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Arjun disarmed Campus on the boil |
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Healthy proposal
Pugwash initiative on Kashmir
No kid stuff
North Pole: Russia’s claim questioned Used as
labourers, abandoned Giant, unsafe dam in Iraq threatens millions
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Arjun disarmed THE rejection by the Supreme Court of the Centre’s plea for vacating the stay on the implementation of 27 per cent quota for the other backward classes (OBCs) in professional institutions like the IIMs and IITs is a major setback for Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh. He was keen to introduce the quota from this year though admissions to the IIMs and IITs were over. He had asked his ministry to get the OBC seats filled in once the court vacated the stay order. The five-member Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan ruled that it would examine the constitutional validity of the impugned legislation first. It took exception to the Centre’s instructions to all institutions to go ahead with their infrastructure upgrade even before the Bench started hearing the petitions. The vacation of the stay would have created confusion among the students with some getting the benefit of the quota and many others losing it. This would have also created fresh tension between the pro-and anti-reservationists. Significantly, this is the third time the Centre has lost its appeal for the vacation of the stay. In its application, the Centre did not cite any new ground for its plea. Nor did it mention the number of seats it had increased in the institutions concerned and the criteria for the cut-off. In fact, the government is yet to address the main question raised by the two-member Bench which first stayed the impugned legislation on March 29 — the faulty mode of selecting data based on the 1931 census for providing quota to the OBCs. Its reference to the court decision which allowed the Tamil Nadu government’s 69 per cent quota was irrelevant because it was included in the Ninth Schedule and was an interim arrangement. Now that the Constitution Bench has started hearing the petitions challenging the Act, the Centre will have to wait for the final judgement. It was illogical for the HRD Minister to implement the quota in a hurry without doing the necessary homework. More important, he cannot brush aside the widespread anxiety and concern among the anti-reservation groups. The March 29 stay order has helped cool down tempers on both sides. Wednesday’s order, too, will serve a similar purpose.
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Campus on the boil FIRST, Punjab Agricultural University saw a change of guard when the Vice-Chancellor, Dr K.S. Aulakh, resigned, alleging political interference in the affairs of the university. Now the Punjabi University Vice-Chancellor, Mr Swaran Singh Boparai, has gone on record saying that the “top political family of Punjab” is behind the latest trouble on the campus. The Akali Dal government had even tried to bypass the Punjab Public Service Commission but the UPSC did not oblige it. The smooth functioning of autonomous institutions is being disturbed without any apparent case of wrongdoing. Mr Boparai is in no mood to quit like Dr Aulakh. He views the arrest of his confidant and Registrar of the university, Dr B.S. Sandhu, on the charge of taking a bribe as an attempt to target him ultimately. While it is for the court to decide the case against Dr Sandhu, the peaceful atmosphere on the campus has got vitiated. There is a joint action committee which has been agitating for quite some time to seek the removal of the Vice-Chancellor. Although the university Syndicate had on August 6 constituted a five-member committee to look into its grievances, the JAC is back in action, trying to fish in troubled water. Then there are private B.Ed colleges owned by politicians. The university had disaffiliated some and fined others up to Rs 1 crore for not following the university regulations. They are also after the VC’s blood. Politicisation of the universities in Punjab prevents them from emerging as centres of excellence. Though on paper they are autonomous, dependence on state government aid makes them vulnerable to political interference. Punjabi University has managed its affairs fairly well and the VC has taken personal interest to make higher education available to rural students and mobilise funds from overseas Punjabis. He is at the receiving end for being a Congress appointee. Such troubles can be avoided if politicians are kept off universities and appointments are made on merit and through established procedures.
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Healthy proposal THE Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry’s proposal requiring doctors to undergo 60 hours of medical education and re-register every five years has not come a day too soon. In fact, this is something the Medical Council of India (MCI) should have got the government lay down years ago. If the issue has not been raised till now and there has been no debate on the need for such a programme of re-registration that may well be because the medical community found it convenient to let things continue as they were. It is indeed amazing that doctors who avowedly root for practices, equipment, standards, drugs and compensation comparable to the best in the world should have remained silent about the need for continuing education. More amazing is that despite Indian doctors being competitive — and in demand to sustain medical services in some of the developed countries — India is one of the few countries where a doctor can practise forever once he has cleared the MBBS examination. Such a practice would be unthinkable in other countries that maintain a measure of standards. In fact, in most such countries continuing medical education is compulsory and the doctors are assessed periodically as a precondition for renewing their licence to practise. It is high time that India too adopted this as a standard procedure. Doubtless, doctors as a community will protest and come up with a variety of arguments to show how this would be wasteful, bureaucratic, discouraging and fraught with difficulties and problems. None of these objections merit the least consideration, as doctors need to update themselves with the advances in medical science and practices. The medical profession cannot be sustained for the convenience and benefit of doctors. It should function in the interest of the public. Therefore, in this case medical standards are too important to be left to the doctors alone. The sooner the Union government gets going with this proposal the better it would be for the health of the nation.
