme Court, which was hearing a PIL on the government’s lacklustre approach in tracing Quattrocchi, that it had no clue about his whereabouts. The court had given it four weeks to submit a detailed report of its progress. The record of the investigating agency in nabbing Quattrocchi has been abysmal. Last year, a British bank defroze the bank account of the Italian businessman after the agency failed to provide any evidence to the British Crown Prosecution Service. Earlier too, Quattrocchi had gone missing after a Malaysian lower court rejected the extradition request of India and allowed him to travel abroad in 2002. How the CBI fares this time will be watched with a lot of interest. The formal extradition request has to be presented within 30 days. That means that now it has only about 10 days. The clock is ticking. Will the CBI redeem itself or will it again proceed in the hesitant manner which gives credence to the belief in some quarters that it is more interested in providing as long a rope to the suspect as possible?
|
|
UK troop pullback The British decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from its 7,150-strong contingent in Iraq indicates that it can no longer ignore its domestic political and security compulsions. Prime Minister Tony Blair says that “Basra is how we want it to be …” and hence no need for the second largest contingent sent by a member of the “coalition of the willing” to remain there. This, in fact, indicates his undeclared admission that the worsening ethnic crisis in Iraq cannot be handled successfully by foreign forces. Moreover, he cannot afford to allow the Iraq factor to further erode the support base of his Labour Party, already feeling uncomfortable because of the Blair government’s involvement in a war which remains unjustifiable. Most Britons are unable to understand why they should remain engaged in a civil war-like situation which is only complicating the security scenario at home. Perhaps, most of the 22 countries still having their fighters in Iraq are looking for an exit route. South Korea and Denmark have already decided to reduce their troops in the coming few months. A similar decision by Lithuania and some other countries is expected anytime now. But it was Spain which first saw the futility of participating in the Iraq regime-change project, though only after the ruling party there suffered the loss of power. The foreign troop withdrawals, though in small doses, clearly show that what remains in Iraq is a coalition of the unwilling. Despite President Bush remaining firm on increasing the US troop strength there, the alliance he had built up is gradually weakening. He is facing opposition to his Iraq plan not only from Americans but also from Iraqis and others in West Asia. His compulsions are formidable. The US cannot afford to leave Iraq to the Iraqis at this stage when its Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt want it to remain militarily engaged. The Sunni regimes fear a social upheaval in the region in the absence of the coalition forces in Iraq, as Baghdad’s largely Shia administration may not be able to control the many-sided crisis. Thus, under the circumstances what suits Britain is not in the larger US interest.
|
|
Bill to help elders The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens’ Bill, cleared by the Union Cabinet last Thursday, is a progressive piece of legislation. To be introduced in the current session of Parliament, it seeks to provide effective care and protection to both parents and the elderly as also a speedy and inexpensive legal framework to grant maintenance to senior citizens. In the light of increasing cases of neglect of parents once they will their property to their offspring, the Bill provides for a person to be disinherited if he fails in taking care of his elders. Those found wanting in their duty towards their parents, particularly those with no source of income, may be jailed and fined. As part of the redressal system, tribunals will be set up in every sub-division. Undoubtedly, the Bill was long overdue. While the Bill is expected to come to the rescue of the aged, the state cannot absolve itself of its primary responsibility for providing them comprehensive social security. The elderly population in the country has grown manifold since 1947. For instance, while only 19 million people were 60 plus in 1947, today this figure has risen to nearly 80 million. Nearly 90 per cent of the elderly have no form of social security and over 40 per cent live below the poverty line. There is also the problem of widows and destitutes. Even though the problems of the aged have multiplied over the years, the Centre woke up to the reality very late. It was only in 1999 that it framed some guidelines to provide financial security, healthcare, shelter and protection to the country’s ageing population. However, there is no political will on the part of the Centre and the states to allocate adequate funds to help the elderly. This has led to tardy implementation of schemes aimed at improving the welfare of senior citizens.
|
|
Better by far you should forget and smile/Than you should remember and be sad. —
Christina Rossetti |
Who bothers about Parliament?
