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Not done, Mr President Style and substance |
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Chaos in Gaza
Threat from Northern Areas
Portrait of a rose princess
Clintons liquidate controversial assets Ramu Gandhi: A solitary thinker in smug, noisy times Chatterati
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Style and substance As
Sivaji: The Boss released across theatres in Tamil Nadu and other parts of India, and milk and flowers cascaded down billboards, it is clear that the hype surrounding Rajnikanth’s 100th Tamil film is unprecedented, even by southern fan club standards. The expectations surrounding Sivaji have been high ever since the film was launched a couple of years ago. Coming as it does on the back of a hit, Chandramukhi, which re-established his credentials after a relative failure, Baba, there is something about the package that is Sivaji that has captured the nation’s imagination. It has even overwhelmed the Tamil-Kannada animosity to such an extent that Tamil fans in Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka have shown little inhibition in celebrating the arrival of a new Rajni film. Following the Cauvery Tribunal verdict, largely seen as being favourable to Tamil Nadu, Kannada chauvinist groups have been up in arms. Tamil films have always been a target even if the majority of those standing in the queues are in fact Kannadigas. But then, the Rajni mystique has a Bangalore connection. It was a Marathi-speaking lad, Shivaji Rao Gaekwad, who dreamt about being an actor while serving as a bus conductor with the Bangalore Transport Corporation. Even today, tales abound of his trips to his native city, his meetings with old cronies and the conductor fraternity, and his forays into his old haunts — in disguise, of course. Tamil cinema and Tamil Nadu politics are bound closely together, but Rajnikant operates only at the fringes of this interaction. He never quite plunges in — it is just a nudge here, a little dialogue there, that does the trick. More than anything else, Rajnikant exemplifies a certain genre of film-making where the style is also substance. It is necessarily exaggerated, given the film-making idiom that is adopted, but it is clearly saying that even if you do not have anything, you can have a bit of swagger, a glance, a flick of the hair, and thus find both identity and meaning. It is about style as the ultimate escape. |
Chaos in Gaza Nine
days of fighting between Hamas and Fateh gunmen in Gaza, home to 1.5 lakh Palestinians, has led to the disappearance of any governmental authority there. The bloody power struggle has so far taken more than 115 lives in the latest round, resulting in the Gaza Strip coming under the control of Hamas extremists. The Palestinian Authority area has thus got divided into Gaza with the Hamas and the West Bank under the control of President Mahmoud Abbas of the Fateh faction. In the process, the Palestinians themselves have reduced their homeland cause to tatters. The Palestinian infighting has also dealt a serious blow to the peace process involving Israel. President Abbas, with his headquarters in Ramallah, a West Bank town, can claim that his writ runs in the bigger Palestinian area — the West Bank — with a population of 2.5 million. He has replaced Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh with independent lawmaker Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official. Mr Abbas may try to re-establish his authority in Gaza with the promised support by Israel, the US, Jordan and the European Union. But all this cannot help him much with his Fateh movement remaining discredited among the Palestinians. The Hamas had won a comfortable majority in the Palestinian parliament in last year’s elections. The extremist outfit continues to be most popular even today, much to the discomfort of Israel. The Fateh had been sharing power with the Hamas under a Saudi formula of national unity government. The idea was to change the character of the administration so that the donors who had threatened a boycott did not stop the supply of funds to the Palestinian Authority. But neither Saudi Arabia nor any other country having influence among the Palestinians tried to end the serious differences between the Hamas and the Fateh. The result is chaos in Gaza today. The world community will have to intervene fast to bring the warring factions to the negotiating table. Otherwise, the towns and villages in the Gaza Strip will be faced with a major humanitarian crisis with an acute food shortage in a week or so. |
The time was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set it right.
