 |
|
Redrawing constituencies Sonstruck father |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Top of the world Edmund scaled the heights of adventure FOR Edmund Hillary climbing Everest “represented the ultimate in achievement; the supreme challenge for flesh and blood and spirit.” But with that out of the way at the age of 34, in 1953, there was still plenty of life and adventure left in this great and good man.
Dealing with China
A first lady comes visiting
Revolution on wheels Can the British break free of class? Inside Pakistan
|
Redrawing constituencies POLITICAL expediency seems to have prevailed on the Union Cabinet when it decided to defer the exercise of delimitation in Jharkhand and four Northeastern states by approving an amendment in the Delimitation Act, 2002. One can only hope that the process will be gone through quickly at least in the rest of the country. Steps must be taken so that the next parliamentary elections take place under it. It is necessary to make the announcement at the earliest so that the leaders and parties can nurse their constituencies suitably. The Delimitation Commission headed by Justice Kuldip Singh has already submitted its report to the government. The Guwahati High Court has stayed the process in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland. In Jharkhand, there is a peculiar problem. A large number of outsiders have settled there, with the result that the percentage of the tribal population has decreased. The recommendation of the commission was to convert a reserved seat to a general category seat on this basis. But that would have caused an uproar. Hence, even Jharkhand has been kept out. But this is tantamount to showing disrespect to the commission, a constitutional body, whose report is binding on the government. The amendment, likely to be tabled before Parliament during the Budget session, is expected to empower the President to defer limitation in any state on certain grounds like security. The recasting work is expected to commence only in March, when the Election Commission would have notified the Karnataka assembly elections. MPs and political parties on their part want the government to start the exercise immediately so that the fresh contours are known to them well in time. Political parties have differing views on delimitation. While the BJP and the Left parties want an early notification to implement the commission’s report, close Congress allies such as the RJD and the JMM have been unhappy with the report because it may lead to an increase in the number of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe parliamentary constituencies at the cost of general seats. Delimitation has not been completed in Jammu and Kashmir since it has its own constitution that provides for its own delimitation commission. The state has not yet started the process although there have been a vociferous demand in its favour. The state, too, should initiate the process immediately so that the next general elections truly represent the changed composition of the electorate.
|
|
Sonstruck father EVER since the Supreme Court rejected his petition for anticipatory bail on January 3, the surrender of Orissa’s suspended Director-General of Police Bidya Bhushan Mohanty before a Jaipur court had been on the cards. His surrender on Thursday may mark the end of the long chase for him by the Orissa and Rajasthan police forces. But his son Biti Mohanty, who was given seven years’ rigorous imprisonment by a fast-track court for raping a German research scholar in 2006, is still at large. The senior Mohanty has been booked for aiding and abetting his son’s escape from the Jaipur jail after he secured bail for a fortnight in November 2006. Unfortunately, in his eagerness to free his son from the prison, the father played every stratagem possible to circumvent the law and hoodwink justice. For some time, he even denied he had signed the surety papers for Biti’s bail. When the seniormost IPS officer of a state throws his weight around and short-circuits the established rules of procedure to bail out his convicted son, one can imagine the extent of damage it causes to the system and the discipline and moral fibre of the entire police force. Mr Mohanty is supposed to be a conscientious IPS officer, known for his high professional integrity and character. His downfall started from the day he had secured his son’s release. Mr Mohanty may argue that he is being harassed for his son’s crime. But then, as a senior IPS officer and a law student, he should have known the rules better. If he was indeed innocent, why did he defy the non-bailable warrants of arrest from Jaipur and abscond for months? He was playing the cat-and-mouse game whenever the Jaipur police landed in Cuttack to arrest him! The Orissa government, too, is accused of going slow in the case. Mr Mohanty’s suspension itself came very late, inviting public criticism that the government was trying to protect him. Whether he gets bail or not is not the question. The attention should shift now to his convicted son and no effort should be spared to bring him back to the jail.