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I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. — Sydney Smith
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Pugwash initiative on Kashmir
Colonel
V. Vasant and his radio operator Lance-Naik Ganapat Shashikant were gunned down while thwarting terrorists attempting to infiltrate across the Line of Control in the Uri sector of North Kashmir on July 31. The deaths of Colonel Vasant and Lance-Naik Shashikant are mourned by all those who are moved by the sacrifices of our men in uniform. India’s ruling political class, however, appears to be too busy empathising with the families of suspected terrorists, to take note of such sacrifices. On the same day when the infiltration bid occurred, a Pakistan national, Abdul Wahab, was arrested at Kathmandu airport while disembarking from a flight from Karachi. Wahab was carrying counterfeit Indian currency notes amounting to Rs 1 crore in five-hundred and one- thousand rupee notes. The Nepal police described Wahab as being part of an “organised network” involved in the smuggling of counterfeit Indian currency from Pakistan. Barely two days earlier, six people, including four Gujarati tourists, were killed and 26 injured in a terrorist bomb blast in Srinagar. Terrorism across our borders remains rooted in the Pakistani psyche. These incidents occurred just after I returned from a conference on confidence-building measures in Jammu and Kashmir organised by the Nobel Prize-winning Pugwash Conference. For some inexplicable reason, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who swears by his commitment to “make borders irrelevant” and “transparency” in the conduct of his policies, allowed his security establishment to thwart such conferences in India by denying visas to participants from Pakistan, Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) and the Northern Areas (NA). The Colombo Conference was attended by senior political figures from all mainstream parties in J&K, including the Congress, the PDP, the National Conference and the BJP. There was similar high-level participation from POK led by a former “Prime Minister” of POK, Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan. Delegates from the isolated NA also participated in the conference. Dr Manmohan Singh has remained non-committal on demands for “demilitarisation” in Jammu and Kashmir, resulting in a widespread impression that he is not averse to early troop reductions, as a gesture of “goodwill”. In Colombo, participants from some of the regional parties joined the separatists from the Hurriyat Conference to make a strong demand for “demilitarisation” and an immediate pullout of troops from urban centres like Srinagar, Kupwara and Baramula. Interestingly, those representing national parties like the Congress and the BJP did not favour any precipitate withdrawal or reduction of forces. Further, it emerged that demands for troop reductions and removal from urban areas were largely from parties from the Kashmir valley. People from the Jammu and Ladakh regions held very different views. One representative from POK held that it was ridiculous for General Musharraf to talk of “self-governance” as POK was effectively ruled by the bureaucracy and military from Islamabad, with “four families” enacting a charade of legitimacy. References were also made to a recent report of the European Parliament which had drawn attention to the absence of democratic freedoms in both POK and NA. The unwillingness of the Manmohan Singh government to categorically tell mainstream and separatist parties in J&K that there can be no question of meaningful redeployment or reduction of troops in J&K unless Pakistan’s infrastructure of terrorism is fully dismantled is leading to the belief that New Delhi can be “persuaded” that it will move ahead with redeployments. Participants in the conference suggested that the Manmohan Singh government had given hints earlier this year to the Pakistan government that troop reductions and redeployments in major towns in the Kashmir valley were distinct possibilities once the Himalayan snows melted. Astonishingly, it has not been explained that if “demilitarisation” is attempted now, with over 2000 terrorists in J&K and hundreds ready for infiltration across the LoC, urban centres would be taken over by armed jihadis, who can then be evicted only in messy urban warfare, with heavy losses in civilian lives. But at the same time, legitimate complaints from the people of the armed forces having bunkered themselves in apple orchards, schools and other buildings will have to be addressed by expeditious redeployment in other locations. One of the major achievements of the dialogue process on Jammu and Kashmir has been the opening of routes like the Srinagar-Muzzafarabad