EDITORIALS

Culprits — a dozen of them
Give them maximum punishment

The conviction of all the 12 accused in New Delhi’s Upahar Grand cinema hall fire case, including real estate tycoons Gopal Ansal and Sushil Ansal, by the sessions court on Tuesday comes after 10 long years. The tragedy claimed 59 lives and injured 103. The court has held Ansals guilty of criminal negligence. During this period, the courts held as many as 2,000 hearings and several adjournments. The Ansals, because of their clout and powerful connections, used every method to hoodwink justice. Yet, most remarkably, the Association of Victims of Upahar Tragedy (AVUT), led by its president Neelam Krishnamurti, demonstrated extraordinary grit and determination in fighting for justice and bringing the guilty to book, despite their personal loss. The court will pronounce the quantum of punishment on Wednesday. The ends of justice will be met only if the guilty are given maximum punishment under the law.

The Upahar tragedy was a result of the failure of the cinema proprietors and the Delhi government officials in enforcing the safety standards. In 2003, the Delhi High Court added a new dimension to the law of torts by punishing the civic authorities for dereliction of duty. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi was pulled up for its failure to check illegal constructions. The Delhi Vidyut Board did not adhere to prescribed standards in maintaining the 1000 kv transformer installed in the theatre’s parking area. And the Delhi Police granted licence to Ansals to run the cinema though the Ansals made several deviations from the required arrangements inside the hall.

The audience caught in the fire could not escape in time in the absence of well-marked exits and emergency lights. Most of those who were asphyxiated died in the balcony foyer. The accused have been convicted at last, but the fight for justice may not be over yet. For while Mrs Krishnamurti says that they will go on appeal to the High Court if the Ansals are given minor punishment, the accused themselves may appeal against the conviction. Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court’s 2003 ruling awarding compensation of Rs 18.5 crore to the kin of those killed in the fire is yet to be disbursed. The Ansals too have not paid the fine of Rs 2.5 crore. The wheels of the criminal justice system indeed move at less than a snail’s pace.

Pension for the aged
It’s good, but not good enough

India has 80 million elderly people who need some financial help to lead a dignified life in their twilight years. With the people living longer them before, their population is bound to increase. This calls for long-term planning and massive allocation of resources. As a first step, the Prime Minister on Monday launched a revised old age pension scheme, which is expected to benefit some 1.57 crore people. Only those senior citizens living below the poverty line and aged over 65 years will be eligible. The Centre will contribute Rs 200 and expects every state and Union Territory to provide a matching amount.

It may not be easy for an aged person to survive on mere Rs 400 a month these days with the cost of living and medical treatment so high. Yet something is better than nothing and the government should work towards raising the pension amount and lower the cut-off age to at least 60. Secondly, given the corruption-ridden delivery system, the Centre and the states should ensure that the scheme is not hijacked by the influence pedlars. Despite their large number, the elderly people with modest means are not organised and are often at a disadvantage while competing with other interest groups for the allocation of limited state resources.

Experts have suggested legal steps to ensure that the governments at the Centre and in the states do not go back on their commitment to provide resources for the elderly. The National Human Rights Commission wants the framing of a law to make it a statutory duty of the state to provide financial support to the poor. The Supreme Court has been moved to seek an increase in the allocation of funds for the old age pension scheme. Politicians do realise the electoral benefits of social security measures, but their efforts lack coordination. Funds may not be a constraint if the expenses on the administrative set-up are cut drastically.

Earth in the sky
Humankind has a common destiny

There are few things that seize the human imagination as strongly as the image of planet Earth hanging in the sky over the moon, a ball of blue with swirling white clouds. At once vulnerable and eternal, so intimate and yet so distant, the earth seen thus never fails to provoke a reflective look at ourselves, our common home, and what must be a common destiny. From Neil Armstrong onwards to Sunita Williams more recently, those who have seen it with their own eyes have come away enchanted - and surely, changed forever. The high definition images of the earth rising and setting over the moon’s south pole, captured by a Japanese spacecraft, will have to serve for the rest of us who are not so lucky.