— Lytton Strachey |
Threat from Northern Areas
The
Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan) under Pakistan’s control are a dark corner of Jammu and Kashmir. The darkness is not only on account of their remoteness and harsh terrain, but also due to political and administrative ambiguity, denial of basic rights to the people, discord and discontent, and over two-decade-long increasing sectarian violence. In India, this darkness is reflected by the lack of awareness about and the missing debate on the Northern Areas and a deafening silence of the government and articulate political leaders of J & K. Located astride the high Himalayas and the ancient Silk Route; bordering China and linking Xinjiang through the Karakoram Highway in the north; Afghanistan and Tajikistan through the narrow Wakhan corridor to the west; Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) in the south; and Ladakh and Kargil in the east and southeast, the Northern Areas have always been strategically important for the subcontinent. Ethnically and culturally, except for Islam (39 per cent Shia, 27 per cent Sunni, 18 per cent Ismailia and 16 per cent Nurbakshi), there is little in common between the people of the Northern Areas and the Kashmir Valley. In fact, the Baltis, divided across the Line of Control, are closer to the people from Kargil-Ladakh than to the Kashmiris of the Valley. Pre-Independence, the Northern Areas were part of the J & K State with a British agent located in Gilgit to oversee British India’s strategic interests and to supervise the conduct of policy on this frontier. Like in most other frontier areas, British officers commanded the Gilgit Scouts comprising locally recruited tribesmen. The British handed over the Gilgit Agency to the J & K ruler on August 1, 1947, officially. But when the ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, signed the Instrument of Accession with India on October 26, 1947, the British Commanding Officer of the Gilgit Scouts, Major William Brown, mutinied with some of his Muslim troops on October 30/31, 1947, and made the Maharaja’s Governor, Brigadier Ghansara Singh, surrender to him on November 1. A provisional government was installed thereafter, which asked the Pakistan government to send a civil administrator. On November 16, 1947, without any formal letter of accession, Pakistan installed a Political Agent in Gilgit. In the absence of any letter of accession, there is considerable confusion over the exact political and legal status of the Northern Areas in Pakistan. On April 28, 1949, the PoK government, without any legal rights, signed an agreement with the Government of Pakistan to place all affairs relating to the Northern Areas in the latter’s hand. In the 1970s, the PoK Legislative Assembly, through a resolution, demanded return of this area. The agreement is objected to by many people of the Northern Areas as none of their representatives was present or taken into confidence. In 1995, the PoK High Court, in one of its verdicts, directed the PoK government to “immediately assume the administrative control of the Northern Areas and to annex it with the administration”. However, its Supreme Court gave a different verdict stating that the Northern Areas are a part of J & K but they are not a part of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (PoK) as defined in the Interim Constitution Act, 1974. Pakistan treats the Northern Areas as a disputed territory. Yet it ceded the Shaqsgam Valley (4853 sq km), a part of the Areas, to China in a border agreement in 1963. The Northern Areas have not been given the political or administrative status as awarded to the rest of PoK. The Federal Ministry of Kashmir Affairs and Northern Areas (KANA) of Pakistan rules the Northern Areas. It is responsible for all policies and development, administration and making laws. The elected Northern Areas Legislative Council has limited advisory functions and has no control or say over the federal executive or budgetary allocations. In May 1999, Pakistan’s Supreme Court observed that the people of the Northern Areas had been denied their fundamental right and access to justice. A Court of Appeals was set up six years later. It is obvious that Pakistan prefers to keep this region under its total control for strategic and political reasons. The Karakoram Highway has now become a significant component of 'The Four Countries’ Transit Trade Agreement’ among China, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; signed in 1995 and operative since November 2006. The Almaty- Karachi trade link has been restructured on the pattern of Pakistan-Afghan Transit Trade to establish Central Asia Transit trade across the Northern Areas. A dry port has been constructed at Sosat in the Northern Areas near the Chinese border. Pakistan’s water security is also dependent on the resources and reservoirs of this region, especially the Bhasha Dam. Recently, Pakistan’s Ambassador in Brussels claimed that the Northern Areas were not a part of the J & K State in 1947; as such, the UN resolutions did not apply to these Areas and the integration of the Northern Areas with Pakistan was not prohibited. This claim was rejected in the report prepared by Baroness Winterbourne and is now accepted by the European Parliament. The Ambassador’s own ministry in Islamabad, too, rejected this claim but mildly. There are reports of increasing military control of the Northern Areas, brutal suppression and denial of basic rights and representative institutions, deliberate demographic change through settlement of Punjabis and other Sunni fundamentalists since the mid-1980s under General Zia’s military rule, and ownership of huge chunks of land by retired Army officers and bureaucrats. Governance problems, particularly the Shia-Sunni divide, have often caused violence, which seems to be increasing by the day. In 1988, General Musharraf (then a Brigadier) was personally involved in putting down such a violent insurrection. After taking over as the Pakistan Army Chief, he was involved again when he planned and executed the Kargil war in 1999. Pakistani troops, which infiltrated into the Indian Territory, were mostly from the Northern Light Infantry battalions, specially organised and trained for high-altitude warfare. Most of the casualties suffered by these units belonged to this area and were left behind in the Indian Territory. As the Pakistan Army did not accept its role in the planning and execution of the intrusion, the families of Northern Light Infantry soldiers and others in the region were up in arms due to their personal grief, made more intense by the fact that they could not see the bodies of their kith and kin. General Musharraf accompanied then Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on a tour of the Northern Areas offering monetary and other compensation to pacify the bereaved families. It is necessary for India to raise the Northern Areas issue — bilaterally and internationally — for political, humanitarian and security reasons. Politically because the Northern Areas are a part of J & K. We cannot afford to make the same strategic mistake as we did in the 1950s over Tibet occupation and suzerainty issues. For humanitarian and security reasons, unless urgent political and social reforms are undertaken, fundamental rights and social justice respected and further alienation reduced, discord will continue to mount in the Northern Areas. Religious fundamentalism, sectarian clashes and violent secessionist movements will become a security threat not only within the Northern Areas but also to the adjoining areas of India, Pakistan and China. There is a need for greater political and social transparency in these Areas.n The writer, a former Chief of Army Staff, is President, ORF Institute of Security Studies, New Delhi.