bus service. But here again, this initiative has been so badly implemented, by introducing restrictive procedures that make travel across the LoC virtually impossible, that New Delhi has only earned the wrath of people in Kashmir and exposed itself to justifiable Pakistani and international criticism about its policies. In Colombo, detailed statistics were provided to show that the Srinagar-Muzzafarabad bus went practically empty because of absurd procedures introduced by our intelligence agencies that show little relation to reality. Surely, a person travelling by the bus is hardly in a position to carry AK47 rifles, rocket launchers or RDX. And subversion can be as easily achieved electronically as by personal contacts. A Working Group headed by former Foreign Secretary M.K. Rasgotra has made a number of recommendations on simplifying procedures for two-way travel across the LoC. These measures, even though somewhat conservative, and moves to open new routes and permit exchanges of students, professionals, journalists and academics across the LoC need to be undertaken soon if the government is to retain credibility about its seriousness in implementing its stated policies. Similar measures for facilitating trade across the LoC need to be imaginatively pursued in consultation with the Chambers of Commerce concerned. The Colombo Conference demonstrated the lack of imagination of our security agencies, which permit people to receive telephone calls from across the LoC, but ban calls from our side of the LoC at a time when terrorists can easily use SIM cards issued in Pakistan and when hundreds of satellite phones are now used in J&K. Perhaps our geniuses dealing with national security need to be reminded that we are not living in the Stone Age, but in the electronic age! Sri Lanka, now a haven for Indian tourists and unquestionably one of our friendliest neighbours, was a wonderful venue for a conference to promote the peace process in J&K. But there is an air of anxiety and fear in Colombo, with apprehensions that the LTTE is set to strike after its losses in the Eastern province and moves by the government to prepare for the use of military force to oust the terrorist outfit from its northern strongholds. But experiences worldwide suggest that there are no military solutions to festering political sores. Credible measures on the devolution of power are essential for peace to return to the strife-torn
island.
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No kid stuff
YOU do not usually ask an eight-year-old what her vision is for India in the next two decades. For, as a mother of a seven-year-old, I know their vision is limited to the next year’s birthday bash and the Yo-bike they are likely to get from their grandparents as a gift on that Big Day. But this girl was different. So, I asked her how she visualised India in the coming years. In halting English, she replied that India of her vision was a clean and green nation with no pollution and no traffic congestion and where all children attended school. Both as a journo and as a mother, I was impressed! But then, as I mentioned at the outset, she was no ordinary child. She was the one who managed to impress former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam with a very pertinent question when she met him on May 22, 2006. She was one of the children who had an opportunity to meet the President at Rashtrapati Bhavan to hear about his ‘Vision 2020’. All the other children were from a school at Darwa in Haryana. She was a backbencher as she was included in the group at the eleventh hour. Since she did not belong to the school from which the other children came, she did not have a uniform, which could have been a terrible blow to any child’s confidence level. But not her! She was made of sterner stuff. When Kalam prompted them to participate in the discussion, she got up and asked with all the confidence she could master—“Why can’t India become a developed nation before the year 2020?” It got Kalam thinking and he told her that he would like to take her to Parliament House so that she could get her answer right from the horses’ mouth — the leaders. Things changed since then. The President has gone and the promised visit to Parliament has not materialised. But she has not forgotten him. She has vivid memories of her meeting with the President. After all, it was his kindly tone and fatherly disposition that made her feel at home at Rashtrapati Bhavan. The admiration was mutual. For President Kalam, her question revealed the aspirations of 540 million youth of the nation who want to live in a prosperous, safe and proud India. Small wonder that he made a special mention of this Chandigarh girl, Sai Anukriti’s name in his thanksgiving address to the nation on July
24.