HE is exasperated. He says so. Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee feels helpless for not being able to persuade political parties to keep Parliament as Parliament. Some have, he says with regret, converted it into a place to get even. It is a platform which the rowdy or the foul-mouth use to have the spotlight on them. They are only a few, but the media latches on to them, the Speaker says with a tinge of disappointment in his voice. How does he save the image of Parliament or, for that matter, the parliamentary democratic system is his predicament? It is a difficult proposition when the political scene reflects sharp division and when national issues have been
marginalised. On top of it, there is no consensus on any subject. Yet, before every Parliament session, the Speaker invites senior journalists and editors to ask them for their suggestion to improve things. He covers the same ground with leaders of political parties. But he comes a cropper because they say nothing worthwhile. Is there anyone bothered about Parliament, the Speaker wonders? What torments him the most is the low opinion that the parliamentary system has come to acquire. The public, he believes, considers the Parliament sittings a waste of time and the members’ emoluments a drain on the exchequer. He recalls with remorse the observation by a young girl that she would never join politics because it lacked honesty and integrity. “Those words sear me all the time,” says Chatterjee while recalling the visit of a youth delegation which included that girl. The purpose of his exercise is to awaken the media to its duty to stall the attacks on the parliamentary democratic system. “Tell me if there is a better system,” asks the Speaker. “You have an obligation to sustain faith in it.” He concedes that as many as 45 members in the Lok Sabha are “under cloud”, but his complaint is that the media highlights them or what they say, ignoring the quiet and honest work the rest 500 members put in. Responsible speeches remain unreported, says
Chatterjee, but the ones which disturb the proceedings in the House hit the headlines. I recall my own experience as a Rajya Sabha member. Those who burnt midnight oil to prepare their speech did not get even a line in the Press. In comparison, those who came into the well of the House received all the prominence. I have not known in my journalistic career of 40 years any Speaker who has made so much effort to run the House amicably as Chatterjee with so little result. Chatterjee is a communist. But he has never allowed his ideology to colour his objectivity and impartiality in the House. That he has not succeeded does not mean that he has failed. What he does not realise is that it is the media which has changed. Serious stories, which include the Parliament proceedings, do not make the grade. The media has come to believe that people do not want to read anything which makes them think. Today, the print media is suffering from a mad disease which has played havoc with our newspapers. It is “the tabloid syndrome.” You open any paper in the morning the pages are full of pictures of young models, actors and actresses in various stages of dishabille. There are pages and pages on these models, actresses, supermodels, actors and designers — people you have not even heard the names of — garnished with “information” on what they love to eat, what kind of dress they like best, what they do when they relax, what they think of love and sex and such trivia. The special city pages of the papers look like a cross between a cheap fashion journal and a puerile film magazine full of gossip and crude colour pictures. A newspaper is not a dustbin for dumping drivel, film gossip and other trivia. It must have news. It must have information. It must educate the public about events with background information and editorial comments. One of the reasons why it has happened is people who run the newspapers in our country now think that a newspaper is just like any other commodity. It should be nicely packaged because their idea of “nice packaging means filling the papers with semi-nude colour pictures of models and actresses and trash. This shallow, unthinking attitude gets reflected even in the news stories and articles that are carried in the papers. Reporters do not always cross-check the information they get. They often write one-sided versions of events and about people who do not matter — absolute non-entities. Often good stories are not followed up properly. Plated stories make the front page. Even factual information given in a newspaper is often incorrect. Many years ago Parliament was the biggest news. Both Houses were covered extensively with a weekly round-up of highlights of the proceedings. Now the Press does not devote more than a column. TV networks pay hardly any attention. The media is more star-oriented, whether he or she is in Parliament or on the screen. One TV network has practically nothing else except what actors do while shooting or doing other odd jobs. I recall when I was in the Rajya
Sabha, the then chairman Krishna Kant called a meeting of editors to discuss how to project the proceedings of the House in the media. One, very few turned up and, two, they were cursory in their observation. One editor suggested to throw open to the media the meetings of parliamentary committees. For that Krishna Kant had to consult the Lok Sabha Speaker. The proposal is beginning to take shape as Chatterjee says. But his loud thinking reveals that members are afraid lest the frank testimony by witnesses and the uninhibited discussions at the committee should be retarded because of the media’s presence. This is an unfounded fear since the verbatim proceedings are placed on the table of the House when the committee report is presented. Despite the Lok Sabha Speaker’s exhortations, the media has only a secondary role to play. The first is that of members. The Speaker has to ensure that they do not disturb the House proceedings. If he were to introduce the dictum of “no work, no pay,” things might improve. On the day when there is no business, members should not get their daily allowance. In the Rajya
Sabha, I had my allowance deducted when the daily House bulletin said there was no business transacted. Such a practice, if introduced in both Houses, may pay
dividends.
