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From Bush to Mush Minister or criminal? |
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Empowering women
Nuclear ignorance
Two sides of genocide
Man and superman Time for the British to pay up in Kenya Legal Notes
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From Bush to Mush THE US, believed to be the biggest benefactor of Gen Pervez Musharraf, appears to be putting considerable pressure on him to quickly right the wrongs he has done in Pakistan, resulting in chaos all over that country. It is reportedly reviewing its military and other aid, including the sale of advanced F-16 fighters and P-3 aircraft, to its “key ally in the war on terror” if he does not doff his uniform and hold elections as scheduled for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan. The US advice to President Musharraf has its own significance because he is surviving in office mainly because of being in the good books of Washington. How far the US succeeds remains to be seen. Interestingly, the General has reportedly ignored calls from the White House restraining him from declaring the state of emergency that he did on November 3. The cataclysmic developments in Pakistan have caused worries in most influential world capitals. But the concern expressed by Washington has to be viewed differently because General Musharraf’s actions have a bearing on the people’s attitude in Pakistan towards the US. The suspension of the constitution, taking away of civil liberties, removal of the independent-minded members of the judiciary and gagging of the mass media are bound to create a situation strengthening the already widespread anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. This suits the extremist fringe of society and those supporting or sympathising with the destructive designs of Al-Qaida and the Taliban. The US has to put more pressure on General Musharraf to make him see reason. The cause of fighting terrorism and peace and stability in the region demands that the General must be made to restore the suspended constitution, hold the elections as planned, restore the position of the Pakistan Supreme Court as it existed till the evening of November 3 and hang his military uniform by November 15 as he had promised. In a way, he has to undo the damage he has done to the emerging institutions of Pakistan. The situation may not stabilise in the crisis-ridden country unless he does so. But will he?
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Minister or criminal? Uttar Pradesh
Chief Minister Mayawati has just now armed herself with a new law to fight organised crime by powerful people. She does not have to go far to put it in practice. Only a day after the tough law was adopted, her ministerial colleague Anand Sen Yadav has been accused of having an illicit relationship with a Dalit girl and later murdering her. Ms Mayawati has told him to resign from the Cabinet and has also ordered a CBI enquiry against him. That is the least she should have done. After all, Anand Sen Yadav is her creation. It is she who had given the BSP tickets to him and his father Mitra Sen Yadav, despite knowing full well that they had numerous criminal cases pending against them. This was her way of weakening Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav, with whom the father-son duo was earlier aligned. In fact, she inducted Anand Sen in the Cabinet when he was still in jail. Now that she has offered to clean the Augean stables, she might as well start from her own Cabinet. That will be mandatory atonement. Before this, the Samajwadi Party’s Amar Mani Tripathi has been awarded life sentence in a similar Madhumita murder case. Then there is the infamous Anant Singh case of Bihar, where TV journalists were taken captive and beaten black and blue for daring to ask uncomfortable questions about his alleged involvement in a murder case. But the high-handedness of elected leaders is not confined to these two states. Rather, it is an all-India phenomenon. It can be curbed only if the politicians are punished as severely on being found guilty as any ordinary criminal. In fact, they deserve to be punished harder because when prominent persons indulge in crime, it becomes an example for the common man to emulate. Plus, they also browbeat the law-enforcement agencies into submission. The dividing line between criminals and politicians is getting increasingly blurred. It is time to redraw it, in stone. As we have pleaded repeatedly, criminals deserve to be in jail, not in assemblies or Parliament.
