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Standing tall Delimitation delight |
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Old game, new fizz Hard battles for soft drinks TIME was when cricketers were considered ambassadors for the game. Times have changed and in this gentleman’s game of glorious uncertainties, well, the number of gentlemen is fast declining.
Belgian title for Sonia
Books in the basement
Experiment with independence No locals in a globalising world Myths about Iraq’s terror brigades
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Standing tall FIDEL CASTRO has finally retired. The Cuban leader has told his people that he would neither accept the post of President nor become a member of the national Legislature. Few had expected him to return to power which he relinquished in favour of his younger brother Raul Castro about two years ago after undergoing a major operation. The transition has been smooth, to say the least. Since Raul Castro is only a few years younger to Fidel Castro, the succession issue cannot be said to have been sorted out. Be that as it may, for nearly half a century, Fidel Castro was the undisputed leader of Cuba, whatever might have been the designation he fancied. That he has survived nine American presidents and countless assassination attempts adds to the aura that surrounds him since he defeated the Batista regime in a guerilla war in 1959 when he was only 32. Skeptics who doubted his ability to stand up to the United States were legion but he disproved them when he defeated every attempt to dethrone him. He weathered the Cuban missile crisis when his small nation was on the brink of a nuclear attack and, possibly, extinction. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba faced an unprecedented crisis. Subsidised petroleum products were no longer available to the country which had to import them at a cost it was unable to bear. But Cuba did not falter. It stood up as a bulwark against what Castro was fond of calling the “imperialist designs” in the Latin American continent. The US animosity against Cuba is so strong that the American Presidential hopefuls fight shy of taking a forthright position against dismantling the anti-Cuba laws in place in the country. Opinions differ on Fidel Castro’s legacy. For many he was a dictator whose main job was to keep his people from fleeing away from Cuba at the first available opportunity. And for others, he represented the readiness of a nation which was not prepared to be bullied into submission by the mightiest nation of the world. Of course, Cuba has many achievements to its credit. It can boast of one of the best medical infrastructures in the world allowing Cubans to have the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality rate. Once Castro told the world defiantly, “Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me”. Now it is over to the historians.
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Delimitation delight IF “delimitation” is a long word, “delimitation of electoral constituencies” is an opaque term. It makes the exercise sound so boring that it takes a while to catch on that there will be much fun and games when the next Lok Sabha and assembly elections are held. Simply put, the term means that constituencies will be re-drawn and, as a result, the constituencies of many politicians will have to change. Sitting MPs cannot take the voters of a familiar constituency for granted. They will have to make the effort to get to know their new voters, start afresh to build vote banks and reckon with the fact that the composition of voters has changed. That is, if they want to win. It will be advantage voter. Redrawing the boundaries of the existing constituencies will result in areas from one seat getting transferred to another. It will also mean some politicians losing constituencies as the number of seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes has increased. For instance, Union Home Minster Shivraj Patil may find himself bereft of any ground to stand in Latur; not because of the earthquake that occurred there but because the Latur seat is now SC. On the flip side, Ram Vilas Paswan’s Hajipur will be de-reserved. SAD President Sukhbir Singh Badal (Faridkot) and Congress MP Rana Gurjit Singh (Jalandhar) will have to look for new seats when the delimitation comes into force. The Lok Sabha constituencies of Phillaur, Ropar and Tarn Taran will be replaced by Anandpur Sahib, Fatehgarh Sahib and Khadoor Sahib. With the shift in the vote base and some politicians losing their constituencies, the chances of people being taken for a ride by the same politician as he had managed to dow in past elections is somewhat less. The new voters will need to be wooed assiduously and in this process, the voters can bargain for a better deal. Of course, it will be a politician — though a different one — who wins.
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Old game, new fizz TIME was when cricketers were considered ambassadors for the game. Times have changed and in this gentleman’s game of glorious uncertainties, well, the number of gentlemen is fast declining. To make matters worse, even as the uncertainties on the pitch have increased manifold, the glory is found in sponsorships and endorsements. Hence, when a cricketer is spoken of as an ambassador, it is necessary to specify for which brand. In fact, when the uninitiated watch cricket, it is not uncommon for a viewer to exclaim that he spotted so-and-so model for a cellphone or a soft drink also playing cricket. It looks like the game has become a high-stakes one both on and off the pitch, and there are all kinds of cricket teams at large. First, for those who know cricket, there are the teams for the Tests, ODIs and Twenty20s. Then there are teams for soft drinks, and those who don’t know cricket more readily recall, for example, Team Pepsi. Lest one runs away with fantasies of two teams of eleven competing with each other in how much of the fizzy stuff they can down, it should be made clear that such teams are made up of cricket players. And the job of these cricket players is to endorse the soft drink, increase its sales, get a lot people addicted to soft drinks and ensure the rising fortunes of soft drink makers. However, without the soft stuff, the hard battle on the ground can be difficult; and, if a player doesn’t deliver while playing, he cannot expect to be picked for product endorsements. Now that the text, context and subtext are clarified, be it known to all that Team Pepsi has dropped Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid and roped in Ishant Sharma and Rohit Sharma. The question is whether Sourav and Rahul were dropped from the ODI team in anticipation of Pepsi’s decision? Or, did Pepsi dump them because they are not part of the cricket team? Indeed, cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties.
