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Unborn
daughters of Patran Empowering
Punjab |
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Little
history
Jinnah
revisited
Mind
your funny bone
America’s
latest puppet regime – Lebanon Colombo
caught in a dilemma over human rights violations Missing
– the Model Police Bill
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Unborn daughters of Patran India
not only boasts of the largest written Constitution in the world, it also has laws on virtually every subject under the sun. And they are stringent, to be sure. Among them are those governing sex-determination tests and medical termination of pregnancy. And yet, this safety mechanism does not translate into reduction of these abominable practices. The most horrifying example of this lawlessness was witnessed at Patran in Patiala district last year when nearly 50 aborted foetuses were recovered from wells near a nursing home run by a quack couple. Apparently, legal provisions were never implemented and this fact has been acknowledged in the report of the commissioner of the division also, which has indicted three former civil surgeons for failing to curb the menace. Their defence that no complaint of the illegal activity was brought to their notice only establishes the general apathy towards the fate of the daughters killed before they are born. Instead of being on the lookout for illegal practices, those in supervisory capacity adopted a laidback posture, encouraging the wrongdoers to have a field day. This is not true of Patran alone. Similar horror stories are being repeated almost all over the state. That is why the female-male ratio is so hopelessly skewed. The national figure of 933 women against 1,000 men (2001 census) is bad enough in itself. In Punjab, the number is as low as 874. That means that thousands upon thousands of daughters are killed in womb or soon after being born every year. The administration is not taking active interest in curbing the practice, except at a rare few places like Nawanshahr. Things have come to such a pass because political parties do not bother to take up the cause in right earnest. Even Patran was treated as a non-issue by the Congress and the Akali Dal. Actually, this is one subject on which there should be total unanimity among the political parties and they should fight the menace together. Social, religious and cultural organisations have raised their voice but not with consistency and emphasis. That is why the black mark on the face of Shining India — or India Poised as some others may like to call it — refuses to go away.
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Empowering Punjab Of
the various policy announcements made in the Punjab Governor’s address to the Vidhan Sabha on Monday, the one on enhancing power generation deserves special notice as the state gropes in darkness more than ever before. While the demand for power is growing fast, the supply has remained almost stagnant. The free supply of power to farmers and certain weaker sections leads to its misuse as well as over-use of ground water. But that is a political decision. Why the supply is not confined to small farmers with five or fewer acres is also understandable. That there is hardly any power for giving it free does not carry weight with the political leadership. That the government buys power at exorbitant rates in summer when the demand peaks and diverts it to the farm sector, causing loss of industrial production, is a matter of concern. In this context the announcement that the industry will get 24-hour power supply in three years should be welcome even if it sounds implausible, given the Badal regime’s not-so-glittering past. How the power capacity will be raised is not clear, though the new Finance Minister has hinted at setting up a nuclear power plant. The intention to speed up the establishment of the much-delayed Bathinda refinery is commendable, though the government can do pretty little other than cajoling HPCL and its private partner to move fast. The decisions to revive “adarsh” schools and set up youth development and employment generation boards cannot be faulted, but tackling unemployment will require the government to come out with bolder steps. The quality of education in all government institutions needs improvement and “adarsh” schools alone are not enough. For employment generation the state needs to attract heavy investment. This requires political commitment, upgrading infrastructure and a responsive official machinery free from red tape and corruption. The government should monitor outcomes of its outlays and desist from fund distribution at “sangat darshans”. Giving a boost to Punjab’s economy needs a big effort and it is worth making.
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Little history LITTLE history, like little knowledge, is a dangerous thing. Particularly when a little politician like Rahul Gandhi unleashes it in a little town in Uttar Pradesh. He said, had any of the “Gandhis” been in active politics in 1992, the Babri Masjid would have remained intact. The little boy that the young MP was those days had heard his Dad tell Mom that he would go to Ayodhya to stand before the shrine to protect it from the demolition squad. It is a pity that such an assertion, which would have made his Dad the darling of the secularists, remained a family secret to be passed from generation to generation. Why he chose to make public the secret is a puzzle, the unravelling of which will reveal why he chose to wear a skull cap that day. It was Gibbon who said happy is the country that has no history. But the same cannot be said about the Gandhi family, which has a history. It is a different matter that reading history ended with Rahul’s great grandfather, after whom the family has a great aversion for books, except the comic variety. Of course, Rahul is right when he says that no one from the dynasty was in power when the centuries-old mosque was pulled down. His Dad had gone west and his Mom was in mourning unable to rush to Ayodhya to fulfill her dear, departed husband’s wish. It is a different matter that nobody knows whether even a feeble attempt was made in that direction. But everybody knows the little roles Dad had played in the run-up to the demolition. Like facilitating the opening of the masjid for puja, as if the government was waiting for a court order, his flip-flop on the Shah Bano case that came in handy for the Sangh Parivar in its campaign for a “magnificent temple”, the shilanyas for which his government made all the arrangements, the launching of the Congress Party’s 1989 election campaign from Ayodhya in the presence of Arun Govil, who was dressed like Rama in the teleserial Ramayana, where too he played the lead role. After all this, to say that Rajiv Gandhi would have sacrificed his life to protect the masjid is to plug holes with darkness. Now that the “Gandhis” are in power, what about rebuilding the masjid for which the party and its government had given a commitment? The taste of the pudding is in the eating, Mr Rahul Gandhi, MP.