|
|
Top of the world FOR Edmund Hillary climbing Everest “represented the ultimate in achievement; the supreme challenge for flesh and blood and spirit.” But with that out of the way at the age of 34, in 1953, there was still plenty of life and adventure left in this great and good man. He led a team of fellow New Zealanders in a race with a British team to the South Pole, beating them comprehensively across a couple of thousand kilometres of snow and ice. He climbed other Himalayan peaks and raced up the Ganga in a jet-boat, aiming for the river’s source in his beloved mountains. Just to slow things down a bit, he became New Zealand’s High Commissioner in New Delhi. And he was himself most proud of the activities and achievements of the Himalayan Trust he founded in 1961, a vehicle to give something back to the Sherpas and the people of the mountains. His famous companion to the summit was Tenzing Norgay, one of the redoubtable sherpas of Nepal without whom no expedition would have ever succeeded. The Trust has built 27 schools, two hospitals and 13 health clinics, besides rebuilding bridges and constructing drinking water projects. His achievement captured the imagination like no other at that time. In India, his name is a household word — every schoolboy or girl knows it so well that it just trips off the tongue. Climbing Everest is being done so often now that it no longer has that magic, but back then, being the first, he represented something of the pioneering, never-say-die spirit of the human being, to successfully go where no man has gone before. He and Tenzing also had to do it all by themselves, with a fraction of the support that expeditions today set out with. He will always be remembered and loved, his craggy face soaring above our mental horizons, quite like the Himalayas themselves. |
|
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. — Benjamin Disraeli
|
Dealing with China
Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh’s first official visit to China has
evoked a large number of articles in the media, mostly exhorting him
to stand firm in his dealings with the Chinese leadership. One did not
see very many articles that supported the trilateral
India-Russia-China grouping expected to balance the unilateralism of
the United States. Understandably enough a majority of the writings drew attention to the Chinese stand on the Tawang tract and their tactics of negotiating endlessly. There were references to the Chinese strategy of string of pearls by which they were developing facilities in countries around India — Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan and their increasingly growing arms transfer relationships with those countries. There were also references to the rapid development of infrastructure in Tibet and its implications for India. A few articles also focused attention on the positive developments in the India-China relations since the visit of Prime Minister Wen Jiao Bao to India. There has been rapid development of trade — now in favour of China and mutual investments have been stepped up. Prospects for further economic and technological interaction are considered bright. A small number of articles had referred favourably to India being included in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as an observer and regretted that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was reluctant to attend its last meeting as an observer while the heads of state of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran did not mind attending in their capacity as observers. While the present visit of the Indian Prime Minister to China has generated a vast range of views on the past, present and future state of India-Chinese relations what is badly needed is a comprehensive assessment of China’s policy towards India. Obviously it is unrealistic to assume that China intends to confront India militarily across the Tibetan border or using their facilities in our neighbouring countries, or their navy in the Indian Ocean or with the threat of use of nuclear weapons. However, it is true that Chinese leadership had been having a somewhat patronising view about India. At the dawn of Indian Independence the Chinese Communist Party termed Jawaharlal Nehru, an imperialist lackey. Even when Nehru visited China he complained to the Indian journalists that when he was meeting Mao Dze Dung he was ushered in as though into a great presence. In the late 50s there were attacks on Nehru and his Tibetan policy. Their true views on India and Nehru can be read in “Kissinger Papers”. They planned carefully and executed the 1962 attack to conincide with the Cuban missile crisis. The Indian Army’s fourth division dissolving without a fight at Sela-Bomdila only confirmed the low opinion they had about India. They started siding with Pakistan and arming it with conventional weapons. They initiated negotiations with Islamabad for cooperation on nuclear weapon development and concluded it in June 1976 during Z.A. Bhutto’s visit to Beijing. In the sixties Beijing authored the thesis “Spring-thunder over India” which cast doubts about India remaining united. The Sino-Pakistan nuclear weapon and missiles proliferation was comprehensive and led to Pakistan’s nuclear weapon arsenal and China getting access to sophisticated European centrifuge technology and US weapon technology transferred to Pakistan. Meanwhile, in 1971 China switched over to US alliance against the Soviet Union. Though in the early 50s Mao Dze Dung talked of capitalism and socialism as irreconcilable, China