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Sins become more subtle as you grow older. You commit sins of despair rather than lust. — Piers Paul Read
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Belgian title for Sonia
HAS Mrs Sonia Gandhi committed any offence by accepting the award “Order of Leopold” from the Belgian government? If not, can Tendulkar become “Sir Sachin”? The complaint against Mrs Gandhi seems to be that the acceptance of the award is “acknowledgement of allegiance to a foreign State”, which would disqualify her from continuing to be a MP under Article 102 of the Constitution. Prima facie, the charge looks frivolous. But there is another provision in the Constitution — Article 18 — with the title “Abolition of Titles”. Strangely, that article is housed among the Fundamental Rights. So, it is the fundamental right of every citizen not to be conferred with any title other than military or academic distinctions. It further says, “no citizen of India shall accept any title from any foreign State”. What if a citizen accepts one — like the “Order of Leopold” —or a knighthood? Article 18 is silent on the sequel to its violation. The philosophy behind Article 18 is that in a democracy, all citizens are equal and the State should not disturb this concept through award of titles — academic or military distinctions are earned — not gifted. Constitutions of different States like the US, Germany, Ireland and Japan prohibit the State from conferring titles of nobility. Why did the makers of our Constitution prescribe a prohibition without spelling the penalty for its violation? This aspect was specifically considered. While discussing the draft Article 12, which eventually became Article 18, T.T. Krishnamachari, a member of the Constituent Assembly, suggested that the words “not being a military or academic distinction” be inserted. Another member, Loknath Misra, said: “We know instances where people have got titles which they do not deserve and the entitled gentleman belies the import of the title”. Naziruddin Ahmad pointedly asked, “If anybody accepts any foreign title, what is the penalty which is provided? No penalty is provided for accepting it. The State has no means of giving effect to this clause”. To this Dr Ambedkar replied, “The State shall not recognise it.” H.V. Kamath raised a query, “If the State inadvertently or in a fit of absentmindedness or due to some other cause, does confer titles, what can be done against the State? After all, the State itself has conferred the title”. After considerable exchange of thoughts, Dr Ambedkar said, “My answer to that (to the query as to what is the penalty) is very simple: That it would be perfectly open under the Constitution for Parliament under its residuary powers to make a law prescribing what should be done with regard to an individual who does accept a title contrary to the provisions of this article. I should have thought that that was an adequate provision for meeting the case which he has put before the House”. Dr Ambedkar further said, “The non-acceptance of titles is a condition of continued citizenship; it is not a right, it is a duty imposed upon the individual that if he continues to be the citizen of this country then he must abide by certain conditions, one of the conditions is that he must not accept a title because it would be open for Parliament, when it provides by law as to what should be done to persons who abrogate the provisions of this article, to say that if any person accepts a title, certain penalties may follow. One of the penalties may be that he may lose the right of citizenship. Therefore, there is really no difficulty in understanding this provision as it is a condition attached to citizenship, by itself it is not a justiciable right.” It may be recalled that the Citizenship Act, which was enacted in 1955, makes no reference to the acceptance of the title. Nor is there any other law that has given effect to the solution offered by Dr Ambedkar. As the law stands today, Mrs Sonia Gandhi cannot be punished for accepting the Belgian title. It is a different question whether any person having taken the oath to “bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India” can violate a provision like Article 18 without suffering any consequence. And Article 51-A makes it the fundamental duty of every citizen to “abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals”. Again, no penalties are prescribed for disregarding this constitutionally ordained duty. The Constituent Assembly had rejected the suggestions by many members that no foreign title shall be recognised in India. So Tendulkar can be “Sir, Sachin” without inviting the wrath of law. What about our own Padma awards introduced in 1954 — four years after the Constitution came into force? In 1977, soon after the Morarji Desai government assumed office, the then Attorney-General late S.V. Gupte opined that the awards were opposed to Article 18. As a result, from 1978 to 1980, the January 25 ritual stood abolished; they were, however, reintroduced in 1981. In the case of Balaji Raghavan (1996), a five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held that the Padma awards were only methods of recognising excellence. The court, however, decreed that these honours conferred by the State should not be used as suffixes or prefixes, i.e. as titles by the recipients. A passing glance at some of the recipients of these awards is enough to make one marvel at the art or science of recognising excellence. It is a different matter that many of these excellent men and women do not mind letting the awards being used as suffixes or prefixes, with impunity. What about the “honorary doctorates” conferred by universities? These institutions of higher learning generally are “States” within the meaning of the expression in the Constitution. Recognition of academic distinctions — Ph.Ds or D.Phils and the like — is conferred from time to time on the basis of merit proven according to the established rules. The honorary doctors are generally modest enough not to lay claims to any special achievement. Nevertheless, in some States a sizeable number — especially among the politicians — are “doctors” flaunting their prefixes. There was a belief some time ago that these honorary doctorates are like garlands presented at a ceremonial occasion — not intended to be displayed on the streets after the function, though the recipient is its owner. One sees no reason not to treat the honorary doctorates conferred by the universities as anything but titles prohibited by Article 18, if they can be legitimately used as prefixes to the
names.