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It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us. — Isaac D’sraeli
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Jinnah revisited Six
decades after two countries — Pakistan and Israel — were formed on religious grounds, second thoughts seem to be prevailing in at least one of them while the other is trying to swim against the tide of history. The resurfacing of the debate in Pakistan on the unambiguously secular content of Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s speech on August 11, 1947, is a sign that past prejudices are wearing thin. The move to include the speech in the Pakistan constitution marks, therefore, a dramatic new initiative with portentous consequences not only for the subcontinent but also for the very concept of religion-based states. True, it is a Parsi member of the Pakistan National Assembly, M.P.Bhandara, who wants the speech to be a part of the constitution, but the fact that it has been referred to a standing committee and not rejected out of hand is a hopeful sign. It is not insignificant that the initiative has come in the wake of a decision to play down the two-nation theory in Pakistani textbooks. Instead, it is now being claimed that it isn’t the pursuit of this theory which led to Partition, but the economic and religious insecurity of the Muslim minority in undivided India. Even if the two-nation theory had been practically buried by the creation of Bangladesh, the move for its rejection in Pakistan is an episode of immense significance for inter-communal relations in the subcontinent. What is more, this decision has been taken together with the government’s announcement that the minorities in Pakistan will enjoy the same rights as the majority, which is tantamount to cutting the ground from under the feet of an Islamic state. Not surprisingly, Gen Pervez Musharraf mentioned Jinnah while making these announcements. As is known, the Pakistan President has been in favour — at least in public — of a policy of “enlightened moderation”, which is aimed at reducing the influence of the bigots and fanatics, for whom the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are an inspiration. Predictably, these moves have aroused the ire of the fundamentalists. The chief of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who is also the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, has argued that “we cannot accept him (Jinnah) as one of the mujahidin-e-azadi (freedom fighters)” while the newspaper, Qaumi Azad, has quoted the Jamiat as saying that “Jinnah did not really do anything extraordinary for Pakistan”. Another ultra-conservative leader, Liaquat Baloch of the Muttahida-Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), has said that “Pakistan is an Islamic state … we can’t go against the ideology … any bill that negates Pakistan’s ideology will not be supported by the MMA”. The MMA has also opposed the inclusion of a chapter on Hinduism in textbooks. These objections are understandable because successive military and political leaders have cynically fostered the belief in a distinctive concept of nationhood as a buffer against Indian influence with its grounding in secularism. But the fact that the concept is now being challenged with reference to a speech which the Pakistani historian, Ayesha Jalal, compared with the Magna Carta shows that something unusual is happening in Pakistan. It doesn’t take much perspicacity to see that the very recitation of Jinnah’s speech — “you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques — you may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state” will be a devastating blow to the fundamentalists. No wonder that another Pakistani historian, Akbar S. Ahmed, compared the speech with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. There is little doubt that this slow and still uncertain drift towards moderation has come in the wake of the seeming consolidation of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the north-west and their continuing influence on sections of Pakistan’s polity, including the military, the intelligence services, the clerics and politicians. While Islamabad may have once encouraged these bigots to take their battles to Kashmir and is probably still does so, the less ideological among the Pakistani authorities may be gradually realising (with some prodding from the US) the deadly consequences of playing with fire, especially in the context of the recent suicide bombings in Pakistan. And what better way to retreat than to hark back to the wisdom of the founder of the nation? India, of course, cannot but wish godspeed to these endeavours. The elimination of religion from the “business of the state” in Pakistan will be yet another confirmation of the value and success of the Indian multicultural model, where faith remains in the private domain while the state is strictly non-denominational. It is also an example which is in keeping with modern trends, which reject the ancient concept where the ruler decided his country’s religion — cuius regio, eius religio — articulated in the Peace of Augsburg, 1555. Theocratic countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia base their polity on this archaic concept. So do other Muslim countries, except