fought a high casualty war with the US and used to conduct annually “hate America” campaigns. But it had no hesitation to ally itself with the US. China cultivated closer relationship with the US than India had and launched on a trade expansion with the US by enlisting the help of the US multinationals and chain stores. Even during Maoist era the objective of China was to catch up with the European standards in a couple of decades. China always characterised its ideology as Sinicised Marxism. In the sixties they came up with various theories of countryside surrounding the cities (the developed world). An overall assessment of Chinese strategy from 50s to eighties would reveal that China’s aim was to become once again the Middle Kingdom, particularly in Asia. They planned to countervail India by allying themselves with Pakistan and by cultivating their relations with all India’s neighbours and all great powers. Given their population, for China, only India could be a possible rival. They felt they were in a position to contain India and keep it at the status of a regional power bracketed with Pakistan. This strategy appeared to work up to 1998 when India conducted the Shakti tests. India’s rise as a power was taken note of by other major powers and the great powers US, EU and Russia appreciated India’s potential as a balancer of China primarily in Asia but also in the emerging international balance of power. Following this development China has developed a two-pronged strategy. Firstly to cultivate India and try as far as possible to prevent the development of a closer relationship between India on one side and the US, Japan and EU on the other. Secondly to continue the drive to cultivate India’s neighbours to contain India within South Asia. China has understood there is an inherent competition between the two most populous nations which are also two ancient civilisations. The competition is essentially in economic and technological fields. China also takes seriously that in the competitive game among the US, China and India, the first and last powers will have a natural tendency to come together vis-a-vis the second power. This is because the first power does not want to be overtaken by the second. The third power has to move up and draw level with the second before it can move up further. This competition will prevail though in this nuclear age there is not likely to be any military confrontation among the three. India has to reconcile itself to China’s global competition as well as Chinese efforts to countervail it in its own neighbourhood. In turn India has to cultivate the major powers that have a stake in enabling India to balance China and become so economically and technologically powerful that it would be more beneficial for our neighbours to cooperate more intimately with us than with China and through us with other great powers of the world such as the US the EU, Japan and Russia. The only way to ensure that China, as a great civilisation and power will have a stake in friendship with India is to develop our economy and technology rapidly and cultivate our economic, technological and where possible military interactions with other great powers. China, like all other great powers, has only contempt for weak nations spouting platitudinous
sentiments.
|
A first lady comes visiting
IF
you have missed short putts on the 18th hole, two rounds in a row, you are naturally edgy after the round. And then, as you sit and sip tea, your son rings up and tells you that the street in front of your house is crawling with policemen. When with an accusing tone he asks, “Dad, what is happening here”,your natural answer will be, “how should I know?” All this while your brain is running around in circles, trying to remember if you killed a caddy when you threw your club in disgust after that air shot? As an afterthought you ask, “What do they want?” “Some first lady wants to come to our house, they say.” “Tell them they must have got it wrong. Why will any First Lady want to come to our house. Who in this world knows me anyway?” I mumble. “Remember Khushwant Singh’s article about you? Everyone knows you”, the boy has high opinion about his dad, it seems. I hurry home. When I turn into my street, I don’t see any of the dreaded police personnel there. False alarm, I say and then promptly forget all about them. My mother and wife return from where ever they have been. Suddenly all hell breaks loose. My dogs go crazy. My wife peeps outside and is suddenly pulled inside as if by some unseen force. “Get up, ji. See who is outside. The whole lawn is full of cops!” There are about 10 people in the verandah. The cops are not in uniform and they are smiling. I open the door and say “come in, come in!” The shortest of them all says “Doctor, not till you tell me who I am!” Now that seems very unfair. I think to myself, this guy should be knowing who he is. My wife saves the situation, “Are you Gerrad?” “No! I am Ganpath! “ Ganpath says the First Lady is sitting in the car outside! “What!” screams my brain. So the thing about the First Lady is correct. I immediately go outside to the big Mercedes. The First Lady is there, peaceful and all. I escort her into the house. Since I have never met many First Ladies in my life, I do not know how to behave. Her calm goads me back to my Punjabi rustic style almost immediately. By now I know what is going on. Three Mauritian students, Ganpath, Gerrad and Iqbal, had stayed as tenants in our house more than 25 years ago. Obviously they had some happy memories to talk about. The President and the First Lady are on a private visit to India and Ganpath, who is the administrator to the Office of the President of Mauritius, comes along. Once in Chandigarh, he insists that he be taken to my house. They are a team in a hurry. They politely refuse tea. After partaking a few sweets, they depart as suddenly as they had arrived, leaving me absolutely zapped. The missed putts are already a fading