What man has made of man was the poet’s lament of an earlier century, while modern day angst is also about what man has made of this planet. While fears of blowing ourselves up in a nuclear holocaust have receded, we are clearly confronted by climate change of substantial proportions, and the course this will take is as yet unknown. The technological zeitgeist, stated or otherwise, has always been that what technology can do it can also undo. Scientists are already talking about ‘geo-engineering’ the planet. And alternative sources of energy are sure to be mass-marketed sooner rather than later.

But what the image of an earth in the sky does most is to challenge any geo-centricity in our make-up. This planet, with its teeming, seething, mass of life, is but a speck in the universe, and in time. What lies beyond? Human intelligence on earth is distinguished by this ability to introspect, look inwards, and simultaneously throw out our thoughts towards infinity. And the technology we create enhances our ability to do so. But we seem as far away as ever to answers about “ultimate questions,” whatever they may be. In the meantime, if truth is indeed beauty, we can just look upwards to the sky.

Thought for the day

I’have a grand memory for forgetting, David. — Robert Louis Stevenson

ARTICLE

Supping with the Devil
Mistaken US efforts to bail out Musharraf
by B.G. Verghese

The breathless American working of the telephone to Islamabad and the too-ing and fro-ing of emissaries from Washington to General Musharraf has been of little avail. The US pet has become a monster that its master does not know quite how to tame. In seeking to trade every kind of aid and political comfort to keep “fighting terror”, successive US regimes, with other Western members of the “coalition of the willing”, have built Pakistan into a font of terror which seemed all right, though at terrible cost to the hapless people of Pakistan, as long as others were victims. India has paid a huge unacknowledged price for such “collateral damage” that makes America’s own “terror” casualties puny by comparison.

Despite talk on restoring “democracy” in Pakistan, the US has joined General Musharraf’s game of charades which even Ms Benazir Bhutto - a handy façade and no democratic icon herself - has discovered to her cost. General Musharraf’s promises, timetables and democratic vision entail grandstanding and if he moved from supporting jihad to “fighting terror” some years ago, the move was first tactical, then strategic and now totally amoral and opportunistic. The General’s coup against the judicial impedimenta to his authoritarian designs amounts to martial law with controlled freedom until the new judicial bench of servitors endorses his “re-election” as President-in-uniform. Both the coup and its subsequent defence have left none in doubt that the General’s power comes from the barrel of the Pakistan Army.

To rattle his American interlocutors, General Musharraf has said Pakistan’s nuclear armoury is safe in the hands of the military but that elections held in a “disturbed (read democratic) environment” could result in the control over nuclear weapons falling into the hands of “dangerous elements”. Such blackmail should serve as a timely reminder to Washington that it has over the years condoned or even assisted the garnering of nuclear weapons capability by Pakistan, and even negotiations for its sale by the latter to rogue states and non-state actors, in exchange for short-term gains, some of them cosmetic but entirely self serving, in the “war on terror”.

Much of this is no secret and has been revealed from time to time in credible media disclosures that have been met with thundering silence. The grim catalogue of American guilt, treachery and practiced deceit in this regard is now chillingly told by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clarke in “Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy”. Successive US Presidents have stoically lied to Congress, the American people and the world to “conjure a grand deception” which, the authors write, “have served further to destabilise it and to empower those bent on global jihad”.

The jihadi “war on terror” the US claims to wage was nurtured by it, using Pakistan as a surrogate. To fight the Soviets in Afghanistan the Americans recklessly proliferated nuclear technology that they knew would soon be weaponised. Pakistan was given carte blanch to pursue its nuclear ambitions and its own war of terror (in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere in India) and was financed to do so, while the US and some of its allies looked away. With this, the US endorsed Pakistan’s tutelage of the Taliban and other forms of Islamic radicalism to rear “good Muslims” who would confront the Soviet atheists. It also encouraged proliferation of small arms that were to wreak havoc on human rights in South Asia, and narcotics to keep Afghan warlords happy and in funds. The born again Ugly American played Jekyll and Hyde with consummate skill.

