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Licensed to kill Truth about Rizwanur Ailing higher education |
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Monks confront military regime
High-strung parenting
On guard in Kashmir The crazier the theory, the better Defence Notes
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Licensed to kill HORRIFYING incidents like the Khalra murder and the Connaught Place shooting expose the real face of the Indian police and show how ugly it is. It was poetic justice that the horrible visage got a judicial slap that it richly deserved this Tuesday. While the seven-year rigorous imprisonment handed down to the policemen who tortured and shot dead Jaswant Singh Khalra was increased to life imprisonment by the Punjab and Haryana High Court, a Delhi court convicted Delhi Police ACP S.S.Rathi and nine other policemen for bumping off Pradeep Goel and Jagjit Singh, two Haryana businessmen. The sentence in the second case is to be pronounced on October 24. Nobody can bring back the slain persons but the judgements would at least be a befitting lesson to the trigger-happy cops that they don’t have a licence to kill. Licence or no licence, the Punjab Police eliminated many a terrorist through encounters, which were anything but genuine. But Mr Khalra was not even a terrorist. He was a human rights activist who was looking into the deaths of innocent persons killed in fake encounters. How was he to know that he was going to become one of them soon enough? His torture and murder is a blot which the Punjab Police will be hard put to wipe away. The Connaught Place shootout was no less. Apparently, it was a case of mistaken identity. The policemen thought a UP gangster and his accomplices were in the car and rained bullets on them. As is their wont, they fired first and asked questions later. The way they planted a pistol and live cartridges in the car to befool the investigators not only made their murderous mistake all the more heinous, but also laid bare the time-tested methods of the so-called encounter specialists. The forensic expert who should have nailed the police claim, instead, joined hands with the police in giving a false report. He is also under scanner for his controversial role in the Jessica Lal murder case. One wonders whether anything is being done even now to eliminate such barbaric methods from the police list of “standard procedures”. |
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Truth about Rizwanur THE ruling Left Front in West Bengal appears to be getting few things right when it comes to administration of the state, particularly the role of the police. Be it Singur and Nandigram or the case of Rizwanur Rahman, the police is in focus for not acting in accordance with the law. Given the issues of policy involved, public and political intervention in Singur and Nandigram is understandable. There should not have been any need for public protests and pressure in a murder case. Yet, they appear to have been necessary because the conduct of the state police is not only suspect but the very investigation of Rizwanur’s murder has been vitiated by money power, political muscle and communal considerations. In the event, the Calcutta High Court ordering the CBI to investigate the death of Rizwanur is more than an indictment of the state CID; it is a ringing endorsement of the intervention by civil society to rescue the case for fair investigation, free of unlawful influences. The fact that crowds had gathered outside the court and cheered the order attests to the utter lack of public faith in the state police. Such police conduct as has come in for adverse notice cannot be condoned in any state; less so in a state ruled by the Left Front, which professedly represents the interests of the weaker sections. Rizwanur, a computer graphics teacher who married the daughter of a rich businessman against the wishes of her family, was found dead near Kolkata’s railway tracks on September 21. His body had multiple injuries and the suspicion that he had been murdered grew with the perception that the police was attempting a cover-up. The case triggered an outcry, which compelled the government to order a judicial enquiry. The developments in this case underscore that the police in West Bengal commands little public confidence and, therefore, civil society needs to be ever vigilant and ready to intervene when the authorities don’t act within the bounds of law. |
