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Talking nuclear Illusive Mr Q |
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Brutality at Nurmahal
Racing to the bottom
‘Why I chose to be a lawyer!’
India must give Sri Lanka military aid Diego Garcia played major role in secret CIA prisons Chatterati
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Talking nuclear The
brief meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush on the sidelines of the G-8 summit in Germany has raised cautious hopes that the Indo-US nuclear deal will cross the hurdles in the next couple of months. No doubt, “some tough negotiations will be needed before we can see light at the end of the tunnel”, as Dr Manmohan Singh has cautioned, but on the whole he has sounded more optimistic than ever before during the last six months. India’s proposal for creating a fully safeguarded facility for storing spent nuclear fuel should satisfy the US non-proliferation lobbies. Mounting pressure from these lobbies has made the US negotiators reluctant to allow India particularly the right to reprocess spent fuel. The signing of the final agreement has proved to be the most difficult test for the negotiating skill of the officials involved from both sides. After all, neither can afford to move ahead unless they take care of their national concerns. The US has also been unwilling to guarantee an uninterrupted supply of fuel to India’s reactors. Then there have been problems with the Americans not trusting India’s voluntary moratorium on nuclear tests. When US top negotiator Nicholas Burns came to New Delhi recently it had been made clear to him that Indian concerns must be addressed to enable it to sign the final document. The US, of course, has its own problems, but India cannot let Washington “transfer” these to New Delhi, as External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee emphasised in a television interview on Sunday night. Significantly, Mr Mukherjee has also reiterated India’s stand that the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement cannot be allowed to affect the country’s indigenous strategic programme. His statement must be viewed in the context of what Dr Manmohan Singh said after his interaction with President Bush --- the substance of the 123 Agreement “should conform to what I had told the people of India and what I had conveyed to Parliament”. Mr Mukherjee’s interview strikes a different note than the reports from Germany have suggested. Despite the hopeful signs thrown up by the Bush-Manmohan Singh meeting, it appears that India will have to bargain hard at the future rounds of official-level talks. |
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Illusive Mr Q Many
in the Congress party and the government may be feeling relieved following the Argentina court’s refusal to entertain its request to get Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrochi extradited to India in connection with the 20-year-old Bofors scam. The CBI, too, has every reason to feel happy with the El Dorado court ruling. The court will give the detailed judgement on June 13, spelling out the reasons for its refusal to extradite Quattrochi. Not surprisingly, CBI Director Vijay Shanker, says: “We will wait, study the judgement and then chalk out our future course of action”. However, what action the CBI will take now is open to question. Over the years, it has done little to bring Quattrochi to book. While the Government of India has been reluctant to bring him because of the fear that he would spill the beans on the Howitzer deal, the CBI has been acting as its true handmaiden, having diminished independence. How India lost its case for his extradition in both Malaysia and London earlier is fresh in public memory. Even with regard to the latest attempt, Quottrochi would have been at large, hoodwinking the law of the land, but for his detention in Missiones province four months ago on the basis of an Interpol alert while he was on his way to Brazil. Just as his latest statement, Quattrochi had protested his innocence for years in the Bofors case. However, if he is indeed innocent, what prevented him from coming to India, face the court of law and prove his innocence? Even now it is not too late. His shying away from facing trial in India strengthens the impression that he has something to hide. Unfortunately, the Government of India and the CBI have at no time shown their eagerness to try Quattrochi. Given their continued policy of delay and dithering, it is doubtful whether they would fight seriously — this time, in Argentina’s Supreme Court against Saturday’s court ruling. |
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Brutality at Nurmahal The
suicide by a three-member family, including a pregnant woman and a four-year-old daughter, by jumping in front of a speeding train at Nurmahal in Punjab’s Jalandhar district is quite disturbing. But more shocking is the fact that they were driven to take the extreme step due to harassment by the police. The police had reportedly detained and tortured 30-year-old Sukhdev because his nephew had been charged with the abduction of a minor girl. When fellow villagers protested and turned violent, a policeman opened fire, killing one and injuring three others. What the Nurmahal police has done is nothing unusual. This is the way the police often functions in Punjab. Instead of making efforts to nab the actual culprit, the police picks up family members and relatives to force the accused to surrender. The police did not fire in the air, but direct at the crowd. This violates all norms of crowd control and speaks of poor training and callous attitude. Why do policemen take the law into their own hands so often? It is largely because they have no fear of the law. Militancy might have gone long ago, but the police mindset it had shaped is very much around. Custody deaths are still common and the guilty get away with the crime. While the life of an ordinary citizen is so cheap, 50 policemen are deputed to protect an IGP and 42 gunmen guard a retired DSP. VIP security is a priority while the common man is subjected to police brutality. Successive governments in Punjab have been reluctant on reforming the police as ordered by the Supreme Court. Nurmahal provides another reminder to the government to ensure that the police serves the people and not makes the victims of cruelty. |
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This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but with a whimper.