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Portrait of a rose princess
Little
known facts about well-known personalities sometimes astonish the people. Babur loved his five daughters so much that he named four of them with the prefix of gul (rose). His eldest daughter was Masuma (Innocent) and then Gulrukh (Rose-Faced), Gulrang (Rose-Coloured), Gulchehra (Rosy-Cheeked) and Gulbadan (Rose-Body). The youngest Gulbadan has in her memoirs told the story from Babur’s conquest of India in 1526 till her death in 1603 during Akbar’s reign. Incidentally, Akbar died two years later in 1605. Gulbadan (the rose princess) says, “Babur wanted his sons to be versed in the art of writing. If he had not been so great and constant a warrior he himself could have been a true poet.” Even when Humayun grew up, Babur wrote to him, “You certainly do not excel in letter writing and you fail because you have too great a desire to show off.” Rumer Godden in her book Gulbadan (Viking 1981) has commented, “How surprised he would have been to know that it was his smallest daughter who would be the one to follow him in this love.” There is an interesting episode in Gulbadan’s memoirs as to how Babur received his begum Maham when she came from Kabul to Agra in 1527. On June 27, Begum Maham reached Aligarh (then known as Kul-Jalali). Babur wanted to meet his wife as early as possible. At the evening prayer time someone told him, “I have just passed her Highness on the road, four miles out.” Gulbadan comments, “My royal father did not wait for a horse to be saddled but set out on foot and met her.” When Humayun ascended the throne, he continued to shower his affection on his sister Gulbadan, who was otherwise undemanding. In fact, he inspired her to note down from her memory all the significant events since Babur left Kabul to meet Ibrahim Lodhi at Panipat. She was four years old at that time but her memory was very sharp. Humayun, on his part, was not fond of writing like his father Babur, whose Tuzuk-i-Babari is considered a classic. In fact, he did not find time to do so due to the turbulent period of his lifetime. Still he had some interest in reading as Gulbadan tells, “Humayun had gone up to the roof of the tower he used as a library. Then he had interested himself in astrology, especially the rising of the planet Venus, probably to find some auspicious date.” During Akbar’s reign Gulbadan continued to get due regards from her nephew. Akbar had not shown any interest in studies during his childhood, but when he grew up he had “a real delight in books and philosophical debate.” He had such a memory that none could realise that he was illiterate. He is said to have more than 24,000 books in his library. Regarding “haughtiness” it can be said that “Babur had never been imperious — he was too sensitive to his sins. Humayun was hardly imperious enough, but in the case of Akbar, despite his mother Hamida’s remonstration, this trait was obvious.” Still for Gulbadan it was “that innate and unswerving reverence for the title ‘Emperor’ and of the blood royal. She could not help but esteem Akbar, no matter what he did.” In February 1603, Gulbadan was laid up with a fatal fever at the age of 80. Hamida was with her at that critical time. Her last words were ‘Jiu’, a sort of blessing from an elderly person to a younger one. Akbar himself helped to carry her bier. Rumer Godden concludes, “There seems to have been no ‘death name’ for Gulbadan. Hamida was to be known as Miriam Makhani in tribute, oddly enough, to the Virgin Mary, but Gulbadan lives on in history as herself, Princess
Rosebody.” |
Clintons liquidate controversial assets
WASHINGTON — Former US President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary have amassed a fortune worth between $5 million and $25 million since 1993, when they first entered the White House and put their investments in a blind trust. It was revealed last week that the Clintons sold off most of their investments in April 2006 fearing that they would become a political liability in the 2008 Presidential race. For a political couple who have always stressed the value of public service over the money-grubbing private sector, the revelation that much of their wealth comes from arms, oil and pharmaceutical companies, will shock many Democratic activists. From their time in the White House to today’s campaign for the Presidential election, the Clintons have always sided with America’s working man and woman over corporate interests. But thanks to their investments, the books – they have both published books – and Bill Clinton’s speaking engagements, they are now part of America’s wealthy elite, although far from being among the nation’s wealthiest. They got there thanks to a portfolio of investments in the arms trade, Big Oil and Big Pharma, all high on the hate list of many Democratic voters. They made more money investing in Wall Mart and Rupert Murdoch’s News International – owner of Fox News – two bogies of the liberal activists. With the 2008 race for the White House increasingly focused on the war in Iraq, the absence of health care for tens of millions of Americans, oil insecurity and rising petrol prices, the stock portfolio was a ticking political time bomb for Hillary Clinton. A government directive this