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Empowering women THE government move to ensure that at least 33 per cent direct and indirect benefits of all schemes must reach women and girls is commendable. A road map to empower women socially and economically has been drawn by the Planning Commission, which intends to involve the states too in achieving the social sector targets. These targets include correcting the imbalance in the sex ratio for the 0-to-6 age group, reduction in the gender gap in literacy and access to potable drinking water in all villages. Gender budgeting has become popular in the recent past, but the concept has not been implemented as required. It has not found much favour in states except some like Rajasthan, where the Chief Minister is a woman. Women’s organisations complain that government departments are showing funds earmarked for programmes like the Indira Awas Yojana and the Integrated Child Development Scheme as part of gender budgeting. It is said 95 per cent of the outlay of the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry has been included in the gender budget statement. In the absence of records of how each scheme impacts women, it is difficult to monitor the outcome and plug loopholes. A study of all education and health schemes with regard to the benefit to women and girls can be quite an eye-opener. The National Family Health Survey’s third round estimates that 41 per cent of women, aged 15 to 49, have no formal education as against 18 per cent of men. A 2 per cent education cess is levied on all taxes and it will be interesting to see how much money goes into girls’ education. The launching of schemes or making of gender budgeting claims alone is not enough. The change must be visible at the grassroots level.
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If a man’s foresight were as good as his hindsight, we would all get somewhere. — American proverb
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Nuclear ignorance IT was an amazing pointer by the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr P.K. Iyenger. In a recent speech, he said some (former) prime ministers “did not know what is plutonium”. Provocative though this expression may be, it nevertheless brings out the unpalatable reality of the political elite’s lack of knowledge of India’s nuclear programme, and, in general, about nuclear science and technology as such. In this category we could even include a very large segment of our MPs and quite a few ministers. Such being the narrow range of knowledge, the fallout on the debate on the Indo-US nuclear agreement can well be gauged; the debate is being conducted partly in a vacuum. To this one must join the point that the Indo-US Agreement on Civilian Nuclear Cooperation is a complex accord having few parallels in international treaties and agreements. It has both bilateral and international dimensions, each being equally important. The agreement is on civilian nuclear cooperation, but its military dimension is in a sense even more important. For, the accord straight away confers de facto nuclear weapon power status on India, bypassing the NPT. Encased in the 123 Agreement, this status is to be sealed by the IAEA, an institution under the United Nations, within the terms of the India-specific “safeguards” agreement that the IAEA is to work out with the Indian nuclear establishment. Thus, in order to give shape to this duality, an important feature of the agreement is what is known as a separation plan — demarcating the military facilities and their working from the civilian nuclear reactors and allied facilities, the latter to be under the IAEA safeguards. The issues of future fast breeder reactors, reprocessing spent fuel, the back-up infrastructure for the Indian nuclear programme and imported nuclear reactors and equipment and fuel - specified facilities among these are to be under the IAEA safeguards — do add a structural complexity to this accord, more than any treaty of recent times. Even enlightened leaders of the CPM such as Mr Prakash Karat and Mr Sitaram Yechurry need to make a special effort to comprehend the full import of the nuclear accord. This need is indicated by the CPM leader’s comment - since India’s indigenous nuclear programme is able to deliver the goods, why go in for a searing agreement with the US, binding the country in stiff terms! This comment ignores the fact that one of the first upshots of the agreement would be to give a big impetus to the Indian indigenous nuclear programme by removing its major constraint of meager uranium resources, enabling India to import uranium for its expanding indigenous reactor programme. Mr Yechurry, on the other hand, is worried about the US withdrawing nuclear facilities and material in the event of a rupture, ignoring the most important facet of the agreement — that it lifts barriers from India’s nuclear trade worldwide. Under its terms, nuclear imports by India - reactors and other facilities - need not be restricted to the United States. Actually, France and Russia might be the main source of Indian nuclear reactor imports alongside the US. Russia is already constructing two 1000 MWe light water reactors. And it will sign up for two more similar reactor construction as soon as the agreement is cleared by the NSG. France, too, is waiting for this moment and, of course, the GE of the United States is readying for the race. It will be nice to see the nuclear big three competing, enabling India to draw the best lot with the best financial terms. And so, the hazards of American policies can be cushioned to an extent that they are virtually nullified. Then, there are completely wrong conceptions on safeguards - as if they open the way for an American invading force into Indian nuclear facilities! The IAEA, on the board of which Indian presence is strong, is to administer the safeguards, not the US. Safeguards, under the accord, are a two-faced process. While they prevent any nuclear imported material from overflowing into the Indian military programme, the safeguards are also good for