The writer is Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India.
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Books in the basement LUIZ JOHN is an old friend. By now, he would have been our envoy somewhere in the world. But he quit his job in the Ministry of External Affairs within a few years of joining it. Everybody in his family, not to mention friends, was shocked by his decision. He had other plans up his sleeves. Instead of going to Moscow where he was posted, Luiz set up a lending library on Marine Drive in his hometown Kochi. When the leasedeed of the building expired, he shifted the library to the more up-market Press Club Road. Christened Eloor Library, it became a big hit with the readers, mainly wives and children of the Naval officers posted in Kochi. Though the library movement was strong in Kerala, Eloor Library was a new concept for the Malayali reader. Members could borrow books, some of them in mint-fresh condition, for a fraction of the book’s cost. Once I took author Sanjoy Hazarika to the library. He was pleasantly surprised to find his books - Strangers of the Mist and Rites of Passage — on the shelves. If a reader fancied a book, published anywhere in the world, Eloor Library would see to it that it was made available to him within a few days. Luiz spent his time studying the reading habits of the people and catering to them. He evolved such a system of cataloguing and monitoring in those pre-computer days that it enabled him to stay at home reading about books, if not books, and attending to the needs of the family while the Library remained virtually on auto-mode. The success of Eloor Library prompted many entrepreneurs to set up similar lending libraries on the Press Club Road itself. But one by one they folded up while Eloor Library expanded with a branch in Thiruvananthapuram in 1986, Bangalore in 1988, Chennai in 1993 and Kolkata in 1997. Rupa Bajwa, author of The Sari Shop, said this in India Today: “I will admit that I was astounded when I first visited Eloor Library in Bangalore. The sheer number of books was staggering. I could not have hoped to have access to one-tenth of these books in Amritsar, my hometown”. Luiz once claimed that his was the world’s largest library of its kind. But he did not want to rest on his laurels. He wanted to expand his library network to the national Capital. That is how he bought a property - the basement of a building in posh South Extension Part I - and started Eloor Library in October 2006. “Apart from the air-conditioned ambience, marbled floors and neat woodwork, what helps is that you need not bother about membership cards or those passport-sized photographs. A webcam captures your image and the electronic stylus takes care of the signature. Eloor has bid those old-fashioned manual catalogues goodbye; readers here browse through e-catalogues”. Such gushing newspaper comments did not help when mindless babus descended on the library on February 5, drove away the employees, removed the electric meter and sealed the premises because they thought the library was “illegal”. Luiz, who studied the Delhi rules before investing in the library, about which writer Mukul Kesavan wrote that it was “the best thing that has happened to South Delhi in decades”, knew that libraries were exempted from the rules pertaining to the use of basements of buildings. While the law is definitely on his side, Luiz has a long legal battle on his hands. Surely, that was not what he bargained for when he set up Eloor Library in the Capital.