spring, meant that she, as a presidential candidate, had to dissolve the blind trust that was managing their wealth and to reveal the assets. Her leading opponent, Barack Obama, quickly attacked Hillary Clinton for reaping “significant financial rewards” from controversial companies and for her “unwillingness to protect American jobs” being outsourced to India. The Clintons have had an often toxic history with investments. Their White House years were overshadowed by accusations that they had used their influence to play fast and loose with the regulations. It was alleged that while speculating wildly on the cattle futures market and in a real estate deal known as Whitewater, that the insider knowledge of influential friends protected them from losses. It was Hillary Clinton – a corporate lawyer during their Arkansas years – who did the speculating and managed to transfer a stake of $5,000 into $1,00,000 in short order. That money ballooned over time thanks to astute investments by the blind trust over which they had no direct control. Critics say it could have always been earmarked towards ‘ethical’ investments. Today the couple’s total net worth is between $10 million and $50 million. On top of money made in the stock market, Bill Clinton earned some $10 million giving speeches around the world last year. Mrs Clinton pulled in royalties of $3,50,025, for her largely ghostwritten autobiography, Living History. Under the new rules the Clintons did not have to sell off their investments, just disclose the holdings. But their holdings in companies like Raytheon, which makes missiles which have killed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Exxon-Mobil which has spent at least $8 million dollars to challenge the existence of global warming were certain to be attacked by her opponents Democratic and Republican. At a time when healthcare is a burning issue for poor and middle-class Americans, the Clintons investments in a range of pharmaceutical companies was also bound to draw attention. Their stake in Fox News was equally sensitive given that the Democratic candidate are boycotting the network. The John Edwards campaign says that Fox News “advance the right-wing agenda while pretending they’re objective.” The Obama campaign was furious with Fox News broadcasting a false report that Obama had been educated in an extremist madrassa. Clinton advisers say that the couple would never have chosen many of the companies invested in by their blind trust. Moreover by selling the entire portfolio they now face a huge capital gains tax bill. “Senator Clinton and the President wanted to go above and beyond and avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, so they chose to liquidate their assets,” their spokesman said. By arrangement with
The Independent |
Ramu Gandhi: A solitary thinker in smug, noisy times Not many get to choose the place they die in, but knowing Ramachandra Gandhi, one gets an eerie feeling that this peripatetic thinker would have wanted to breathe his last moments in a place that was his home – and yet not his home – for so many years, symbolising the eternal homelessness of the modern intellectual. Ramu Gandhi, as he was affectionately called by friends and admirers, was a deeply solitary man and a compulsive arguer at the same time, who loved the unique blend of privacy and gregarious intellectual chatter that a place like the India International Centre (IIC) encouraged and nurtured. But he was not the kind whose relentlessly questing mind and athirst spirit could be confined to one place for long or belong to a particular institution. As the news of Ramu Gandhi’s death flashed on TV last week and almost vanished into the deluge of babel that poses as profundity, my mind raced back to those hallowed meetings of the Philosophy Society (Philo-Soc, to the initiates) of St. Stephen’s College at the residence of R.K. Gupta, the then head of the philosophy department, in the early nineties. Ramu Gandhi, the fine listener that he was, mostly kept quiet, following the subtle cadences of thoughts of fellow discussants, but on the rare occasions he paused to make a point, he was all eloquence and gravitas, his words coming from the depths of a mind that has long lived with these ideas and listened intently to what they really had to say. But it wasn’t unrelieved high seriousness all the time; Ramu Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, brought with him not just a mind that delighted in philosophy as a way of dwelling in this world that was all easily seduced by poseurs and impresarios, but a witty tongue as well. It was thus pure delight to converse with him and a tingle of pleasurable anticipation passed over one every time Ramu spoke about his favourite philosophers and seekers like Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sri Aurobindo and Ramana Maharishi, or his other pet passion: cricket. One invariably emerged richer and wiser from such encounters, his wit and irreverent humour whetting the appetite for the life of the mind he epitomised. A few years ago, I bumped into him at IIC. He had not changed a bit: it looked like he had floated straight from those freeze-frame memories of college days – clad in kurta-pyjama, holding a mineral water bottle in one hand and a book in