India insofar as they assure a tremendous increase in uranium fuel resources. Similar are benefits for some R&D centers like TIFR and IIPR. The problem is that, by and large, the political class still views nuclear science and technology with coloured glasses handed down from the seventies and eighties of the last century. Viewed mainly as an atom bomb technology, nuclear power is being heavily weighed by high costs, bristling with radiation hazards. And so, the Indo-US civilian nuclear accord is rated rather low. Very few are informed of the ongoing worldwide nuclear advances - a nuclear renaissance - which one witnesses in the developed nations and most noticeably in China. It will be a flip-flop not to take into cognizance the global change in favour of nuclear power as being the most effective alternative to fast diminishing fossil fuels - realisable by virtue of the tremendous nuclear technology development during recent decades, matching in power costs, with zero carbon dioxide emissions, thus providing the answer to the threat of global warming. Even more damaging is the ignorance of the strides that Indian indigenous nuclear capability has attained, placing it among the world’s nuclear front rank. Such being the backdrop, it is the presumed political strings attached to the nuclear accord that takes the front rank for the Left leadership. Coming after three decades of a stiff sanctions regime against India’s nuclear programme, led by the United States itself, the accord poses the question: why is this about-turn by Washington? As CPM leader Prakash Karat says, there is no altruism in American imperialism that makes it offer a grand deal without extracting a very heavy price. The obvious answer is that the turnaround of global events has compelled the US to retract - the rise of religious terrorism, initially stoked by Washington itself, having become its principal enemy. So, the accord is essentially a victory for India’s nuclear programme; Washington has been forced to recast its approach towards India. The hostility of the Left towards the agreement is in reverse shared by the American diehards, the so-called non-proliferation lobby, which says that Washington has surrendered to Indian nuclear military aims. The full picture is, of course, mixed — the accord is very good for India, good for the United States and good for the world. Where do we go from here? As things stand, the nuclear accord may not be consummated - a prospect that is hard to accept for the damage to India’s growth in terms of energy security, the setback to Indian science and technology development, as also to India’s standing and credibility world-wide. Is there a way out? There is. The agreement needs to be analysed without bias, and the specialised knowledge and expertise of the Indian nuclear establishment made available for political leaders, particularly to the CPM, CPI and BJP leaders. To bring about a consensus on the agreement that serves the country, there should be interaction between the nuclear establishments - let us say, AEC chairman Anil Kakodkar and the Principal Scientific Adviser of the Government of India, Dr R. Chidambaram - and Left leaders. The government should facilitate this interaction prior to the next panel meeting with the Left. This interaction will serve to fill the vacuum - provide knowledge about the linkage of India’s indigenous nuclear programme and the agreement, the value of bringing India into the global nuclear mainstream, and assuring full nuclear contribution to India’s energy security. The nuclear establishment will also be able to remove several apprehensions that the Left leaders nurture on the terms of the agreement, for these are the very aspects on which the nuclear scientists have taken a tough stand in the course of the tenuous year-long negotiations with Washington, and won all along the
line.
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Two sides of genocide
THEY were everywhere in the house, whole armies of ants, marching over the floor or on the wall. I had to apply the “Final Solution” — a poisonous chalk that could exterminate hundreds of them in no time. I started from the kitchen, drawing two long lines on the marble floor. The poison did its job within minutes. The operation was repeated successfully in other rooms. Just as I entered the store, they started moving hurriedly on the wall, apparently out of fear. What I witnessed next had to be seen to be believed. Some of the ants had positioned themselves with mind-boggling coordination to form the word “Genocide”! How the hell had they come to know of this dreaded eight-letter word? Had they been going through the newspapers lying in that room? Even more shockingly, these pests were accusing me of such a heinous crime, virtually comparing me with the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. “That’s not the right word”, I wrote with the chalk on the opposite wall. The little creatures instantly replied by dividing themselves into three groups and coming up with the words “POGROM”, “CARNAGE” and “HOLOCAUST”. I couldn’t help being amazed by their vocabulary. What I direly needed was a euphemistic expression to counter the charge of mass murder levelled against me. Why not call it “riots”, I thought. It was a handy word used by the powers that be to get away with any organised massacre. With great (over)confidence, I wrote: “Your fellow beings died in anti-ant riots”. Pat came their silent but scathing response: “LIAR! LIAR!” Shaken and stirred, I pondered over another ploy popular among rulers — outright denial of the genocide, as if it was merely a figment of paranoid imagination. However, I rejected it because what I’d done was undeniable. Every room in my house was witness to the decimation I’d caused. They were all waiting for my reply. Having willy-nilly become a spokesperson for the (in)human race, the onus was entirely on me to handle this embarrassing situation. At last, I had a flash of inspiration. Two golden words forced my accusers to concede defeat. What I wrote was pretty simple and straight — “PEST
CONTROL”.