— T. S. Eliot |
Racing to the bottom India
must be the only country in the world where people struggle and kill to be declared backward and revel in social regression in reversal of the whole story of civilisation and where it is official policy and serious politics to tout and cultivate such nonsense. This monstrous aberration that stigmatises and deforms our society is a product of warped thinking and ad hoc action that legitimises and rewards such crude behaviour. The Gujjar-Meena “caste war” is a fallout of the vote-bank politics and policies practised over the years by all parties across the board to score petty points, stoke fires and win cheap kudos at the cost of the national interest. Yes, Gujjars, like any other community anywhere in the country, deserve to get their due share of jobs and opportunities through fair competition untrammelled by nepotism or discrimination. If they do not compete it could be that they have other preferences unless it be that they are not competitive, in which case the remedy lies elsewhere, in education and training, rather than in seeking to carve out more and more quotas for ever larger numbers at an increasingly high social cost. It is nobody’s case that the Gujjars in Rajasthan, an OBC, face wilful discrimination in writing exams and entering the civil or other superior services. The Meenas have made advances through reservation, having long back been declared a tribal community. The Jats in Rajasthan, by no means a particularly disadvantaged people, were some time back listed as an OBC, enabling them to appropriate a slice of the reserved quota. So when the Gujjars of Rajasthan argue that it is now their turn to get the golden key, with what logic can they be denied? After all, Gujjars in J&K, Himachal and Uttaranchal have been scheduled as tribes and derive certain entitlements from that status. And the criteria of backwardness, remoteness, isolation, etc, by which such a determination is made, provide little justification for such selection. In J&K all those living in Leh tehsil were declared tribes on a territorial rather than any sociological basis. So, by adding nonsense to nonsense over the years, logic and reason have fled and pure political expediency has come to dictate far-reaching decisions that have a bearing on the national interest. The story has been repeated in the eastern region where Rajbongshis are SCs, STs or OBCs depending where they are domiciled. A process of de-Sanskritisation and re-tribalisation has been unleashed, the price for which varies from burning 10 buses to killing half a dozen people or the other way about, depending on the prevalent “ideology” in vogue. The Gujjars of Rajasthan are understandably inflamed because several of their people died in police firing. But who should mourn the initial manhandling and killing of some policemen whether in Rajasthan or Kalinganagar in Orissa or elsewhere? There is reasonable ground for reservation for SCs and STs and maybe other disadvantaged groups (who may not necessarily be traditional OBCs) accompanied by a well-defined exit policy subject to periodic review so that the benefits seep down to the least privileged and the entire quota is steadily depleted and not perpetuated and enlarged as at present. Yet the very idea of a “creamy layer” is derided by those who have battened on the cream to the detriment of others more deserving. A further and major flaw lies in not adequately expanding education and vocational and professional training at all levels and in all regions to build competence, merit and equal opportunity, backed by scholarships. Distance learning, open universities, correspondence courses, workers’ education and extra-mural studies are all well known methodologies. Certainly something has been done in this direction but this has been too little and rather late. The Education Ministry at the Centre has been too busy playing petty politics to devote much time to this vital task. Private education has been needlessly thwarted or sought to be over-regulated, a current example being the threat by the Karnataka government to de-license Kannada medium schools for switching to English, which, presumably, is what parents and the job-market want. It is nobody’s case that Kannada or the mother tongue should not be well taught; but why prepare the ground for creating a prospective demand for declaring alumni of such Kannada-first schools OBCs or STs 10-15 years from now! The object of all right-thinking people should be to enlarge the cake so that there is more for more, and not to reduce the size of the pie and then dole out starvation rations to burgeoning numbers of job seekers looking for better opportunities and a richer life. The Rajasthan crisis calls for a national solution that is long term and holistic. Hopefully, the judge appointed to inquire into the merits of the Gujjar demand will lay down what will be adopted as rational national criteria. There is sometimes nothing like a crisis to crystallise the mind. Hopefully, the Meena-Gujjar “caste war” will give pause to the political class and caste demagogues to reflect on their follies and enable them to fashion a better response to the huge challenge of inclusive development and social
change.