The US bombed Iraq in search of non-existent WMDs even as it rewarded Pakistan despite knowing that it was being aided by China to build a nuclear arsenal and was proliferating its clandestinely acquired nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, Libya and others. The notorious A. Q. Khan sowed the dragon’s teeth from Kahuta with the full support of the Pakistan state and a protective US cover. The demonisation of Islam by the US in the wake of Afghanistan was matched by the Islamic radicalisation of Pakistan as state policy. Now all these chickens have home to roost.

What is the moral of this sorry story? American efforts to bail out General Musharraf from the pit he has dug for himself with their help are completely mistaken. He is beyond redemption. He has destroyed every vestige of trust in Pakistan. Another less megalomaniac General is not the answer. The Army itself has been part radicalised and corrupted by its vested interest in the business-industrial-feudal complex that it operates at the cost of the citizen and the state.

The people of Pakistan yearn for true democracy, secular progress and good neighbourly relations. They are searching for a new vision of themselves, a new politics and new institutions. The forces arraigned against such an outcome are formidable but not invincible. The struggle will be hard and could take long. But the international community has some levers too, especially America which can yet learn from its crass follies. A rogue Pakistan constitutes a clear and present international danger. The world needs to help an imperiled and embattled Pakistan to choose and win democracy.

MIDDLE

Commonsense Home
by Sarvjit Singh

Through a bad relationship, I was in the process of learning the worth of a boss. Taking out irritation on family had become a routine. It was a bad patch. Mother and wife were not maintaining good health.

Then one day, Sanjiv Goel, a rich man and a self-professed Vaastu expert, walked through our government house, looking at his small compass all through. Over a cup of tea he directed his prescription. Stop using this bathroom. Shift your bedroom to this smaller one. Cut a window on this wall and shift this door to the other corner.

To top it, close the main door and make a new entrance on the other end of the house.

The house had a haunting past. Over the years there had been unnatural deaths and accidents with the occupants of the house at a frightening regularity.

We carried out most changes blindly and felt better; “is it real or placebo.” I was forced to ponder. “What is it?” The rational me, prodded me to analyse.

As I started observing Vaastu tenet by tenet, everything started falling in place. Barring a little, most of it turned out to be pure commonsense and aesthetics, coated with divine sanction. Commonsense being common everyone gets a thrill in challenging it.

North facing plot is good, as like animals, we are also relaxed when we are deep in our caves (read houses) and south provides the bounty of sunlight in that depth. South-facing shops are “auspicious” as their front is sunlit and also sun remains on the back of the customers entering the shops. Sleep with head towards south and sit facing north or east, so that sunlight comes from the back and doesn’t irritate eyes.

Studies in American universities have shown that waking up with sunrise synchronises sleep with the natural biorhythm of the body. In the west sunrise simulators have been developed for use in the months Sun doesn’t rise. With sunrise one gets up energetic and ready for the day. Dogs, cats and birds know this secret behind staying healthy wealthy and wise.

The bathroom in the northwest and the store in the west are good as they get sterilised with the copious sunrays; it also blocks the heat to the living areas. Kitchen in southeast gets the first rays of sun; no dampness, therefore no pests and flies! Door in the office or the bedroom should be diagonally across the bed or the table; this gives you vantage over the intruder as you see him before he sees you. A dog will sit under the cot, facing the open, his back blocked by walls, so make the master’s bedroom in the deepest (southwest) corner of house with heavy walls in south and west.

Leave more open space in the north; basics of architecture tell us if the space on front is 1.5 times the height, the building looks aesthetic as one doesn’t have to crane the neck up to have a look at it.

Water flow and wells etc. should be in the northeast or towards the entrance of the house, so the plumber and the scavengers don’t have to go inside the house. Have terraces on the north and the east. Ours is a hot country. These terraces will be cool in the shade of the house.