memory. |
Revolution on wheels
In redeeming his promise to deliver a car at Rs 1,00,000 or $2,500, the Tata Group chairman has disproved all his critics, including rivals in the Indian auto industry, who claimed he would have to renege on his promise. Though he had to postpone the launch by several months, he finally made available his dream car that will displace Maruti 800 from its lofty position as the cheapest car in the world. Nano’s price is only half of Maruti’s entry-level model. It will take a few months for it to hit the roads and it is too early to comment on how good the car is. Going by the looks, which are contemporary, and the specifications, which show Nano has 21 per cent more space inside than the Maruti 800, the Euro IV-compliant Nano is bound to catch the imagination of the motorists. It was the sight of a small family of four struggling on a scooter to reach their destination that kindled the idea of a “people’s car” (volkswagen) in Tata’s mind. For millions who commute on their two-wheelers, Nano is an alternative, affordable and comfortable mode of personal transport. Critics will carp at the environmental damage it will cause – clogging the roads and parking spaces, increasing the pollution levels in cities and making a deleterious effect on the import of fuel – but the common man will simply lap it up. For comfort, here is a description of the scene in Paris soon after automobiles arrived in large numbers: “Streets filled with cars day and night; vehicles could be seen parked outside farms that, even after the war, had still relied on horses. Rush-hour traffic became a pain and worse, and Paris began to measure air pollution and warn the citizens of unavoidable poisons. No one really cared; the freedom that came with mobility trumped all the rest”. Only someone like this writer, who saved every penny to buy his first second-hand Vespa, which enabled him to shift to a new and bigger house in the outskirts of the city where he lived, before graduating to a new Bajaj Chetak, and so on knows how aspirational a car is for the average middle class Indian. Nano marks a milestone in the annals of Indian auto industry, dominated at one time by gas-guzzling Ambassador, Fiat and Standard until the arrival of Maruti 24 years ago. The new car transformed the vehicle scenario in the country. Maruti became a status symbol as proud owners like writer Khushwant Singh wrote about its sleek looks. The large crowd that assembled to see the first Maruti is still etched in my memory. In due course, it became a cash cow for Maruti Udyog. The company refused to make innovations in the car because of the monopoly it enjoyed. Suzuki refused point-blank to indigenise the car beyond a point. It continued to import from Japan, for instance, the fuel injection pump on the specious plea that Indian vendors could not guarantee quality. For the rich and the status-conscious, it offered Maruti 1000, an underpowered sedan that was difficult to drive in both city and countryside. In other words, Maruti did not allow indigenisation and entrepreneurship to flourish. Of course, all this changed with the economic liberalisation ushered in by the Narasimha Rao government. When Maruti’s monopoly was ended with the arrival of new cars like Hyundai’s Santro and Daewoo’s Matiz, it was compelled to go in for newer models like Alto, Zen, Wagon R, Esteem and Baleno to protect its market share. Maruti can no longer remain complacent with American General Motors and Ford, South Korean Hyundai, French Renault and Czech Skoda all breathing down its neck with promises and prototypes of their versions of volkswagen. All this while the Indian market has also been changing. Maruti sold more of the Alto than the Maruti 800 and Matiz, which changed hands, made a new avatar as General Motors’ Spark. Last year Suzuki, which now enjoys majority share in Maruti, produced more cars in India than in Japan. The same year, worldwide Toyoto overtook Ford as the second largest car producer in the world. Probably, it has already displaced General Motors as the world’s largest car producer. The scenario was not always like this. There was a time not very long ago when the Japanese marvelled at the American carmakers. That was the time when Henry Ford bragged that the buyers of his cars could have them in any colour they wanted, so long as it was black. It was the heyday of the Model T, a specimen of which I found recently parked proudly in the portico of the priciest hotel at Bathinda. I wondered why the car was there but when I checked in, I realised it symbolised the antiqueness of the curtains and linen in the room. Lest the reader should get a wrong impression, Model T was made at various times in a number of colours, though only one colour at a time. The essence of Ford’s philosophy of mass production was: make all the cars alike and make a lot of them. Sell them cheap and everyone will buy them. The Ford principle became the basis of the American automobile manufacture. The Japanese who had only 13,000 vehicles, all imported, in 1923, learnt from the American assembly line manufacture and began improving on it laying greater