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Man and superman
I have a confession. My uncle is a cyborg, and my aunt is a Frankenstein’s monster, patched together from different body parts. You wouldn’t know it to look at them but it’s true. Oh, and I am a super-enhanced super-human, immune to diseases that kill millions of you. No, I have not gone mad. I am simply pointing out how medical advances that are seen as sci-fi freakishness at first quickly become recognised as glorious and life-giving. My uncle has a pacemaker, making him a living mixture of flesh and machine. Stop the machine, and you stop him. My aunt is only here because of a heart transplant. And I have been given immunity against half-a-dozen deadly diseases by vaccination. Every single one of these life-saving technologies was assaulted by bio-conservatives – with the religious in the lead – when they were first introduced, on the grounds they were “unnatural” and “immoral”. I raise this because last week, a mouse roared -- and started a new battle between the defenders of medical progress and their enemies. Scientists in Ohio have created a Mighty Mouse. He runs like an Olympic athlete, lives longer than his siblings, and keeps shagging until he drops. They did it by altering a single gene in the mouse’s embryo. In my lifetime, we are likely to confront similar technologies that make it possible to radically improve human life. It is becoming increasingly easy for scientists to change the genes in the very first cell of a human embryo – and therefore in every cell of the child that emerges, and his children, and grandchildren, and so on, forever. New IVF technologies are making it easier to implant them. The slow process of natural selection is about to be supplemented by a swifter process of deliberately chosen selection. The possibilities are dazzling: to name just one, Professor David Baltimore in California is working on potentially engineering human cells so they are resistant to HIV and cancer. Professor Gregory Stock has written about creating genetic “supplements” to every embryo, making them more intelligent and longer-living. Yet this debate is being hijacked by the extremes. There is a group of Californian scientists calling themselves “transhumanists”, whose goal is to use this technology to create a new super-human species. Max More, one of their leaders, wrote in a letter to Mother Nature: “Truly we are grateful for what you have made us. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease. You compel us to age and die n just as we’re beginning to attain wisdom. We have decided it is time to amend the human constitution.” Enemies of these technologies have fixated on opposing the transhumanists. The writer Francis Fukuyama – who serves on George Bush’s Council for Bioethics – has called for a halt to virtually all this research, demanding to know: “If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim?” But these streams of hot-and-cold-running hyperbole are not the way to understand this. Instead of getting trapped in an argument about whether we want to create a new species, we need to reframe the debate. Our goal should be to make people healthier, smarter and longer-living, using any and every technology. If the end-result of that is that we advance so far we become post-humans – and look back on our current state as we now look at apes n that’s fine, but it shouldn’t be our goal. Once you see it this way, it becomes clear that while the transhumanists are eccentric, their opponents are worse, trying to hold up life-saving treatments because it doesn’t fit with their primitive anxieties. Fukuyama and the bio-conservatives insist it is essential to maintain the human germ-line in its current form, because it reflects our fixed and eternal human essence. Tamper with it and you tamper with the core of what we are. But this crowd needs to put down Plato and pick up Darwin, so they can learn there is no fixed “us”. The human germline is always evolving and changing, and it always will. Richard Dawkins has offered a lush image that explains this. Imagine a woman, alive today, holding hands with her daughter on one of the shores of Africa. She in turn holds her mum’s hand, and she hold’s her mum’s hand, and on and on, holding hands back into the distant past. It will only take 300 miles n barely a dent into Africa n before this human chain reaches our ape ancestor. At what point in this chain does this mystical human “essence” suddenly appear? No doubt each woman in the line could have thought n like Fukuyama n that evolution had gone quite far enough. As Professor John Harris notes: “I personally am pleased that our ape ancestor lacked either the power or the imagination... to preserve herself at our expense.” The human germline will keep on evolving. The only question is: do you want the changes to be haphazard and arbitrary, or directed by us to make us into what we want to be? The