Turkey. In India’s neighbourhood, Pakistan and Bangladesh subscribe to this model while Nepal has thankfully ceased to be a Hindu kingdom. If Pakistan decides to break away to join the modern world where a country is not identified by its religion, then it will set a wonderful example to those still living in the past. Among them is Israel, which was also established in 1948 on a land which had not been its own since the biblical times. Though undeniably a democracy unlike, say, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Israel is not pluralistic since its Jewishness is its badge of distinction. Although it has Arabs as citizens, they resent Israel’s flaunting of Zionism as the core of its nationhood, as is seen from the emblem of the Star of David in the country’s flag. The Arab view has been articulated by Shawki Khatib, head of a 64-member Arab mayors’ group, who said recently that “we do not accept our situation as second class citizens”. To quote from Los Angeles Times, nearly half of Israel’s 1.4 million Arabs live below the poverty line and their rates of unemployment and infant mortality are twice the national average. It isn’t surprising that former US President Jimmy Carter has compared the conditions in Israel with those which prevailed in South Africa under apartheid. Israel’s insistence on retaining its Jewishness is based, of course, on the suffering of the Jews in Europe for long periods, culminating in the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. But if the Jews were victims of their second class status in Europe, the dispersal of the Palestinians after Israel was established is a reflection of the fate which the Jews themselves experienced for centuries. It is to avoid a repetition of that fate that Israel considers itself as the homeland for all Jews, just as Pakistan is supposed to be the homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent. But such religious and ethnic exclusivity militates against modern nation-states, which have realised that the minorities cannot be wished away. Nor can they be allowed to remain as a suppressed group. The view of a right-wing Israeli minister, Avigdor Lieberman, that the “minorities are a problem” and his preference for a hermetically sealed “Jewish homogeneous state” are no longer widely accepted. Instead, multiculturalism of the Indian kind is being increasingly seen as the answer. Pakistan seems to have realised this. Israel would do well to emulate this
example.
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Mind your funny bone If
you have a funny bone that tickles at odd hours leash it when you are visiting a practitioner of modern medicine. Once on the advice of my family physician, I visited a cardiologist. After the preliminaries he handed over to me a long list of diagnostic investigations to be done. During my next visit he concentrated on my ECG and the X-ray of the chest waving his head in despair. Then he said: “Well, you are suffering from an enlargement of your heart, which is quite serious”. My funny bone tickled and I said: “Doctor Sahib, my grandmother always prayed and advised me ‘Gopal, whatever be the circumstances you should always be large-hearted. My trouble may be due to this’”. The doctor was visibly enraged. Flaunting the X-ray before me he moved his palm from neck downward and pontificated: “All this is your heart.” I wondered if I were living without lungs, stomach, liver and other organs. I, however, kept mum. He gave me a prescription and asked me to come next week, but I visited him after two weeks. “So you are coming after two weeks,” he said. “It means you are not worried about your disease”. By this time I had decided not to visit the doctor again. Therefore, I looked straight into this face and replied: “Doctor Sahib, I paid your consultation fees so that you may worry about my disease and you are asking a cardiac patient to worry”. After a long search I found a doctor who always gave me a sweet smile whenever my funny bone tickled, which it frequently did. Once I asked him, “Doctor Sahib, it is said that miserly persons have a small heart. Will it help me?” His reply was a sweet smile. I continued his treatment. On one occasion I attended a camp for cardiac patients organised by a charitable hospital. The doctors examined me and went through my medical records. Finally the panel declared: “The medicines you are taking are the best but sorry, you will have to take them for all your life”. I said: “Doctors, there is no need to be sorry about it. It is possible that God wills me to take a huge quantity of medicines. Then He will give me life long enough to consume that amount.” The doctors smiled and said: “This is a good philosophy of life.” On another occasion I took my wife to a physician for her disease. After all investigations he gave us the prescription. My funny bone tickled again I said: “Doctor Sahib, we have a personal problem. Both of us are in our late seventies. My wife assures everyone that she will not leave me alone. I also give her the same assurance. If the prayers of both of us are answered by God, we will have to live till the Doomsday. I got from him a snub: “Don’t you see that so many patients are waiting for their turns. Now, don’t waste my time and come after one week.” I cursed — not the doctor but my funny
bone.