So we made a Commonsense Home and it generally evokes the comment “it is simple but has something special.”

Incidentally, my relation with bosses also improved.

OPED

Pakistan still a puzzle
Look beyond emotional dimension
by G.S. Bhargava

Two weeks after Gen Pervez Musharraf imposed a formal martial law on Pakistan, scrapping the democratic trappings of his eight-year-old regime — such as a functioning judiciary at the apex and in the districts, legislatures at the national and provincial levels, etc. — it is time to look beyond the emotional dimension of the outrage.

If the removal of General Musharraf, either by force or guile, would restore the pre- martial situation and put Pakistan on the road to wherever it had been heading, one should by all means make it the focus of one’s thoughts and strive single-mindedly for the objective. Otherwise, it would be throwing the baby with the bath water

Equally short-sighted will be targeting the United States for what has happened in Pakistan on the ground that American economic and military aid has been keeping General Musharraf going.

This is despite the weighty argument that massive US support, to the tune of $ 2 billion during the last seven years, especially in the wake of 9/11/2001, has not saved General Musharraf from faltering in his main task of combating al-Qaida and the Taliban, which have been steadily nibbling away territory in north Wazirstan and Swat.

Instead of meeting the menace, the General has been targeting the judiciary to settle personal scores.

Still, that an international strategy guru like K. Subramaniam should concentrate on the ouster of General Musharraf as if it were a panacea for not only Pakistan but also the entire South Asia is breath bereaving. For a next-door neighbour like India it is risky glibly to write off Pakistan “as a failed state.” It would be like turning a blind eye to a festering cadaver next door. Most of our prime ministers from Nehru to Indira Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and even Dr. Manmohan Singh, by fits and starts, have been alive to this home truth.

Further, even if General Musharraf were given the order of the boot, it would not mean automatic graduation to a civilian responsible government. Thanks to several spells of military dictatorship from the time Field Marshal Ayub Khan had rid the land of Allama Iqbal and Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah of chaotic and rickety civilian governments, Pakistan has been star-crossed in the matter of political stability.

The Field Marshal recalls in his memoirs — “Friends, Not Masters — that almost every civilian head of government/state prior to his coup” had been asking his army to go to war with India — primarily on Jammu and Kashmir. That was when Pakistan was poorly equipped and ill-prepared for hostilities with India.

Ironically, the Ayub years were free of tension between India and Pakistan even if Nehru was not overly enthusiastic in responding to the Field Marshal’s overtures.

Still, the seminal Indus Waters Treaty of 1961 was signed at the goading of the World Bank. Ironically, there was peace — not merely in the sense of absence of war — during the first decade of Ayub rule until the evil genius of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto precipitated the 1965 hostilities, during the tentative years of Lal Bahadur Shastri’s prime ministership.

It happened when the US influence in Pakistan slackened and China entered the scene in a sinister way. In the process, US-Soviet strategic interests in the region, particularly India, converged.

Simultaneously, Sino-Soviet ties loosened. (It took some years for the Nehru government to realise the situation and get over the obsession that a “socialist” country does not attack a non-aligned state.)

V.K. Krishna Menon, the Defence Minister, recklessly set up poorly equipped “penny packets” on the border saying that “if they stick one post, we stick another.” It did not happen that way.

The Chinese border guards swept off all our border posts and cleared Indian presence from the whole area claimed by them in Ladakh (Aksai Chin) and NEFA — North-East Frontier Agency — (today’s Arunachal Pradesh) in the Northeast.

That was the occasion when Nehru sought US air support against the apprehended Chinese occupation of Assam. The purpose of recalling in some detail the 1962 debacle is to caution against a tunnel vision in matters of national security.

Any development, which could facilitate the al-Qaida taking advantage of leadership vacuum in Islamabad is fraught with grave risk. It happened when following the Tashkent Accord and the passing away of Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966 Bhutto manipulated the deposition of Ayub Khan and objectively ensured the succession of General Yahya Khan, his inept deputy.