bio-conservatives argue that there is a difference between “treatment”, which restores people to the norm, and “enhancement”, which makes them “better than well”. This is a slightly bogus distinction: when I was just vaccinated against yellow fever, I didn’t have the disease. I was being enhanced. But even if you granted this point – so what? If you discovered your parents could have made you much cleverer and longer-living at the click (or squeak) of a mouse, and chose not to, wouldn’t you be furious? However, one of the bio-con concerns is legitimate n even if their solution is bogus. Some of them worry that, like in H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine, humanity will split into two branches n the enhanced over-class and the “natural” people, left behind as second-class citizens. This is a real danger n but the solution isn’t a blanket ban. Today, people in the West have access to protease inhibitors and vaccinations, while millions in Africa don’t. We don’t respond by banning the treatments here, but by fighting to extend them there. In the same way, we can’t deal with human enhancement through a kind of genetic Stalinism, ensuring equality by government diktat that reduces everybody to the level of the lowest. Support the science -- then spread the science. A century from now, a generation of cleverer, healthier people will look back on the bio-Luddites who wanted to keep them down with the same bemused contempt we bestow on the mobs who smashed Gallileo’s telescope. Let Mighty Mouse run – he’s scampering into a better world.
By arrangement with The Independent
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Time for the British to pay up in Kenya Lately, saving Africa has become very fashionable. Hollywood celebrities are adopting African babies. Bill Gates, former heads of state Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and a sprinkling of former World Bank officials have probably caused traffic jams there as they tout their campaigns. Put aside the irony of Clinton doing little for Africa when holding the most powerful office in the world and now, as a private citizen, wanting to save the whole continent. In the “save Africa” caldron, you will find two active ingredients missing: Africans and modern African history. Africans want former colonial powers to be held accountable for a history of suffering. One example is the lawsuit the Kenya Human Rights Commission plans to file in the British High Court on behalf of the survivors of what came to be known as the Mau Mau Rebellion. The colonial government declared the rebellion a “state of emergency,” and it lasted from 1952 until the rebels’ defeat in 1960. Kenya had been officially made a British colony in 1920. The rebellion began with the Kikuyu – the largest ethnic group – fighting against British rule and British settlers’ land grabbing. Some Kikuyu leaders mobilized fighters against the British through oaths of allegiance (the term “Mau Mau” was coined by the British, likely from the Kikuyu word for “oath”). The British response, through the British army, the Royal Air Force and the help of Kenyan collaborators, was brutal, with innocents swept up along with the rebels. The official number of fighters killed was 11,000, but some estimate that tens of thousands more Kenyans died and as many as 1 million – mostly women, children and elderly men – were detained. Because recent authoritarian governments suppressed Mau Mau history and threatened survivors with arrest if they tried to organize, the Mau Mau movement was not legally recognized in Kenya until 2003. The lawsuit, to be filed in February, will now seek justice, alleging that from 1952 to 1960, the Kenyan colonial government killed and tortured Mau Mau detainees. A background document I obtained from the Kenya Human Rights Commission argues that because the injuries “were sustained in the detention camps of the Kenya colonial government” operating under the mandate of the British, it follows that the British government is liable. Further, it claims the British did not do enough to prevent the torture and abuse. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, historian Caroline Elkins estimates that more than 100,000 people died in the detention camps in the process of “re-education.” Thousands of others were shot in combat, hanged or killed as collateral damage, and the majority of the Kikuyu people were interned. The lawsuit raises several questions: Can and should one generation be held accountable for another’s atrocities? Should citizens be held accountable – through the taxes they pay – for the atrocities committed by their governments? Should corporations and banks be held accountable for profits gained through past actions that hurt others? Historical precedence answers in the affirmative. For example, Germany and Austria have paid billions of dollars to the Israeli government and individual Holocaust survivors for World War II atrocities. For a British citizen, the wealth created by colonialism (not to mention slavery) is the foundation of today’s well-being in much the same way that the poverty created by colonialism is the foundation of the infamous Nairobi slums. Poverty and wealth can both be inherited. If a society continues to gain from a past atrocity, doesn’t it have a duty to the children of the victims? The whole truth, an apology and a tangible gesture of righting the wrong would go a long way in making this living history truly a thing of the past. The writer, a Kenyan, is a political columnist for the BBC’s Focus on Africa magazine