emphasis on quality. As the story goes, when an American visited a Japanese car factory, he wanted to meet the quality inspector. His host told him that they did not have any inspectors as their workers themselves did the job. The emphasis on quality turned around the reputation of the Japanese manufacturer. Before the war, the Japanese goods were scorned as “rubbish, shoddy, meretricious, unreliable, made for five-and-dime stores”. Now they are quality leaders. At one time, the Americans ridiculed them, even the concept of “small cars”. The very name Toyota made them smile. Ford and General Motors thought Americans wanted big cars they could love and make love in until OPEC raised oil prices in the 70s and they realised “small was indeed beautiful”. The Americans blamed Japanese state subventions and protectionism for the latter’s success. “Henry Ford stuck to technologies long after they were obsolete. When he was right, he was very, very right. And when he was wrong, other producers took market share. The Model T was in some respects obsolete from the start. But it was cheap, the price of the standard model going from $825 in 1908 to $260 in 1927” when the last car of that model rolled off the line. The Americans seem to have learnt from their Japanese rivals. General Motors has put its acts together and is now giving stiff competition to its Japanese rival the world over. Even in India, its Spark, Aveo and Montana provide a challenge to all the models from the Maruti stable. All this is good for the consumer, who now has a surfeit of choices. Tata’s Indica, which was derided as a car that runs like a truck – noisy and bumpy often needing a push – underwent so many refinements that today it is an ideal option for the taxi operator from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and Vadodara to Vandanmedu. If Nano clicks and Jagaur and Land Rover fall into its lap, as expected, Tata will emerge as the first Indian carmaker of the world.
|
|
Can the British break free of class? A headline in Tuesday’s Independent was arresting. “Miner’s son invited to sing Otello by Placido Domingo,” it said, and it struck only the pedants among us that a better headline might have been: “Miner’s son invited by Placido Domingo to sing Otello.” After all, it was not the Spanish tenor but the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi who was responsible for the opera based on Shakespeare’s play. What the text revealed was that 49-year-old Ian Storey n who last month became the first British performer in many years to open the new season at La Scala in Milan, in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde n is actually the grandson of a miner. His father was a coal board clerk. Nonetheless, Mr Storey’s humble origins among the collieries of County Durham were plainly what gave the story its worth as a news item. And that brings me to the subject of Britishness, because in other countries, not least Italy, it would be neither here nor there that a fellow from a humble background had risen to sing n in front of six prime ministers and presidents, no less n at La Scala. To cite an obvious example, the late Luciano Pavarotti was a baker’s son. So what, even an Englishman might think. But only because he was Italian. Had Pavarotti come not from Modena but from Manchester or Minchinhampton or Merthyr Tydfil, his artisan antecedents would have defined him, almost more than his exquisite talent. Of course, the British obsession with class has diminished since the days when John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett lampooned it so brilliantly on The Frost Report n “I look up to him because he is upper-class ... but I look down on him because he is lower-class” n but not nearly as much as we like to think. It has also acquired a curious new dynamic, which might these days be represented by Corbett, standing on a large box, saying: “I look down on him because he is upper-class... and I look down on him because he is middle-class.” The Conservative leader David Cameron is a victim of this shift. He is an Old Etonian and by definition out of touch with the needs of ordinary people, remains the verdict of even some intelligent folk, who consider him the very embodiment of a class-ridden society. But it is they who are preoccupied with class, not he. There is now as much inverted snobbery in British society as the conventional sort, which admittedly may not be a bad thing, because it at least shows a society trying to address its traditional foibles and perhaps over-egging the pudding (which I’m quite sure Pavarotti’s father never did). A snob, incidentally, is defined in my Reader’s Digest Universal Dictionary as “one who overvalues rank or status, and despises his supposed inferiors” and I am mindful that there might even be one or two people who feel a slight snobbish twinge towards me for owning a Reader’s Digest Universal Dictionary. After all, snobbery comes in many forms: intellectual, social, racial, moral, political, even geographical. It is metropolitan liberals, though, who are in many ways the worst snobs of all. To them, the notional land they call Middle England is a hotbed of reactionary conservatism, a land of Hyacinth Buckets and a deeply-held if rarely-articulated belief in the innate superiority of white over black, of Englishman over Frenchman, of St George over St Andrew. But in sneering at Middle England they display precisely the traits they claim to despise; judging other people not by the colour of their skin but by where they choose to live, or whether they are members of golf clubs, or what newspapers they read. This is where the liberal claim on the moral high ground founders. As for the actual high ground, I’m pleased to say that, like me (a bookie’s son), “miner’s son” Ian Storey lives out here in the Herefordshire hills. Not that he’s going to be around too much these next few years. “Dubbed the Billy Elliot of opera, Storey now has engagements booked at opera houses around the world until 2013,” This class-fixated nation’s interest in him as a news item derives from him getting away from his roots, not returning to them. By arrangement with The Independent