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North Pole: Russia’s claim questioned
A Russian expedition reached the North Pole last week and sent two men in submarines 2.65 miles below the Arctic Ocean to explore the seabed – and, not incidentally, to plant a titanium capsule containing the red, white and blue Russian flag. The explorers want bragging rights for a journey they compare to “taking the first step on the moon,” but they are also pressing Russia’s claim to a vast swath of the Arctic Ocean. The flag-planting ritual and the thinking behind the Russians’ audacious territorial claims have their roots in the development and use of the Doctrine of Discovery by European and American explorers from the 15th through the 20th centuries. Starting with Pope Nicholas V in 1455, the Europeans conveniently declared their divine right to empty land or to land occupied by “pagans and enemies of Christ.” The main requirement was just first-come, first-served discovery. When it comes to applying the discovery doctrine in the 21st century, Russia is hardly alone. Climate change is shrinking the Arctic icecap and opening new sea lanes, fisheries, oil fields and mineral caches for exploitation. Barren islands are suddenly valuable. A new race to explore, conquer and acquire another “new world” is on. For example, the United States and Canada are in a dispute about Canadian claims that an emerging Northwest Passage sea route is in its territory. The US insists that the waters are neutral and open to all, but Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper states that he will place military icebreakers in the area “to assert our sovereignty and take action to protect our territorial integrity.” Canada is also facing off against Denmark over tiny Hans Island near northwestern Greenland. In 1984, Denmark’s minister for Greenland affairs landed on the island in a helicopter and raised the Danish flag, buried a bottle of brandy and left a note that said “Welcome to the Danish Island.” Canada was not amused. In 2005, the Canadian defense minister and troops landed on the island and hoisted the Canadian flag. Denmark lodged a protest. Planting a flag or burying brandy isn’t enough these days to guarantee possession – international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea are invoked. But historically, staking a physical claim is the first rule of the discovery doctrine. Spanish, Portuguese and, later, English and French explorers engaged in all sorts of rituals on encountering new lands: hoisting the flag, displaying the Christian cross and leaving evidence to prove who was there first. In 1776-78, for example, Capt. James Cook established English claims to British Columbia by burying bottles of English coins in several locations. In 1774, he erased Spanish marks of possession in Tahiti and replaced them with English ones. On learning of this, Spain dispatched explorers to restore its claim. Nearly 40 years earlier, in 1742-49, French military expeditions buried lead plates along the Ohio River. The plates stated that they were “a renewal of possession” that dated from 1643. Americans also staked their claims. The Lewis and Clark expedition marked and branded trees and rocks in the Pacific Northwest to prove the American presence and claim to the region. It also left a document at Ft. Clatsop, at the mouth of the Columbia River, in March 1806, and gave copies to Indians to deliver to whites who might arrive later to prove the US claim to the Northwest. As the document stated, it was posted and circulated so that “through the medium of some civilised person . . . it may be made known to the informed world” that Lewis and Clark had secured land rights all the way to the Pacific Ocean on behalf of the US government. A decade later, as the US and England argued about dueling discovery claims to the Pacific Northwest, US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and President James Monroe ordered American officials back to the Columbia “to reassert the title of the United States.” In August 1818, Capt. James Biddle performed a textbook discovery ritual: In the presence of Chinook Indians on the north side of the Columbia River, he raised the US flag, turned the soil with a shovel and nailed up a lead plate inscribed: “Taken possession of, in the name and on the behalf of the United States by Captain James Biddle.” He repeated the performance on the south shore of the Columbia, with a wooden sign declaring American ownership of the region. As early as 1790, federal law reflected the discovery doctrine, but it wasn’t until 1823 that the doctrine was formally recognised by the US Supreme Court – and its full meaning spelled out. Indian rights “to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.” In short, Indians couldn’t sell their tribal lands to private citizens because their conquerors – the US government by then – essentially owned them. Today, that aspect of the 600-year-old Doctrine of Discovery still prevails in US and international law. It remains the principle by which the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia continue to control the lands of their indigenous peoples. As to the larger principle of “finders (or claimers) keepers,” it also lives – notwithstanding international treaties. The proof is in that symbolic Russian flag planted 2.65 miles below the North Pole, at the potentially lucrative, already contested bottom of the deep blue Arctic sea.
— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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Used as
labourers, abandoned