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Ailing higher education SO Mr Arjun Singh, Union Minister for Human Resource Development, finds higher education a ‘sick child’. And whose fault is that? His comment was made at a national conference of vice-chancellors on ‘Development, Inclusion and Excellence’. Barring a few shining examples, our higher education institutions have indeed shown the symptoms of several maladies. Hopefully, they are not terminal, and efforts will be made to revive them before it is too late. More likely though, the system will just muddle along, with incremental improvements that are always just enough to keep the whole show going. There is no doubt that the system needs to work on all three parameters of development, inclusion and excellence. There is precious little development, and excellence is a scattered phenomenon, rather than the norm. Inclusiveness is indeed a critical concern, and no society can afford to be comfortable with limiting the access of large sections of its own population to higher education. Mr Arjun Singh’s own obsession with reservations has generated much passion and rancour and has prevented more imaginative solutions from coming to the fore. The National Knowledge Commission has made several important recommendations with regard to higher education, and these form a good starting point. It, too, talks about a “quiet crisis” which needs a “systematic overhaul” with the objectives of “expansion, inclusion and excellence.” It has stressed, among other things, the need to create many more universities, including 50 “national universities”, and promoting more autonomy and accountability in the existing administrative structures. While it sees reservations as “essential”, it has also stressed the need for a diversity of responses. Clearly, policy makers and administrators have a lot of thinking and hard work to do. The sickness is all-pervasive and deep, and we are yet to make a beginning in trying out a cure. |
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It’s not that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem. |
Monks confront military regime In stormy street protests in 1988 all cross Burma that brought down the one-party socialist regime of Gen Ne Win, over three thousand people perished when the army opened fire on peaceful demonstrators. Like most democracies across the world, India voiced strong condemnation of the massacres. Despite its relatively friendly relations with the Ne Win regime, the US joined the chorus of international condemnation of the crackdown, prompting a senior American diplomat in Rangoon to tell The Washington Post: “Since there are no US bases and very little strategic interest, Burma is one place where the United States has the luxury of living up to its principles.” A few months later, students across China started a wave of protests that culminated in a ruthless suppression at the Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, where demonstrating students faced tanks of the Peoples’ Liberation Army. According to the Chinese Red Cross and Chinese Students Association, between 2000 and 3000 students perished in the carnage that followed. But Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi — who thoroughly enjoyed the discomfiture of the Marxist government in West Bengal whose leaders were taunted by Congress party leaders in the state for their deafening silence at the carnage in Beijing, — chose not to criticise the massacre primarily because of the gains flowing from his visit to China in December 1988. However, the massacres in Rangoon, Mandalay and Beijing led to a new bonding between China’s communist leaders and Myanmar’s military rulers. There have been several reasons motivating the close ties that have brought China and Myanmar close to each other since the events of 1988 and 1989. From China’s side, the events of June 1989 showed that the spread of democracy can be contagious. The Chinese leadership has feared (not without justification) that an overthrow of an authoritarian government in Myanmar by a popular movement for democracy will inevitably destabilise its Yunan province, neighbouring Myanmar. China also realises that an isolated Myanmar regime would suit its strategic interests of seeking access to the Indian Ocean and reinforcing its “containment” of India by a presence in the Bay of Bengal. Finally and more recently, China believes that its own energy security will be enhanced by oil and gas pipelines from Myanmar to Yunan — a strategy that will enable it to bypass the Malacca Straits whenever needed. By 1992 India realised that its relentless attempts to isolate the Myanmar regime were getting it nowhere, especially as not only China but also Myanmar’s ASEAN neighbours were following a policy of “constructive engagement” with the military rulers in Yangon. With the Khaleda Zia regime in Bangladesh joining Pakistan in arming and training insurgents in India’s northeastern states, and confronted with problems like narcotics smuggling, India has thereafter worked closely with the regime in Myanmar to handle effectively the troubles related to border management like counter-insurgency operations. With Myanmar joining ASEAN in 1997, cooperation expanded to include efforts to develop road and rail links across Myanmar. And in recent years Myanmar has emerged as a partner for the exploration and supply of significant amounts of natural gas and hydroelectric power. Politically, the military regime showed its desire to maintain a semblance of balance in relations between its two giant neighbours, by supporting India’s candidature for permanent membership of the Security Council and eschewing any gratuitous comments following our nuclear tests of 1998. The recent brutal crackdown on protests by Myanmar’s monks has naturally evoked