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America’s latest puppet regime – Lebanon As
the West looks anxiously at Iraq and Afghanistan, dangerous cracks are opening up in Lebanon – and the White House is determined to prop up Fouad Siniora’s government. The spring rain beat down like ball-bearings on the flat roof of General Claudio Graziano’s office. Much of southern Lebanon looked like a sea of mud this week but all was optimism and light for the Italian commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, now 11,000 strong and still expecting South Korea to add to his remarkable 29-nation international army. No specific threats had been directed at Unifil, the UN’s man in southern Lebanon insisted, and his own force was now augmented by around 9,000 Lebanese troops patrolling on the Lebanese-Israeli frontier. A drive along the frontier with Israel shows that the UN is taking no chances. Miles of razor wire and 20ft concrete walls protect many of its units. But Unifil, like it or not, is on only one side of the border, the Lebanese side, and despite their improving relations with the local Shia population – the UN boys are going in for cash handouts to improve water supplies and roads, “quick impact projects” as they are called in the awful UN-speak of southern Lebanon – there are few Lebanese who do not see them as a buffer force to protect Israel. Last year’s UN Resolution 1701 doesn’t say this, but it does call for “the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon”. This was a clause, of course, which met with the enthusiastic approval of the United States. For “armed groups”, read Hizbollah. The reality is that Washington is now much more deeply involved in Lebanon’s affairs than most people, even the Lebanese, realise. Indeed there is a danger that – confronted by its disastrous “democratic” experiment in Iraq – the US government is now turning to Lebanon to prove its ability to spread democracy in the Middle East. Needless to say, the Americans and the British have been generous in supplying the Lebanese army with new equipment, jeeps and Humvees and anti-riot gear (to be used against who, I wonder?) and there was even a hastily denied report that Defence Minister Michel Murr would be picking up some missile-firing helicopters after his recent visit to Washington. Who, one also asks oneself, were these mythical missiles supposed to be fired at? Every Lebanese potentate, it now seems, is heading for Washington. Walid Jumblatt, the wittiest, most nihilistic and in many ways the most intelligent, is also among the most infamous. He was deprived of his US visa until 2005 for uncharitably saying that he wished a mortar shell fired by Iraqi insurgents into the Baghdad “green zone” had killed then- Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. But fear not. Now that poor old Lebanon is to become the latest star of US foreign policy, Jumblatt sailed into Washington for a 35-minute meeting with President George Bush – that’s only 10 minutes less than Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert got – and has also met with Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Gates and the somewhat more disturbing Stephen Hadley, America’s National Security Adviser. There are Lebanese admirers of Jumblatt who have been asking themselves if his recent tirades against Syria and the Lebanese government’s Hizbollah opponents – not to mention his meetings in Washington – aren’t risking another fresh grave in Lebanon’s expanding cemeteries. Brave man Jumblatt is. Whether he’s a wise man will be left to history. But it is America’s support for Fouad Siniora’s government – Jumblatt is a foundation stone of this – that is worrying many Lebanese. With Shia out of the government of their own volition, Siniora’s administration may well be, as the pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud says, unconstitutional; and the sectarian nature of Lebanese politics came violently to life in January with stonings and shooting battles on the streets of Beirut. Because Iraq and Afghanistan have captured the West’s obsessive attention since then, however, there is a tendency to ignore the continuing, dangerous signs of confessionalism in Lebanon. In the largely Sunni Beirut suburb of Tarek al-Jdeide, several Shia families have left for unscheduled “holidays”. Many Sunnis will no longer shop in the cheaper department stores in the largely Shia southern suburb of Dahiya. More seriously, the Lebanese security forces have been sent into the Armenian Christian town of Aanjar in the Bekaa Valley after a clump of leaflets was found at one end of the town calling on its inhabitants to “leave Muslim land”. Needless to say, there have been no reports of this frightening development in the Lebanese press. Receiving threats that they are going to be ethnically cleansed from their homes is – for Armenians – a terrible reminder of their genocide at the hands of the Turks in 1915. Lebanon likes its industrious, highly educated Armenians who are also represented in parliament. But that such hatred could now touch them is a distressing witness to the fragility of the Lebanese state. Siniora, meanwhile, can now bask in the fact that after the US administration asked Congress to approve $770 million for the Beirut government to meet its Paris III donor conference pledges, Lebanon will be the third largest recipient of US aid per capita of population. How much of this will be spent on the Lebanese military, we still don’t know. By arrangement with
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Colombo caught in a dilemma over human rights violations Sri
Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa finds himself in a difficult position as far as human rights in the island nation is concerned. On the one hand, pressure is growing from outside the country to put its human rights record on track soon or face intentional isolation. On the other hand, his political opponents within the country are pressurising him to improve the law and order situation in the country. Being the Commander in Chief of the armed forces in the country, he is unlikely to take any action against a member of the military, given the fact that they are fighting the country’s arch enemy, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in one part of the country. After all, the President has adopted a very pro-military line and any move to punish men within the ranks could backfire on him, even if he is doing the right thing. The subject of human rights is a sensitive one for Sri Lankans and with good reason. In a country that has been embroiled in a bloody war for nearly 25 years, it’s an issue that is raised from time to time. There are rights groups that wait in line to accuse successive governments of violations, while the governments have defended themselves against such allegations of abuse. It has been a difficult balancing act for President Rajapakse since assuming office in November 2005. The first serious allegations of extra judicial killings attributed to the military came in January 2006, when five youth were shot dead in the eastern town of Trincomalee. This was followed by the killing of 17 aid workers of Action International Contre la Faim (ACF) in Muttur, also in the east. In both the cases the finger has been pointed at members of the militarily but the government has defended itself saying there was no evidence to take action against any military personnel. Since then the situation has only worsened. The number of persons disappearing has gone up rapidly and unidentified bodies have begun to surface, not only on the streets of the north and east, where the fighting between government troops and the Tamil rebels are confined to, but also in Colombo and its suburbs. The issue has got so bad that two ministers sacked by President Rajapakse in February, including the former Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera, have come out strongly against the government, accusing it of turning a blind eye to human rights violations. Despite whose side you are on in the human rights issue, it is very much on Sri Lanka’s agenda at the moment, with the government at the receiving end of criticism from influential organisations such as Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurist, Human Rights Watch and well as the United Nations, which are urging Lanka to act promptly to clean up its act. It is amidst these allegations that Sri Lanka’s Minister of Human Rights Mahinda Samarasinghe left for Geneva, Switzerland, in mid-March, to attend the annual sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He was called upon by several countries as well as rights groups for the establishment of an international monitoring body for Sri Lanka. The government has rejected this call because it would prove unpopular domestically. It has dismissed the calls stating that there were adequate safeguards within the country to protect human rights, and therefore no international intervention was needed. The conventional attitude among the majority of Sri Lankans is “why dictate terms to us on human rights when western nations violate the same laws quite liberally?” But realistically speaking, it is an issue that needs to be addressed, given the fact the country depends heavily on foreign aid to keep it going and any sort of sanctions could put the country in economic dire straits. The most the Government has done so far is state that the allegations of human rights violations are exaggerated, made mainly by parties with vested interests, who want the government to back down from its military campaigns against the Tamil Tigers.
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Missing – the Model Police Bill The
establishment of the Police Act Drafting Committee (PADC) by the Ministry for Home Affairs in September 2005 was hailed enthusiastically by one all. At last, a concrete step in the direction of Police Reform! There was a universal wave of triumph among civil society, police officers, progressive government circles at this move to shake off the mantle of the outdated and archaic 145-year old Police Act of 1861. The Committee was initially given six months to produce its draft of the new Police Act. The Committee’s time was extended to October 31, 2006, in recognition of the complexity and depth of the task on hand. The Ministry of Home Affairs opened a web page and draft chapters were posted on this website from time to time in order to maintain transparency in the Committee’s deliberations. The website generated much interest among concerned citizens. One and a half years on, one is compelled to ask the question: What’s become of the draft Police Bill submitted by the PADC? The PADC, chaired by the eminent Soli Sorabjee, aided by an able group of knowledgeable peers pondered the form and content a complete overhaul of the archaic Police Act, 1861 should take. The PADC deliberated on its brief for a year, and in October 2006, handed over its Draft Model Police Bill, 2006 to the Ministry for Home Affairs. Many citizens made applications under the Right to Information Act 2005, for this document. This draft was made public in February 2007 by being posted on the Ministry of Home Affairs website. It is now five months since the PADC submitted its Model Police Bill to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). Where has this Bill got to? The Home Minister told the Lok Sabha during question time on 13 March 2007, “We can introduce the new legislation in this session. If this is not possible in the current session for some reason, then it will definitely be done in the next.” Well, why aren’t the citizens of this country able to see on the MHA website, the most current legislation that it proposes to introduce in Parliament? We need a deep fishing net to drag the Draft Police Bill out of the Bermuda Triangle of the MHA and see the version of the Bill that the MHA proposes to table before Parliament. Is it relatively unchanged from the draft the PADC submitted in October 2006? Or has it changed substantially? If so, what are these changes? And what is the rationale for the changes? After all an expert committee, set up the Government itself, spent 12 months focussing on solely this task. How much more work would the Government have to do on the draft its own expert committee presented? Further, citizens of this country continue to live with the archaic Police Act of 1861 and therefore have the rightful and primary stake in shaping changes to this legislation. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting rather impatient as a citizen!!! The writer is a consultant with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi
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