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Experiment with independence Serbia promised maximum autonomy to Kosovo but the Muslim Kosovans preferred independence following the models of Pakistan and Bosnia. Kosovo was the original cradle of Serbian nationalism. Kosovo is not likely to get the endorsement of the UN since Russia is likely to veto any such move. The Chinese attitude is also not clear. China, given its problem of Taiwan, Tibet and Uighur secessionism in Xinjiang, is not likely to favour UN membership for Kosovo. At first glance it would appear the US and the West are encouraging Islamic secessionism and confirming the clash of civilizations thesis. In Bosnia the Muslims were only a small majority. Yet they decided they could not coexist with others professing Christianity. So is the case with Kosovo, which after the NATO offensive against Serbia in their favour on the ground of Belgrade’s genocide against them, was given full autonomy under UN supervision. That was not sufficient for them. Why did the US and the European Union decide to favour Kosovo’s secession? In US and EU there is a growing opinion that Muslim countries like Turkey, Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo can be absorbed in the European Union and secularised and that would contribute towards the process of secularisation of the rest of the Islamic world. The progressive reform of laws and governance in Turkey under pressure from the European Union gives room for hope to the West that secularisation of Islam in these countries is possible. Only the future will tell whether this assumption is a valid one. In a sense, the clash of civilisations will begin to be decided in the European continent. While the American way of life appears to be strong enough to ensure that there is no assertive demand from the Muslim minority in the US to their being governed exclusively by Shariah, there are such demands in European countries where there are significant Muslim minorities. A recent pronouncement by the Archbishop of Canterbury that British laws could be amended to accommodate some Shariah provisions generated widespread criticism in the UK including from the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. In France the Muslim minority is aggrieved that their girl children are not allowed to wear head scarves in schools. On the other hand in Turkey, which has been fiercely secular since the twenties of the last century when Kamal Ataturk decreed secularism for that country and forbade head scarves for women and Fez caps for men, a recent constitutional amendment has been adopted to permit the women the option to wear head scarves. Many Turks believe that this is the first step towards Islamisation of Turkey. The present government which piloted this measure and has Islamic roots is yet keen to join the European Union. In Christian civilisation there is a concept of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and rendering unto God what is God’s. This implies a clear division between the Church and the State. Even the Catholic church, while being against abortion or divorce, does not question the right of elected representatives of the population to legislate on such issues. They usually advise the population not to vote and elect representatives who hold such views. But in Islam it is held that there is no division between church and state. As General Zia ul Haq once explained it did not matter in Islam how a person became a ruler of the country. But as a Muslim his duty is to enforce Shariah. Therefore the orthodox among the Muslims argue that no representative democratic institution can alter any law or traditional observance contrary to Shariah. Islam does provide for such adjustments in the procedure, Idjma, by which Islamic scholars could debate and arrive at a consensual opinion in favour of reform. However this has not been adequately used and understandably there is strong resistance to change from the status-quoists. Since hereditary rulers will naturally favour status quo in most of the monarchical Islamic countries, orthodoxy prevails. In Pakistan Zia-ul-Haq used Islamisation to legitimise the military usurpation. In a sense there is a strong churning within the Islamic world and a clash between those who would like reforms to adjust themselves to the conditions of the day and those who would like to resist change. The West, which has encouraged Kosovo secessionism, appears to believe that democratisation and modernisation will sweep over and overwhelm religious obscurantism. The Russians worry about this secessionism’s impact on their Muslim areas – Chechnya, Tartaristan etc. The Chinese too have reasons to disapprove of this move as there are significant sections in Taiwan which aim at obtaining membership for Taiwan as an independent member of UN. Long ago the Balkans were the battlefield between the advancing Islam into Europe and the Christian powers. Once again the Balkans will decide whether Islam will adjust itself to the globalising world and secularise itself or there will be a clash of civilisations. What should be India’s attitude to the emergence of independent Kosovo? India has seen Pakistan, Israel and Bosnia emerging as religion-based states, all with western support. Now this is the fourth one. India has accorded recognition to all of them. It may have to be done in this case as well. But there is no need to rush into it. India can wait till Russia and China make up their minds.