worldwide condemnation and outraged public opinion in India. But while distant western countries can afford the luxury of unrestrained condemnation, India’s interests in neighbouring Myanmar necessitate a more measured response that takes into account the reality that China will not allow the western world to apply UN sanctions on Myanmar. The other reality is that the military in Myanmar is not going to relinquish power in a hurry and that any move towards democracy in Myanmar can only be evolutionary. As Dr Maung Zami, founder of the Free Burma Coalition, now living in exile and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, recently noted: “Change in Myanmar will come only in generational terms. There needs to be a 10-or-20-year policy, not ratcheting up the pressure right now. Right now it won’t work”. Those in the US and the UK who know Myanmar point out that while American sanctions on Myanmar exports have not impressed Yangon’s rulers, they have resulted in 80,000 textile workers being rendered jobless. Myanmar’s ASEAN neighbours are becoming more open in calling for democratic reforms. Meeting with Myanmar’s Foreign Minister Nyan Win in New York on September 27, his ASEAN counterparts expressed their “revulsion” over reports that “demonstrations in Myanmar are being suppressed”. ASEAN ministers urged Myanmar to “resume its efforts at national reconciliation with all parties concerned” and called for the release of all political detainees, including Aung Saan Suu Kyi. Like ASEAN, India has also stressed the need for “national reconciliation” and urged that the “process of political reform should be more inclusive and broad-based”. In effect, both India and Myanmar’s ASEAN partners are urging the regime that the process of drafting a new constitution that it has embarked upon should be hastened and be made more inclusive by coopting even those who are opposed to the regime. This has also been the thrust of UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative Ibrahim Gambari’s efforts. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has called for “all parties” to exercise restraint, seek stability “through peaceful means”, promote “domestic reconciliation and achieve democracy and development”. More ominously, however, China is reported to have embarked on an “intense programme of training and cooperation” with Myanmar that has “focused on counter-insurgency and the suppression of street protests”. The key liaison man in such Sino-Myanmar cooperation is reported to be one Col Fen Lian, a specialist in psychological warfare and counter-insurgency, stationed in the Chinese Embassy in Yangon. In these circumstances it would be desirable for India to work together with ASEAN on the ways to bring in China to develop an Asian approach on how to evolve a national consensus in Myanmar on a roadmap to democratic governance. Merely resorting to issuing condemnatory statements, as some people suggest, will be of little utility in helping to facilitate a process of political evolution in a friendly neighbouring country. Moreover, if China remains recalcitrant on this issue, western countries could well use the considerable leverage they have by calling into question the utility and appropriateness of the forthcoming Olympics being hosted by China. Western pressure on this score did moderate Chinese recalcitrance on the massacres in
Darfur.
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High-strung parenting
When
it was time to enter our baby daughter in her first school, we chose one that was apparently not “among the top ones.” What we fell for was their claim to be following a method of education that allowed a child’s talents and abilities to flower naturally, apart from the wonderful Sanskrit shlokas that they taught the kids. We were discussing the school with our paediatrician, and he endorsed our choice — but with a caveat: “It is a good school,” he said. “But the people here don’t prefer it, because it doesn’t make their children high-strung.” High-strung? Now, why would anyone want their kids to be high-strung? But it was soon obvious what he meant. Modern parenting is all about pushing the children, hard and early. At school and outside. In the classroom, on stage, in the playfield. Go, go, go. Achieve, achieve. Beat the other kids. Falling back is not an option. How will they survive in the rat race tomorrow? High strung children are competitive children. With competitive parents. I recalled a dinner table conversation with relatives of ours visiting from Bombay. The young son had a tight daily schedule and a full calendar. He was coping well enough. But he startled us with a casual comment: “The only time I don’t feel pressurised is when I am at school.” Wow! But I realised what full-blooded competitive parenting was all about, when I came up against some of the parents who brought their kids to Chandigarh’s horse riding school. Now, horse riding is a great leveller. It does not matter whether you are a man or a woman, a child or an adult. Though it is physically demanding, it does not require great strength. That said, I was astonished to find that I, one