Since then south Asia has not had peace and stability. First the 1971 hostilities which had tempted India unwisely to detach Pakistan’s eastern wing — today’s Bangladesh — and put itself in a nut-cracker between two hostile neighbours and potentially sources of terrorist inroads deep into our country.

From Ahmedabad in the West to Hyderabad in the belly — besides Mumbai, Delhi and Punjab — are all grist to terrorist mills. On top of this, anarchy and chaos in Pakistan would be dreadful.

The army, the only institution inherited intact by Pakistan — it has made mincemeat of the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy — is still holding. If the Generals, too, fall out, God save Pakistan and the rest of South Asia.

One caveat in conclusion: Asma Jehangir, the indefatigable champion of human rights in Pakistan — comparable to the late Justice V.N. Tarkunde in our country — has reported assaults by the Pakistan police/army on human rights activists. Whether General Musharraf is there or not the international community should sit up and take note of such outrages.

Climate change to hit agriculture
by Rick Weiss

Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe's citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture.

Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years - along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts – will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet's lower latitudes, where most of the world's poor live.

India, on track to be the world's most populous country, could experience a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger.

Africa - where four out of five people make their living directly from the land - could experience agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones, such as rice. Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent.

Even the emerging agricultural powerhouse of Latin America is poised to suffer reductions of 20 percent or more, which could return thriving exporters such as Brazil to the subsistence-oriented nations they were a few decades ago.

And those estimates do not count the effects of new plant pests and diseases, which are widely expected to come with climate change and could cancel out the positive "fertilizing" effects that higher carbon dioxide levels may offer some plants.

Scenarios like these - and the recognition that even less-affected countries such as the United States will experience significant regional shifts in growing seasons, forcing new and sometimes disruptive changes in crop choices – are providing the impetus for a new "green revolution." It is aimed not simply at boosting production, as the first revolution did with fertilizers, but also at creating crops that can handle the heat, suck up the salt, not desiccate in a drought and even grow swimmingly while submerged.

The work involves conventional breeding of new varieties as well as genetic engineering to transfer specific traits from more resilient species. As part of those efforts, scientists are busily preserving seeds from thousands of varieties of the 150 crops that make up most of the world's agricultural diversity, as well as wild relatives of those crops that may harbor useful but still unidentified genes.

"For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt," said Ren Wang, director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a network of agricultural research centers. "It's important that we have a wide pool of genetic diversity from which to develop crops with these unique traits."

At the same time, scientists are finding that agriculture and related land uses, which today account for about one-third of all greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, can be conducted in much more climate-friendly ways.

But time is of the essence if a worldwide crisis in food security is to be avoided, said William Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which are Washington-based nonpartisan economic think tanks.

"You'll have a tripling of world food demand by 2085 because of higher population and bigger economies, and I would not be surprised to see as much as one-third of today's agricultural land devoted to plants for ethanol," Cline said. "So it's going to be a tight race between food supply and demand."

The work of developing adaptive plants has begun to pay off. Researchers have discovered ancient varieties of Persian grasses, for example, that have a remarkable tolerance for saltwater. The scientists are breeding the grasses with commercial varieties of wheat and have found they are growing well in Australia's increasingly salty soils.

Other research is building on the recent discovery of a gene that helps plants survive prolonged periods underwater.

Even rice, which grows in wet paddies, will die if it is fully submerged for more than three or four days, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. But recent tests on farms in Bangladesh show that a new line of rice containing the flood-resistance gene can live underwater for two weeks.

That's going to be important, Zeigler said, because 70 percent of the world's poor live in Asia - most of them in South Asia - where rice is the staple. Yet 50 million acres of that region are already subject to seasonal flooding that can temporarily submerge plants under 10 to 12 feet of water. The problem is predicted to worsen as climate change brings more intense rainfall there.

"Crops grow in weather, not in climate," Zeigler said, meaning they must be able to survive not only the anticipated average rises in temperature but also the day-to-day extremes that come with climate change.