|
Humour in misprint
Newspapers inform, enlighten, and help mould public opinion. But they also amuse, quite often, inadvertently, through the devil that lurks in the print-room. The presence of presiding deities (chief-subs) has not been able to banish the devil, which according to the Websters dictionary, means “apprentice” in print shop. This “apprentice” fears that he will not get his due from ever-vigilant chiefs and subs. Hence, he always looks for opportunity to spread his inky foulness. He does succeed, at times. The mischief-monger, aptly called printer’s devil, sneaks into the most unexpected nooks and corners of the newspaper. Once, it get into a wedding report — the married couple appeared as harried couple. Similar incursions do take place. An army general was given a farewell party. The report described him as “a battle scarred strong man.” Our dear devil got into his act and it appeared as “bottle-scarred strong man.” The irate general asked for a correction. The newspaper, eager to undo the error, agreed. The correction now appeared as “battle-scared.” A lifestyle reporter wrote: nothing gives a greater variety to a house than a few undraped windows. It appeared: nothing gives a house greater variety than a few undraped widows! The cost of living has shot up so high that people find it hard to make two ends meet appeared as: the cost of loving has shot up so high that people find it hard to make their two ends meet! Misprints are a chronic problem which newspapers fight daily, never entirely successfully. A friend in need is a friend indeed, appeared as: a friend in need is a friend indeed! “She was distinguished for charity above all ladies in the town” was the original sentence in the report. A vigilant editor (Bret Harte) noticed that it had been changed to chastity. He struck out the offendings and put a question mark in the margin. Next morning, he was horrified at what he saw: “She was distinguished for chastity(?) above all ladies of the
town.” |
The dangerous dilution of memories Maurice Papon, lowered into his grave along with his precious Legion d’honneur last week, proved what many Arabs have long suspected but generally refuse to acknowledge: that bureaucrats and racists and others who worked for Hitler regarded all Semitic people as their enemies and that – had Hitler’s armies reached the Middle East – they would ultimately have found a “final solution” to the “Arab question”, just as they did for the Jews of Europe. Papon’s responsibility for the 1942 arrest and deportation of 1,600 Jews in and around Bordeaux – 223 children among them, all shipped off to the Drancy camp and then to Auschwitz – was proved without the proverbial shadow of a doubt at his 1998 trial. Less clear were the exact number of Algerians murdered by his police force in Paris and hurled into the Seine in 1961. Of course, he was not tried for this lesser but equally unscrupulous crime. He organised the police repression of the independence demonstration by 40,000 Algerians; in the cities of Algiers and Oran and Blida and other areas of modern-day Algeria where this atrocity festers on among elderly relatives, they say that up to 400 Algerians were massacred by Papon’s flics. Some historians suggest 250. Papon preferred to claim that only two were killed – in much the same way as he later insisted at his trial that he did not know the fate of the Jews he dispatched so efficiently to Drancy and onwards to Poland. The same was always claimed of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He it was who fled to Iraq during the Second World War, escaped again after the British crushed the pro-Axis government that had taken power in Baghdad and who ended up in Nazi Berlin, shaking hands with Hitler and working enthusiastically for the Third Reich’s propaganda machine. From Hitler, he obtained a promise that “when we (the Germans) have arrived at the southern Caucasus, then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived – and you can rely on my word.” Haj Amin gratefully recorded how Hitler insisted that the “Jewish problem” would be solved “step by step” and that he, Haj Amin, would be “leader of the Arabs” after entering Egypt and then Palestine with the Italian army. More than a decade ago, I spent much time researching the life of Haj Amin and met members of his surviving family. I even met the last – now dead – survivor of his Berlin entourage who believed that Haj Amin did not know the fate of the Jews. To this day, I don’t believe this. In July, 1943, when the extermination camps were already in operation in Poland, he was complaining to the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that rather than allow Europe’s Jews to emigrate to Palestine, “if there are reasons which make their removal (sic) necessary, it would be essential and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control (sic again!) as, for example, Poland...”