of the few adult riders there, was as much a “target” of these parents as the other kids, or the stable staff, or the coach. “Which horse is he riding? Can’t my child have the same one?” Or, “where is he going? Can’t my child go there to?” Or, “he had a ride in the jungle? Hey, what about my kid?” If their child passed my horse in the arena, that was a source of delight to them. If I was struggling on one, that pleased them. “For what?” I asked friends helplessly. “How is a 38-year-old bloke who is not going to enter a single competition with them, a threat?” That is the way it is, I have been told. “It is fight, fight, fight. Aggression is prized and rewarded. It is not enough if your child is doing well. What if someone else is doing better?” It is no consolation that their own kids are a target. I have seen parents hanging on the rail, tension on their faces, urging their little ones on. “Relax,” I want to say. “Give the poor kiddie a little time. No one becomes a rider in two days.” But giving unsolicited advice is one of the most dangerous things you can do, so I say nothing. And after all, I am “competition.” There is nothing wrong with healthy competition. As everyone knows, it can spur us on. But the paediatrician did not mis-speak at all. The goal is indeed to get “high-strung.” And that, clearly, is playing with fire. We will create a generation that may be highly capable, but is, at the same time, highly fragile, liable to snap in a stray wind. Count me out from this
one. |
On guard in Kashmir
Much
has been written and said about demilitarisation in Jammu and Kashmir. While some of the political parties, including the PDP that is part of the ruling alliance, have been quite vocal in calling for demilitarisation, the security establishment has consistently maintained that the situation is not yet ripe for substantial reduction in the number of troops stationed in J&K, particularly in Kashmir Valley. An objective assessment of the pros and cons of demilitarisation is called for. By all yardsticks of measurement, a fair degree of normalcy has now returned to J&K. Unlike a decade go, the road arteries are open to civilian and military traffic, schools, colleges and hospitals are functioning normally, trade and commerce are looking up, development has picked up pace, tourists are visiting Kashmir in droves and political leaders are able to freely address small crowds at street corners. The Kashmiri youth are no longer volunteering to join the so-called Jihad despite continuing threats and coercion by various tanzeems. However, though infiltration from across the LoC has been checked considerably by the army, incidents of sporadic violence – grenade attacks, IED blasts and random killings of civilians – continue to be unacceptably large in number. Intelligence agencies estimate the number of terrorists in J&K as varying between 1,500 and 2,000, including a hard core nucleus of about 400 to 500. Regular encounters continue to take place between these mercenary terrorists and the security forces. Counter-insurgency operations are now being conducted by the army very selectively. These are based on confirmed intelligence and are specially designed to be non-intrusive so as not to cause any harassment to the Kashmiri people. Massive cordon-and-search operations at the crack of dawn, that had been the hallmark of the early-1990s, have long since been discarded. The refrain today is to let a terrorist go where there is even an iota of doubt, but ensure that no innocent civilian is harmed. The army and other intelligence agencies intercept 15,000 to 20,000 radio and telephone messages from the ISI handlers and JeM and LeT controllers across the LoC to terrorist leaders in J&K every month. Most of these are orders to guide and control operations and messages to motivate area and district commanders to do more to be more pro-active. About 1,200 to 1,500 trained terrorists are reported to be waiting in 50 to 60 in training camps-cum-holding areas across the LoC in POK and in other parts of Pakistan for infiltration orders from the ISI. Clearly, the remaining roots of militancy in J&K now lie across the LoC and in Pakistan. The Pakistan Army and the ISI have opted to lie low for the time being as they cannot afford to fight on three fronts simultaneously: proxy war with India in J&K and elsewhere; counter-insurgency operations against the al Qaeda and Taliban forces on the western front with American forces breathing heavily down their necks and threatening to launch raids across the Durand Line into Pakistan; and, crippling internal instability in the NWFP and Baluchistan and urban areas. Hence, the present rapprochement process with India is not a long-term strategic change of heart for peace with India but a tactical ploy to lull India into a sense of complacency and to mollify the international community. The ISI is keeping the machinery for infiltration and terrorist activities well oiled and can raise the ante again whenever they need to, for example if things tend to spin out of control on the domestic front. Under these circumstances, demilitarisation in J&K is a sensitive issue