Corn is another staple that is getting gussied up to party with the hardy - in this case, in preparation for dry spells, which are predicted to increase in Latin America and other corn-growing regions, with a potential 20 percent drop in production over the next 25 years.

Recent tests in South Africa showed that drought-resistant maize plants, created by breeding, produced 30 percent to 50 percent more corn than traditional varieties under arid conditions. But the real test, scientists say, will be to splice in potent drought-resistance genes from plants such as sorghum and millet, which are famously productive even in parched, sub-Saharan Africa. That assumes consumers and regulators will accept such engineered crops, which have been shunned in many countries because of economic and environmental concerns.

By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Inside Pakistan
Negroponte’s futile visit
by Syed Nooruzzaman

The much-publicised visit to Islamabad by US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte last week could not bring about any noticeable change in the political situation in Pakistan. General Pervez Musharraf refused to meet any of his main demands for lifting the emergency, doffing his uniform, releasing political prisoners and removing the curbs imposed on the media.

According to The News (Nov 20), "Mr Negroponte just stopped short of describing his visit as a failure, explaining to the media before he left that 'in diplomacy we don't get instant replies when we have these kinds of dialogue. I am sure the President is seriously considering the exchange we had'."

 The truth, however, is that the US is saying something and doing something else. It is doing all it can to help General Musharraf with "all the political, logistic and diplomatic support to override this crisis, including his rivals to sit and talk with him", as The News added.

 In a more forthright comment, Dawn said, "At every level, from the President and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the White House, the Pentagon and State Department spokesmen, the Republican administration has made it abundantly clear that it cares little about a time-frame for the emergency.

For record's sake, of course, President Bush and Republican administration officials have expressed their concerns over the proclamation of the state of emergency, but all such declarations have invariably been accompanied by expressions of full confidence in President Musharraf's leadership and his role in the war on terror."

Towards farce polls

If at all the coming elections are held with emergency rule remaining intact, it will be an exercise in futility. One can never expect a change in the dispensation in such a situation.

According to The Business Recorder, "The Soomro caretaker setup does not inspire confidence of the general public, much less of the political opposition, in its ability to hold fair, free and transparent elections. With the state of emergency fully enforced in the country and the media having been muzzled, the Opposition finds itself denied of a level playing field."

It is, no doubt, a grim situation today. With Ms Benazir Bhutto's PPP announcing to boycott the elections, more parties may follow suit. The polls will become meaningless if all the major parties in the Opposition decide to stay away. This possibility cannot be ruled out, as no party may like to fight a losing battle.

As Imtiaz Alam says in his article in The News (Nov 20), the General is "not ready to listen to the independent advice of various neutral watchdogs to ensure free and transparent elections, nor is he in anyway and to any extent inclined to accommodate the demands of the democratic opposition.

He seems to be firm in his resolve to repeat a farce of the 2002 polls and bring in surrogate assemblies to have a quasi-parliamentary system appended to a powerful presidency with the backing of the Army."

No end to Swat crisis

The militancy-hit Swat valley in the NWFP continues to remain in the news. It has suffered heavily during the past few weeks with large-scale migrations. No one who can afford to move out is prepared to take the risk of staying there. Reports suggest that another major Army operation may be launched any time now.

According to The Nation (Nov 19), "The situation in Swat is just about to get worse – or better. It depends on how one chooses to look at it. Army officials have revealed to the media an imminent military operation in the valley, one that will attempt to finally purge the militants from the area."

But, as Khadim Hussain says in an article in Dawn (Nov 20), "Extremism of any kind that leads to militancy cannot be curbed only through a military operation. Killing people has never resolved a conflict of this kind. The political parties working in the valley have to accelerate their efforts to help the affected population rehabilitate themselves, both physically and mentally. They have to respond to the socio-economic aspirations of the majority of the population of the valley if they want to ensure their survival and defeat religious extremism. The government has to help establish and rebuild the broken roads, schools, colleges, hospitals and bridges as soon as the operation is over."