another. He looked genuinely pleased to be reminded of the Philo-Soc meetings, and spoke about some novel he was writing. He appeared to be in a hurry and promised to speak more about it some other time. I tried to prod him into revealing more about his new offering, but couldn’t succeed: it was a surprise to hear about this great thinker and philosopher straying into the temptations of writing fiction, a presumption that would have exiled him in Plato’s “Republic”. Then one day, while browsing through a bookshop in Khan Market, I chanced upon Muniya’s Light: A Narrative of Truth and Myth. The author, I peered closer to double-check it, was Ramachandra Gandhi. My curiosity piqued, I immediately bought the book and read it over the next week. Reading it was a transfiguring experience, to say the least. Part autobiography, albeit a disguised one, and part novel, as it claimed to be, the book traced the inner journey of a middle-aged professor as he comes home with his friend’s 22-year-old daughter from the US. The book imaginatively intertwines the metaphysical idea of the young female child as the perfect embodiment of the atman’s radiance, “the perfect picture of... the self-luminous reality of selfhood” with contemporary evils like female infanticide. To me it was yet another reaffirmation of the intellectual’s vocation, which as Edward Said so memorably, consists of “relentless erudition”, always engaging with issues of this world with an other-worldly detachment - something that Ramu Gandhi had already demonstrated in Sita’s Kitchen which he wrote to express his anguish at the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. I last met this habitual loner at the launch of his brother Rajmohan’s biography of their beloved grandfather, the father of the nation. He looked slightly unwell, but intellectual passion in his eyes shone undiminished. He chose to stay in one quiet corner, nurturing his willed solitude and apartness from the crowd. He looked like “a monk in the world”, albeit one who is not averse to camaraderie – not an easy thing in the best of times, as Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote so clairvoyantly. — Indo-Asian News Service |
Chatterati The similarity between the elections to the office of the President of India, who is the constitutional guardian, and the selection of a coach for the Indian cricket team, is amazing. Never has our political elite found it so difficult to zero in on who is going to live in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The comparison between the two may appear absurd but it has so many common factors. First, the timing is unfavourable for both. Both cases involve many decision-makers. Making an appropriate choice is critical in both the cases. After all, Giani Zail Singh was a “different” President who did give Rajiv Gandhi a tough time. In cricket, the coach will have to put up with pressures from the various heads within the BCCI, along with the great expectations of the public. Dealing with senior players would be another headache – the senior players are the coalition partners in the case of the UPA’s President. The President has to be politically well-read. He should know that the honour coming his way is not on merit but because of political adjustments. He should therefore be suitable for all allies. As of now the coaches have had the last laugh. Two coaches have declined the offer from the richest Cricket board in the world. Thank God, for once the arrogant BCCI is at a loss. Well, if the BCCI is over-worked in trying to lay hands on a coach who does not say no, the Congress is busy trying to make sure that the Congressmen and allies say yes to the High Command choice and not cross vote. The Congress zeroed in on Pratibha Patil after going through so many names. But the BCCI is still to find their ‘yes’ man to coach the Indian team. Preferred choices at the power table No wonder senior Congress guys would love to be in the shoes of the Lalus and the Mayas. They may have slogged for decades, but they will never get the same attention the heads of the parties in the UPA. Who but Maya gets to have dinner with Mrs Gandhi for over two hours? Of course, if Mrs Gandhi had to spend two hours, she also got a ‘yes’ for her choice as President. Knowing Behanji, her pound of flesh will soon have to be paid. It was clearly a very busy time for Mrs Gandhi. She also attended the 60th birthday bash of her greatest fan, Lalu Yadav. The night was lit by firecrackers. The lawn was decorated with fresh flowers and guests tasted the Bihari delicacies to the tune of old melodies. The cake was baked in the shape of a train. The Prime Minister, P. Chidambaram, Pranab Mukherjee and A.R. Antulay wished Laluji the very best. Who gets to cut the cake to the clapping of the PM and Mrs Gandhi? Only Lalu and Maya have celebrated their birthdays in such style. |
A wealthy person should look to his superior and poor to poorer person and thus the grace of Ishwara can be adjudged distinctively. —The Vedas He who helps the believers of Ishwara in the hour of need and he who helps the oppressed, him will Ishwara help in the gateway of paradise. —The Vedas God’s command directs the path. — Guru Nanak
—Mother Teresa
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