from the security point of view. By definition demilitarisation means 'to eliminate the military character of', 'to prohibit military forces or installations in' and 'to replace military control with civilian control' (Oxford Dictionary). A duly elected civilian government rules in J&K and by no stretch of the imagination can the 'character' of J&K be described as military in nature - unlike in the Northern Areas across the LoC or in Myanmar. Through a three-tier deployment, the army maintains a constant vigil on the LoC to counter infiltration attempts. It also conducts counter-insurgency operations along with the Rashtriya Rifles in the hinterland of J&K based on accurate intelligence. The physical presence of the J&K police, J&K armed police and the central police and para-military forces (CPMFs) ensures human security in the towns and the security of government property and sensitive installations. Rear area security, that is, keeping the road arteries open for traffic and simultaneously preventing the terrorists from using these for their operations, is responsibility between that is shared by the army and the CPMFs. Large-scale operations are no longer being conducted at night, but vigorous patrolling prevents the terrorists from moving unhindered and striking at will. Sustained intelligence gathering operations, which rely on both electronic and human intelligence, seek out terrorist hideouts and sanctuaries so that these can be destroyed. The operational aim is to keep the terrorist groups on the run, deny them logistics sustenance and to wear them out by allowing them no rest, so as to eventually demoralise them and force them to surrender and join the mainstream. The present situation can only be describes as a strategic stalemate. The security situation is not getting much worse but is improving only marginally. In case the army and other security forces pull out of J&K prematurely, the terrorist groups will be able to establish their control over large areas and the writ of the civil administration will no longer run. They will also rest, recoup and re-group, launch fresh recruitment drives and set up a network to raise funds. Attacks on security forces convoys and non-separatist civilian political leaders will again increase and incidents of rape and loot will come to the fore. The J&K police and armed police are neither trained nor suitably equipped to successfully fight foreign-trained mercenary terrorists. These issues need to be seriously addressed before demilitarisation can be considered. The writer is Additional Director, Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi |
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The crazier the theory, the better There’s
one question no one has raised at this inquest into Diana’s crash. Is it really possible that an elaborate murder, involving flashing lights, redirected cameras and ghostly Fiat Unos, could be organised by a family made up of bumbling aristocratic idiots incapable of crossing the road without an equerry? If they wanted to be rid of Diana, Prince Philip would have just yelled “Chase her through a tunnel? Stuff that, I’ll do her with my twelve-bore.” If only someone would make this obvious point, the whole thing would be settled and the country could save ten million quid. But conspiracy theories are more popular than ever, and they’re everywhere. Last week I spoke at a rally supporting a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and did two separate interviews for websites that went the same way. About 30 seconds in, I was asked what I thought were the real reasons for the collapse of the twin towers. One of them kept saying with increasing volume “How many buildings collapsed that day Mr Steel, I ask you how many?” with such vigour I was on the point of confessing to blowing them up myself. In short, the conspiracy argument surrounding the twin towers seems to be: “First the planes full of fuel fly into the towers and explode. Then the towers collapse. And they expect us to believe these two events are connected? Do they think we’re stupid?” But it’s a mistake to get into a discussion because then comes a battery of unanswerable questions, such as: “How could the steel have melted when it had a residual heat capacity of 145 oblm per 10,000 over nine with an impact resistance factor of Rockall, Finistaire, South-West, six rising to seven, moderate gales likely. Huh?” There’s such a relentless certainty about them. They might, as several websites do, suggest there were no planes involved at all. But if you said, “So where did the fire come from?”, they’d look at you as if you were stupid and say: “The CIA bred dragons. And sent them to the 95th floor of both towers. Obviously.” There are otherwise rational people who claim the planes were holograms and the debris from the planes was planted. Next time someone tells me that, I’ll reply that they’ve missed the point, because the towers themselves were holograms, and anyone who thinks they went up them was in fact hypnotised to think that by the lift operator who was, in fact, a CIA agent. The more deranged theories might be limited to a few busy