. Haj Amin went on to encourage Bosnian Muslims to join the SS Hanjar division, a fact which Serbia’s bloodthirsty militiamen never failed to remind me when I covered their own fascist-style war against the Muslims of the Drina Valley in the early 1990s. Three months before he died, the old man met in Beirut one of Yasser Arafat’s lieutenants, Abu Iyad, who later wrote of their meeting: “Haj Amin believed that the Axis powers would win the war and would then grant independence to (British mandate) Palestine... I pointed out to him that such illusions were based on a rather naive calculation, since Hitler had graded the Arabs 14th after the Jews in his hierarchy of races. Had Germany won, the regime which it would have imposed on the Palestinian Arabs would have been far more cruel than that which they had known during the time of British rule.” Haj Amin’s granddaughter Alia also told me of his later conclusions. “He said that after the Jews, the Germans would destroy the Arabs – he knew this. But what could he do?” All this came back to me last week when I received a remarkable letter from Toulouse in my Beirut mailbag. It was a response to an article I wrote last year about Irene Nemirovsky, whose magnificent, Tolstoyan novel of the Nazi occupation of France was unfinished when Irene was herself sent to Drancy and on to the crematoria of Auschwitz. The letter, in slightly ungrammatical English, was written by Nemirovsky’s only surviving daughter, Denise Epstein, and I hope she will not mind if I quote from it: “Allow me to present myself: I am the girl of Irene Nemirovsky ... and I wanted to thank you for having spoken so well about my mother. This book caused a certain awakening of the consciences undoubtedly but according to what you teach me from the attitude of the French embassy when one evokes the memory of the Jewish children assassinated with the complicity of the authorities of the time, I realize that the memory is really diluted very easily and which that opens the door with other massacres innocent whatever their origin. “It is thus with emotion and gratitude that I want to send this small message to you. I am now 77 years old and I nevertheless live the every day with the weight of this past on the shoulders, softened by happiness to see reviving my parents, and at the same time as them, I hope to make revive all those of which nobody any more speaks. PS: Sorry for my very bad English!” It would be hard to find more moving words than these, a conscious belief that the dead can be recalled in their own words along with that immensely generous remembrance of other innocents who have died in other massacres. And that extraordinary image of the “dilution of memory” carries its own message. This, of course, is what Haj Amin suffered from. Papon, too, I imagine, before they buried the terrible old man last week. By arrangement with
|
|
United colours of capitalism What is the elephant in all our rooms? The global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat, even in old democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it. And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted for salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx is turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, because some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalized capitalism. His prescription failed, but his description was prescient. What, after all, are the big ideological alternatives? Hugo Chavez’s “21st century socialism” still looks like, at most, a regional phenomenon best practiced in oil-rich states. Islamism – billed as democratic capitalism’s great competitor in a new ideological struggle – offers no alternative economic system (aside from the peculiarities of Islamic finance) and does not appeal beyond the Muslim umma. Most anti-globalists are better at pointing out the failings of global capitalism than they are at suggesting systemic alternatives. “Capitalism should be replaced by something nicer,” read a placard at a May Day demonstration in London a few years back. Of course, there’s a question of definition here. Is what Russian or Chinese state-owned companies do really capitalism? Isn’t private ownership the essence of capitalism? Surely what we have across Europe are multiple varieties of capitalism, from more liberal market economies like Britain and Ireland to more coordinated “stakeholder” economies like Germany. In Russia and China, there’s a spectrum from state ownership to private ownership. Considerations other than maximizing profit play a part in the decision-making of state-controlled companies, but they too operate in national and international markets and increasingly speak the language of global capitalism. China’s “Leninist capitalism” is a big borderline case, but the crab-like movement of its companies toward more rather than less capitalist behavior is clearer than any movement of its state toward democracy. Does the lack of any clear ideological alternative mean that capitalism’s triumph is secure? Far from it. For a start, the history of capitalism hardly supports the view that it is an automatically self-correcting system. As George Soros (who should know) points out, global markets are more than ever constantly out of equilibrium – and teetering on the edge of a larger disequilibrium. Again and again, capitalism has needed the visible hands of political, fiscal and legal correction to complement the invisible hand of the market. And the bigger it