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‘Why I chose to be a lawyer!’
A
friend sent me an email a few days ago, explaining why she chose to be a lawyer. Ratika Mehrotra, a PYT (if you don’t know the abbreviation, consult a teenager), is a practising lawyer in the Delhi High Court and lower courts. The email’s title arrested my attention: “Why I chose to be a lawyer!” First her email and then my verbal response to her. Seven lawyers and as many doctors are going from PUNE to Mumbai. Both groups gather at Pune railway station. Both groups are desperately waiting for an opportunity to prove their superiority. The lawyers set the ball rolling. The group of seven takes only one ticket. Unaware of the lawyers’ gameplan, seven doctors buy seven tickets. As soon as the train chugs off, the lawyers start poking fun at the doctors. Under the circumstances, doctors can’t do anything better than waiting for the Ticket Checker to come. When the TC arrives, all seven lawyers get in one toilet. The doctors discreetly tell the TC to check the toilets as well. When the TC knocks, one hand comes out with the ticket and the TC goes away. On return journey, the two groups don’t get a direct train to Pune. So, they all decide to take a passenger train till Lonavala and then take a local train from Lonavala for Pune. During their Mumbai-Lonavala journey, the doctors decide: “This time we will prove that we too are equal”. Now, the seven doctors take one ticket. To the doctors’ horror of horrors, the lawyers don’t buy any ticket at all! The TC arrives. The doctors’ group is in one toilet while the lawyers are in the opposite one. One lawyer gets out and knocks the door of the doctors’ toilet. One hand comes with the ticket. The lawyer grabs the ticket and re-enters the lawyers’ toilet. The inevitable happens as the TC pulls out all the doctors from the toilet and fines them heavily. The two groups reach Lonavala station, the final leg of their journey. Doctors make the last-ditch effort to score a brownie point over the lawyers. The seven doctors board the local train to Pune with just one ticket. They are assured of getting even as the seven lawyers buy seven tickets. The TC comes. All the lawyers show their tickets like good citizens. The doctors start a frantic search for a toilet in the local train. After reading the email, I called up Ratika and said: “It’s a lovely television serial script material. But you know what? If I were the script writer, I would show the TC as an intrepid reporter on a sting operation.” |
India must give Sri Lanka military aid Two
developments have taken place since we last discussed the need for India to be more proactive in Sri Lanka (Tribune 8th April). The Sri Lankan Defence Secretary has been to India for discussions with our officials including the National Security Adviser. Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister also met with our Defence Minister at the Shangrila Conference in Singapore. Both sought India’s assistance in combating the LTTE which, on its part, has been more aggressive, launching attacks on the navy establishment at Kyats Island and on an army base in the north, resulting in deaths of many. Two months down the line, it has become clear that unless we make some major course corrections, our core interests in that country might be seriously compromised. During the discussions, India agreed that maritime forces of the two countries would engage in coordinated, not joint, patrols in the Palk Straits. The impression being conveyed is that this is something substantive and new and will go some way in controlling illegal movements of the terrorists. The facts, however, are different. For the last fifteen years, if not more, India has maintained a patrol in these waters. While the Navy has been operating detachments from seven stations spread through the southern coast of Tamil Nadu and air patrols from its station at Ramnad, the Coast Guard has operated out of its own base at Mandapam. Patrols of the latter have been and are being carried out by regular ships; those by the naval detachments are, by and large, conducted through boats hired from local owners. These do not have speed and cannot chase down a fishing trawler much less a fast moving LTTE boat fitted with two or more outboard motors. The air patrols are operative only during daylight hours. Our own fishermen, putting out for their day’s work, are searched to ensure that they, themselves, are not involved in unlawful activity. These operations are restricted to within our own maritime boundary even as our own fishermen, based in these very places, go right up to the Sri Lankan