bloggers, but the basic conspiracy theories have become hugely popular. Millions believe Diana was murdered, and in America 36 per cent believe that federal officials took part in the attacks on New York. Not all of these people can be mad, and part of the reason for these figures may be that the authorities have been blatant liars in recent years. The Vietnam War escalated after US ships were said to have been fired upon, when this was made up. The Falklands War depended on sinking the General Belgrano for heading towards the British fleet, though this was made up. And the Iraq war depended on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction ... do you detect a pattern here? But these are lies that not only illustrate the willingness of governments to deceive their population. They also show their limitations, because a government can’t rule through a handful of loyal robotic agents, who convey a series of fairy stories to the easily duped masses. Orchestrated lies depend on the connivance of a wide layer of people, and there are always those who break ranks. And then, especially when a war is as unpopular as the one in Iraq, millions become sceptical of the Government’s statements. So the case for the war was exposed, which added to the movement against it. What we know they do for certain is bad enough. George Bush justified the war every day by saying Saddam was responsible for the attack on the twin towers when he knew that wasn’t true. Blair and Bush both exploited the atrocity by using it to justify a war that would have happened anyway. There’s no need to add extra bits in that to sound crazy. It would be like if Robert Mugabe were arrested, and someone started screaming: “Never mind what he’s done to Zimbabwe, I’ve got evidence that he’s Voldemort and tried to murder Harry Potter.” The conspiracy theory can only make people feel helpless, as if we’re under the control of an unbeatable sinister machine, capable of orchestrating every massive event and manipulating the whole population, except for a handful who see through them. So they can end up helping the governments they’re supposed to be exposing. So the more you think this through, the more obvious it seems that conspiracy theories and their websites are all started by MI6 and the CIA, the cunning bastards. By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Defence Notes The
Ministry of Defence (MoD) is looking at reworking the procedures for purchasing military hardware to bring them in line with international practices. A number of suggestions are being looked into to ensure that the country has a new Defence Procurement Policy (DPP) by the beginning of the next fiscal year. A committee headed by former finance secretary N.S. Sisodia is currently studying the suggestions. A team had also visited Britain to study the prevailing policy there. A comprehensive report is expected to be submitted to the ministry by early next year, which would form the basis of the new DPP. The need for reworking the policy has arisen as the offset clause in the previous policy released in 2006 has become a matter of concern with various countries. The policy contained three critical elements, the offset clause, no single-vendor purchase and compulsory transfer of technology.
Wings on Hawks The first six Indian Air Force (IAF) flying instructors have successfully completed their ‘Convex Flying Programme’ on the BAE Systems’ Hawk aircraft. Once the first Hawks have been delivered to the Indian Air Force later this year, these instructors will develop the new advanced fast jet training system and begin training students who will be the IAF’s next generation frontline pilots. Under the 10-week programme the pilots carried out ground school training and simulator sorties at RAF Valley, avionics training at BAE Systems, and sea survival training, prior to undertaking flying training. The flying phase covers 15 flights per pilot (including night flying) over a 5-week period, demanding a particularly high flying rate. The course had been very wide ranging, covering all aspects of fast jet flying training. Despite the unseasonable UK weather, the 90 required sorties were flown in just five weeks using, on average, only two aircraft.
Private initiative Tata Motors has developed a range of armoured vehicles and have displayed the same at the Military World Games 2007, being held in Hyderabad. Among the armoured vehicles the company has developed are a bus and a troop carrier, Sumo and Safari. Being displayed for the first time, the indigenously developed bus is a 29-seater with features like shatter proof glass, under-belly blast protection and side bomb protection. It is currently undergoing trials with the Indian army.
Singapore pact India and Singapore have signed an agreement for a long-term arrangement for joint training and exercises between the Indian Air Force and the Republic of Singapore Air Force. The agreement was signed by the Defence Secretary Vijay Singh and his counterpart Chiang Chie Foo, during the two-day fourth India-Singapore Defence Policy Dialogue held recently. |
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