gets, the harder it can fall. Then there is inequality. One feature of globalised capitalism seems to be that it rewards its high performers disproportionately. What will be the political effects of having a small group of super-rich people in China, Russia and India or other countries where the majority are super-poor? In more developed economies, such as Britain and the U.S., a reasonably well-off middle class, with a slowly improving personal standard of living, may be less bothered by the super-rich. But if a lot of middle-class people begin to feel that they are personally losing out as a few fund managers get stinking rich and jobs are outsourced to India, you might have a backlash. Above all, though, there is the inescapable dilemma that this planet cannot sustain 6.5 billion people living like today’s middle-class in its rich north. In just a few decades, we would use up fossil fuels that took about 400 million years to accrete – and change Earth’s climate as a result. Sustainability may be a gray and boring word, but achieving it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today. However ingenious modern capitalists are in finding alternative technologies – and they will be very ingenious – somewhere down the line richer consumers will have to settle for less rather than ever more. Marx thought capitalism would have a problem finding consumers for the goods that improving techniques of production enabled it to churn out. Instead, it has become expert in a new branch of manufacturing: the manufacture of desires. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale. But are we prepared to abandon it? The writer is professor of European studies, Oxford University By arrangement with
|
|
Chatterati The loss of face and seats in the Mumbai municipal elections does not seem to have had any effect on the bigwigs sitting in the Capital. Ego hassles, back-biting and neglect of the common worker is once again resulting in frustration and non-performance of the grassroots level worker. An amused state minister once said that at the AICC office here, if you mention the name of a really hardworking and trustworthy worker in a state, the general secretary will always say “We do not know him”. Now how many times can a poor worker afford to come to the Capital and who will meet him? How will he get through to them? State ministers and chief ministers are at a loss as to how to communicate this to the high command. And who should be rewarded? A grassroots worker or a smooth operator in Delhi? Even the ultra-rich and the high-flying guys are dependent on their PR skills for survival. In comparison, the grassroots worker does not have the time and money to dine and wine the top guys for posts in the Centre or states. So, performance loses to chamchagiri as usual.
UP’s many battles After Punjab, Uttarkhand and Manipur, attention is focused on Uttar Pradesh. As one senior Congress secretary commented, in Uttarkhand they should get sympathy votes for being so disorganised. Well, may be in UP they could hope for the same. Whether the attempted dismissal of the Mulayam Government becomes an election issue or not, Mulayam is going to use it to the hilt to evoke sympathy among the voters. The high-handedness and sheer arrogance on the part of the Congress team at headquarters will not go in its favour. Lack of knowledge of caste equations and the ground reality will be a major disadvantage for the Congress too. The UP battle will be fought on many grounds including the ego clash between the first family of the Congress and that of Bollywood.
Security lapses The terrorists manage to strike every time a new initative is taken for furthering the cause of Indo-Pak relations. The bombing of the Samjhautha Express really hurt and this time Pakistan was also at the receiving end. As usual words of condemnation came from the highest in the land. The Indian public, which has shown its anger and disgust at such incidents in the past, is looking for solid answers. The Railways should get off its high horse and the massive propaganda about their profits and provide security to their passengers. It is time to get professional about these things and not make mere pious statements. Hope the anger of the Indian public will also ignite a similar feeling amongst the Pakistani common folk who should vent their ire against the Pakistani establishment or the agency carrying on with its agenda of creating mayhem across the border. The encouraging sign is that newspapers in Pakistan today are publishing quite a few articles boldly and independently, despite the military regime. |
A day will come when you will be separated from everything irrespective of whether you are an emperor, king,
landlord or pauper. Why haven’t you still awaken?
Between two falsehoods, which occupy either extreme, lies the middle course, the path of truth which can be kept only by the observance of the right occasion. |
| HOME PAGE | |
Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir |
Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs |
Nation | Opinions | | Business | Sports | World | Mailbag | Chandigarh | Ludhiana | Delhi | | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