Port Blair — Johan Bage is an octogenarian who cannot remember when he retired as a labourer from the Forest Department. His wife Albina Lubun, 70, does not understand why they are in the news now. She recollects her life in the barracks, when it was a camp. There were two barracks with 11 rooms each. Now the families prefer to stay in independent huts. In Shoal Bay, a tiny hamlet in the Andaman Islands, there are approximately 500 migrant labourers from present-day Jharkhand, commonly referred to as Ranchis, staying at various places. The majority has their homesteads at the abandoned forest camp at Number 8. A footpath separates the so-called forest land from the revenue land, where these unknown citizens of the Andaman Islands are leading a peaceful life amidst hectic political activities. Life at the camp goes on uninterrupted. The Ranchi labourers, staying at various camps, forsaken by the Forest Department, are a living testimony as to how people do not figure in our developmental or settlement schemes. Brought from various parts of Chota Nagpur in Bihar in the 1950s and thereafter, these people were employed by the forest department for timber extraction works. The barracks were set up inside reserve forests as residential facility for them and their families. They were provided all amenities like water and electricity connections. They also figure in the electoral rolls of the Islands. They did not encroach into forest lands, but just continued their stay where the forest department has abandoned them high and dry. To make life a little easier, they built small mud huts with thatched roofs - their only known homes now. They have no soaring ambitions, so they never stretched their land holdings beyond their homesteads. There is no design or planning in the alignment of the houses. No house exceeds 150 to 200 sq mtrs of land. If they were genuine encroachers, they could have cleared the forest and extended their holdings, feels a Burmese settler residing nearby, who is sympathetic to their plight. Sabeen Kindo, who does not speak anything other than Ranchi dialect, swears that she does not understand what is happening around her. Etwa Katchwa says that they had fences and small kitchen gardens with lemon trees and banana fonds. Even though all logging activity in the area has been stopped and the camp has been closed, the labourers were left behind by the department. And ironically the same department is trying to evict them from the land now. Out of 105 declared invalid and deleted from the electoral roll, 25 belong to this village and politicians are trying hard to get the remaining deleted as it may hinder their trail to the throne of power. These innocent Ranchis may not understand the intricacies of the dirty politics, but they know where to cast their votes when elections knock on their doors. But the politicians have turned them into outcasts, ensuring that they are kept out of the political mainstream of the
country. — Charkha Features
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Giant, unsafe dam in Iraq threatens millions AS world attention focuses on the daily slaughter in Iraq a devastating disaster is impending in the north of the country where the wall of the giant dam holding back the Tigris river north of Mosul city is in danger of imminent collapse. “It could go at any minute,” says a senior aid-worker with knowledge of the struggle by US and Iraqi engineers to save the dam. “The potential for disaster is very great.” If the dam does fail, a wall of water will sweep into Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city with a population of 1.7 million, 20 miles to the south. Experts say the flood waters could destroy 70 per cent of Mosul and inflict heavy damage 300 kilometres downstream along the Tigris. The dam was built between 1980 and 1984 and has long been known to be in a dangerous condition because of unstable bedrock. ‘The dam was constructed on a foundation of marls, soluble gypsum, anhydrite, and karstic limestone that are continuously dissolving,’ said specialists at the US embassy in a statement. ‘The dissolution creates an increased risk for dam failure.’ In fact the state of the 3.4 kilometre-long earthfill dam, which holds back some 8 billion cubic metres of water in Iraq’s largest reservoir lake, has recently been deteriorating at ever increasing speed. According to one source the total and immediate failure of the dam is now believed to be ‘reasonably high’ at current water levels and ‘most certain’ within the next few years. The effort to prevent the collapse of the dam is overseen by the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources and the US Army Corps of Engineers has made continual efforts to monitor the deterioration and undertake remedial action. But a US report, obtained separately from the embassy statement, says that ‘due to fundamental and irreversible flaws existing in the dam’s foundation, the US Army Corps of Engineers believes that the safety of the Mosul Dam against a potential catastrophic failure cannot be guaranteed.’ Iraq, the site of the biblical flood, is very vulnerable to inundation because it is very flat south of the Kurdish mountains. Prior to the building of dikes and other control measures in the early 20th century there were frequent disastrous floods when snow melted in the mountains of Turkey. The great majority of Iraqis live along the Tigris and Euphrates. If the dam does break specialist sources say that the impact of the flood would be felt all along the Tigris river valley. This would mean heavy damage to cities like Tikrit and Samarra and the floods could reach as far as Baghdad, home to six million people, though by then the force of the floodwaters should have dissipated. Given that the Iraqi government has only intermittent control of this area north of the capital, which is overwhelmingly Sunni Arab, it is unlikely it could undertake effective measures to save lives. The main method used to strengthen the foundations of the Mosul dam is pumping liquid cement into it or grouting. But a US-funded study concluded that grouting would not save the dam although it did need to be continued and enhanced ‘to reduce the probability of failure.’ An international panel of experts called in by the Ministry of Water Resources in Baghdad concluded that a limit should also be placed on the level of the water in the reservoir lake which was done in April last year. The ministry did not respond to enquiries by e-mail and phone about the deteriorating state of the dam. “It is a time bomb waiting to happen,” said the aid worker. “Everybody knows about the threat but they have other preoccupations and, in the case of foreigners, it is now conveniently in Iraqi hands.” He said that on some US communications equipment there is a panic button to be pressed as soon as the dam begins to give way. The unstable bedrock beneath the dam has been known about for a long time. The Iraqi government has been trying to patch it up for 19 years. It is not clear why the dam, known as the ‘Saddam Dam’ prior to 2003, was built where it is, given the solubility of the rock underneath it. The fact that construction began in 1980, the first year of the Iran-Iraq war, and the reservoir began to fill only four years later, may explain why such a gross error about its site was made.
— By arrangement with The Independent
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