|
|
Inside Pakistan AS many as 50 suicide bombings hit different parts of Pakistan last year, but Lahore remained a safe place. The situation changed on Thursday when a suicide bomber killed over two dozen people, most of them policemen, at the Lahore High Court premises. Now efforts are on to identify the elements behind the ghastly incident. Is it the handiwork of Al-Qaida, the Taliban or a smaller extremist outfit? Were the lawyers the real target? Or is it part of the militancy directed against the security forces? The Lahore bomb blast is the most horrifying tragedy after what happened on December 27 in Rawalpindi, killing PPP leader Benazir Bhutto and many others. It seems the extremists, earlier active in mainly the tribal areas ordering Afghanistan, have spread their network all over Pakistan. “The writ of the state has grown weaker still and the ability of the militants behind the bombings to strike at will, where and when they like, has grown by the day.” as The News pointed out in an editorial. “This is the time for all political groups to be brought together, and for a collective strategy to be devised. The shattered ability of the state to protect its people must somehow be resurrected, and the might of the militants broken.” The News pleaded. As The Nation said, “So far no one has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing in Lahore …, but it is bound to deepen turmoil and the insecurity prevalent in the country ahead of the elections.” More than 800 people have been killed in suicide bomb blasts that began with the storming of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid complex last year. Atta shortage The continuing atta shortage in Pakistan has become acute nowadays. At many places, people have to face a lot of difficulties to purchase a few kilogrammes of atta at a much higher price than what was the situation during this period last year. Wheat, which today sells for Rs 21,000 or more per tonne, was earlier easily available at Rs 18,000 or less. The atta crisis is the second biggest source of worry after suicide bombings for the caretaker government. In the opinion of Business Recorder, “The acute shortage of wheat or an increase in its price beyond the capacity of the ordinary people could trigger panic and protests all over Pakistan ….” The problem began last year following an unrealistic estimate of the wheat yield for 2006-07. The idea was to tell the people that the agricultural sector was performing excellently and they had nothing to worry about their basic food requirements. The flour mill owners, however, came to know of the reality and started hoarding wheat, leading to what Pakistan is faced with today. The government has now made an elaborate plan to import wheat from various countries to ease the situation in view of the coming elections, but atta remains as illusive as it has been for the past few months. There is “a crude attempt to politicise the issue and gain mileage from it” by linking it to the violence following Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, as The News points out. However, such excuses carry no meaning for the harassed people. Speculations over polls Will the February 18 elections be held as scheduled? Speculation is rife that the government may further postpone the polls. The increasing threat to peace and stability from extremists can easily be used as a pretext. It all depends on the feedback from the intelligence agencies, not as much about the security situation as the chances of the PML(Q), the King’s Party, to score a clear victory. The PPP and the PML (N) fear that if the elections do take place, these will be rigged to help the PML (Q) to emerge as the single largest party capable of forming a new government. US Senator Joseph Lieberman, currently on a visit to Islamabad, and European Union Election Observers Mission chief Michael Gayle have also expressed their apprehension in this regard. As Dawn commented, “It is no secret that the supposedly neutral caretaker governments (in the provinces) now in place are little but an extension of Mr Musharraf’s PML-Q coterie that was in power until November 15. Unofficially but clearly the old regime is still calling the shots.” Thus, rigging is not impossible if President Musharraf so desires. But the Musharraf regime has been warned to desist from such an adventure. |
| HOME PAGE | |
Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir |
Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs |
Nation | Opinions | | Business | Sports | World | Mailbag | Chandigarh | Ludhiana | Delhi | | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
WHEN The Economist of London publishes the picture of Tata’s Nano on its cover page within minutes of Ratan Tata unveiling his version of the ‘people’s car’ at the 9th Auto Expo in New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, it shows how keenly awaited the whole world was for the world’s cheapest car.