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Legal Notes Vice-President
Mohamed Hamid Ansari has attributed the over-activism of the judiciary mainly to the ‘downward spiral’ of the rule of law and malfunctioning of the institutions of the State, particularly the executive. He expressed his views on whether the country is really governed as per the rule of law and whether the three wings of the State – legislature, executive and judiciary – are discharging their obligations fully as Constitution provides. He made these remarks while addressing the convocation function of the Indian Law Institute, the apex body of legal education and research in the country this week. He felt that there is a need to ponder upon three important aspects – whether the three wings of the State have functioned within their limits; what is the public perception about their functioning; and to what extent they have eroded the spheres of each other. His view on these three aspects was that the rule of law in the country was under serious threat and there was widespread popular disillusionment with it. There are ‘cancerous’ developments eating into the fabric of each institution, destroying it from within, and if the trend is not arrested, it will have disastrous consequences for whole of the Indian State. The executive, supposed to be the most operative wing and the balance between political and profession components, have been disturbed. This is evident in the functioning of the civil and police services, denting the very authority of the State. At the same time, he also expressed concern over the judiciary’s failure to cope with the mounting arrears of pending cases.
Caution on dying declaration Much has been said and written in the legal texts about the truthfulness of a dying man, termed as a ‘dying declaration’ in the parlance of the Evidence Act, and about its status as a crucial piece of evidence. But the Supreme Court in its latest ruling has cautioned trial judges against blindly sticking to the myth and belief that a dying person never lies. It has laid down several parameters to test the veracity of a dying declaration before accepting it a worthwhile evidence, particularly in murder cases where the life of an innocent person could be at stake during the judicial scrutiny, merely on the basis of such a declaration. The trial courts have to be specially guarded whether the statement of the deceased was a result of any kind of tutoring, prompted, influenced, or a product of the imagination. If a dying declaration passes these tests, and the judge is satisfied that the statement made by a dying witness was voluntary without any influence, undoubtedly it can act as an independent evidence not necessarily needing any corroboration by other evidence. The rule requiring corroboration then only becomes a rule of prudence. The apex court, however, ruled that no strict code can be laid for acceptance or rejection of the dying declaration as it all has to be decided on the facts of each case.
No consumer forum role in accident claims Can victims of motor accidents seek recourse to the consumer forum for settling insurance claims? The Supreme Court has pronounced a resounding ‘no’. It opined that the consumer courts have nothing to do with the settlement of insurance claims because a separate mechanism of the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal (MACT) has been provided under the Motor Vehicle Act for this purpose. The consumer courts established under the Consumer Protection Act, 1996, are only concerned with the cases of deficiency of service by service providers, including the insurance companies. But the matters relating to any liability or no liability to pay the insurance as per the Motor Vehicle Act, will have to be decided only by the MACT, none else. The ruling came in on a petition of the United India Insurance company against the verdict of the National Consumer Commission, awarding the
compensation of Rs 1.23 lakh in a 2004 truck accident case from Haryana, along with Rs 20,000 as damage, with 9 per cent interest per annum. Since the National Consumer Commission had overstepped its jurisdiction, the apex court set aside its order while allowing the insurance company’s appeal on its validity.
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