coast. The patrols have not been entirely unsuccessful. They do pose deterrence and it can be argued that but for them, illegal movement across the waters might have been more rampant. However, much more than what is being done is needed. It is not difficult for determined miscreants to slip through and many do, often with the help of sympathetic fishermen on our side. Medicines, detonators, batteries and associated wiring to facilitate assembly of IEDs, diesel and kerosene are some of the things that have, traditionally, been moved across. There is little reason to believe that this is not happening even today. Joint patrolling is quite different from coordinated patrolling. In the latter, both sides go about doing their own thing sharing communications off and on. In the former, both sides operate to a common plan in which patrol areas and responsibilities are well defined and continuous communications established. Intelligence and information is shared in real time so that responses may be immediate as miscreants cross from one side of the boundary line to the other. With the width of the Straits being about 25 odd miles, a fast boat can cut across the narrow waters within an hour. A good number of fast craft are needed to counter this movement. The Sri Lankans, exposed as they are to the threat, have them in some numbers; our own contribution is much less and quite inadequate. There is urgent need to augment numbers and to convert the operation from being coordinated, a cosmetic word for doing one’s own thing, to joint in which the two parties operate together. We must be more serious in looking at the menace in the Palk Straits and should not allow our coast to be used to threaten the security of a neighbouring nation state of great strategic and geopolitical importance to us. The second issue is of supply of military hardware needed by the Sri Lankans in their fight against the LTTE. Our existing approach is indefensible. On the one hand, we say that we can not supply equipment that they need; on the other, we demand that they should not acquire it from any others, say, China or Pakistan. While it is not in our interest that the Tamil movement in that country is allowed to be militarily decimated, it is equally disadvantageous to have the security and integrity of the Sri Lanka state compromised. Therefore, we have to supply military hardware, defensive or offensive are only pejorative terms, which will enable the LTTE to be kept at bay. Development of Hambantota port in southern Sri Lanka with Chinese aid is only the beginning of a process which may see military assistance to the island nation coming from elsewhere. Pakistan is already on the scene, supplying both arms and expertise, and its influence has, inevitably, increased. Concurrently, we must involve ourselves more closely with the political developments that are needed to get the Tamils their due rights and privileges within a unified but federal Sri Lanka. The present attitude of ‘come to us and do not go to anyone else but we will do only this’ can, in the long run, prove counter productive to our own interests. As a former Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Naval Command, the writer has been closely associated with developments in Sri Lanka |
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Diego Garcia played major role in secret CIA prisons New intelligence in the dossier from Europe’s human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, confirms the existence of “rendition” flights and identifies covert CIA detention centres in Diego Garcia and in Poland and Romania between 2002 and 2005. A year ago the report’s author, Swiss MP Dick Marty, named the UK as one of 14 European countries which colluded with the CIA in the operation of secret flights delivering terrorist suspects for interrogation. Marty said the CIA had been running interrogation centres in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and Thailand, and that more than 100 people had been sent to the so-called “black sites” since they were set up following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The Swiss MP said his inquiry had identified the “rendition” of more than one hundred prisoners “affecting Europe”. He said it was clear, despite a lack of “firm evidence”, that the authorities in several European countries “actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities”. But it was the confirmation about the use of Diego Garcia, leased to America by Britain, which caused the most concern among many international human rights groups last week. Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, said: “Reprieve has been in possession of flight logs showing CIA planes flying in and out of the island for almost a year now. A US General has twice said Diego Garcia is being used for secret prisons. Now, the Council of Europe confirms it. And what has the British Government done? Behaved like an ostrich with its head in the sand.” Last week’s Council of Europe report offers more detailed analysis of testimonies from more than 30 serving and former members of intelligence services in the US and Europe, coupled with studies of computer “data strings” from the international flight It says only Bosnia and Herzegovina and Canada had “fully acknowledged their responsibilities with regard to the unlawful transfers of detainees”. But there was now no doubt that the CIA set up its rendition flight programme – taking terror suspects out of US jurisdiction for questioning – “with the co-operation of official European partners belonging to government services”. The programme was kept secret for years “thanks to strict observance of the rules of confidentiality laid down in the NATO framework.” The results of the 19-month inquiry were described as shocking by Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly President Rene van der Linden. He said: “I don’t know which is more shocking – that European governments have been complicit in these activities, violating their legal obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, or that they have used anti-democratic methods to conceal their actions and frustrate parliamentary and judicial investigations.” By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Chatterati I visited Srinagar after twenty years. Militancy, no doubt, has ruined the beauty of the place – but fortunately, normalcy is returning. The Shikhara ride in the Dal Lake was as bewitching as visiting all the religious places. Development is a top priority. The Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad is an astute and stable Chief Minister who delivers. The Kashmiris look at him with a lot of expectations. Unfortunately, the Congress ally is more of an opposition for the Chief Minister than the real opposition. As I read the local Kashmir papers, I realised how the PDP leaders had only one agenda and that was to criticise anything that the Congress government did. PDP leaders Mufti and his daughter Mehbooba talk a different language when they come to New Delhi. Tourists and local people roam around more freely today, whether meeting the Chief Minister, playing golf, going for picnics to Chashmashahi, or visiting markets and the Dal Lake. The fear seems gone but apprehension is still there. I do hope that the Chief Minister can live up to the expectations of his people rather than toe the party or political line. It does need a lot of courage and determination. Of course, it will have a fall out, but in the end Azad has never failed in his duty to both the common man and and his party. Infiltration from all borders has to be tackled. Hassles from the high command, the allies and the economic situation of the state all pose a challenge. His wife Shamim, the Padma Bhushan awardee, is known as the nightingale of Kashmir. She is a renowned TV and radio personality. Her book of verses is awaited in the cultural vacuum that Kashmir has slumped into recently. Her songs, in mobiles as ring tones, are popular. His children, who study in Delhi, are torn between their love for the beauty of their home state and their higher education. Irrespective of the security hazards, this family is committed to fight for the welfare of the Kashmiris.
Coveted status Being in the coveted Z security category is a major ego boost to politicians. The new controversy over who is entitled to it and who gets dumped has surfaced again. Having helped the Congress in the Punjab elections, the head of the Dera Sacha Sauda sect has been rewarded by the Haryana Government with Z protection. Naturally, the Khalsa supporters have objected to it, particularly since there are criminal charges pending against the Dera chief. This is likely to simmer on. Mayawati, of course, chose a far more methodical manner of withdrawing this “facility” for her favourite victim Amar Singh, whom she otherwise chooses to largely ignore. In his case, and in the case of other Mayawati-baiters, she has chosen “the review system,” concluding that they were not under any threat and therefore could be easily outside the blessed Z designation. It looks like the Centre will soon have to ensure similar standards are established in all states before such squabbles become an inter-state issue. |
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