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No locals in a globalising world AS mobocracy rules the streets of Mumbai and the most uncosmopolitan set of questions such as ‘who are you?’ and ‘where are you from?’ spreads its venomous fang, it becomes pertinent to interrogate the mind set which refuses to delink itself from its totemic fixation to territory. Raj Thackrey and his men seem so utterly out of sync with the world that their political desperation and sheer bankruptcy has become exposed. If the pre-globalisation era was about nation states with its fetish for territorial sovereignty and the sanctity of the soil, the era of globalisation is characterised by its accent on de-territoriality. People and their professional identity become more important a marker than their territorial location. Globalisation is also about migration and mobility, about displacement and dislocation. Not that these processes were not there earlier – but they have became more intense in a new global world. All this also meant diminishing significance for the physicality of a highly emotive issue such as ‘national pride’. Indira Nooyi heads the American cola giant but it’s a matter of pride for the Indians and not an occasion signifying any compromise or submission. A Bobby Jindal or a Ujjawal Dosanjh or a Shashi Tharoor represents that symbolic sense of national pride. Migration and mobility are no more necessarily pathological. They rather represent a community’s modern outlook and level of entrepreneurial preparedness. A society or country with people who are mobility-inclined and friendly and ready to transcend the domain of familiarity for unknown terrain is a strong indicator of its globality index. The new world has moved far ahead and away from the rhetoric of brain drain and son-of-the-soil theories of yore. Admittedly those who are better equipped in terms of skill and technical qualification tend to find the transition more smooth and congenial. Yet it does not in any way make the unskilled laborers and the semi-skilled workforce from India, for instance, who work in the Gulf or say in the infrastructural projects in Afghanistan, less welcomed or significant. However, if the world is flat, as Thomas L. Friedman would have it, its evenness would depend on a society’s investment in its human development component. These rules of logic are equally true for intra-national processes and formations. The movement of people from underdeveloped pockets towards higher economic zones have picked up in recent decades in India. Lure of money, quality of life, better productive opportunities and most importantly, security of life, have been the major push factors. Hence, by the same logic, it would be difficult to make a distinction between the recent spate of hate crimes in America against the Indians and the beating of a car driver or a samosa wallah from Uttar Pradesh by the activists of MNS in Mumbai. Also, the argument questioning Amitabh Bachchan’s loyalty to Maharashtra on the ground that he makes his living in Mumbai and spends his savings in Allahabad is fraught with dangerous implications. This will make our nostalgic NRIs go red-faced in their new homes. Yet if MNS is to be blamed for its divisive politics and its obsolescence, the so-called leaders representing the north Indians and who have sprung up in Mumbai in defense of their brethren need to be confronted with some hard questions as well. The first and the foremost would be to ask as to why after all a rickshaw wallah or a samosa wallah from Bihar or Uttar Pradesh has to migrate to such far off places leaving his family behind? Doesn’t it also expose the decades of misrule and plundering of public money by the successive political regimes in these pockets of abject poverty and deprivation? India and its destiny depend as much on Bihar as on Bangalore. Bangalore can not be sustained and managed if Bihar remains mismanaged. This is another important feature of the new global world, the element of inter-dependence. To illustrate it further, a weak and unstable Pakistan, for instance, is no good news for anyone. Moreover within the national boundary with a federal arrangement such as ours, the logic of MNS is dangerously warped and flawed. Raj Thackrey should know that the words such as ‘natives’ and ‘locals’ have become redundant in today’s world. There are only local trains now, no local people anymore. Travel in it Mr. Thakeray, to know the real world.
The writer teaches sociology in Govt. College for Girls, Chandigarh
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Myths about Iraq’s terror brigades IT is accepted wisdom that the war in Iraq has brought huge numbers of holy warriors to the anti-American cause. But is it true? Muslim holy warriors are a diverse lot, reacting with differing intensity to the hot-button issues that define contemporary Islamic militancy. For many fundamentalists, what is seen as an unrelenting Western assault on Muslim male honor and female virtue is the core infuriating offense. For others it may be the alienation that second-generation young Muslim men encounter in an immigrant-unfriendly Europe. And for still others, Iraq, Afghanistan, the tyranny of U.S.-backed Muslim rulers and the Palestinian resistance can all come together to convert individual indignities into a holy-warrior faith. These complexities may help explain, at least in part, why so many secular Westerners seek relief in more easily understood explanations for jihadism (the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being the usual favorites) – explanations that don’t probe too deeply into Islamic history and the militant Muslim imagination. Regarding the Iraq war and jihadism, two facts stand out. First, if we make a comparison with the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979-89, which was the baptismal font for al-Qaida, what’s most striking is how FEW foreign holy warriors have gone to Mesopotamia since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Admittedly, we don’t have a perfect grasp of the numbers involved in either conflict. But the figure of 25,000 Arab mujaheddin is probably a decent figure for those who went to Pakistan to fight the Red Army. Most probably did so in the last four years of the war, when the recruitment organizations and logistics became well developed. In Iraq, we see nothing of this magnitude, even though Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, is in the Arab heartland and at the center of Islamic history. Moreover, for Arabs, getting to Iraq isn’t difficult, and once there they speak the language and know the culture. And of course the United States, the bete noire of Islamists, is the enemy in Iraq. But according to the CIA and the U.S. military, we are now seeing at most only dozens of Arab Sunni holy warriors entering the country each month. Even at the height of the insurgency in 2006-07, the figure might have been just a few hundred (and may have been much smaller). In the 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest and most well-organised Islamist movement, was at the center of the anti-Soviet jihadist recruitment effort. But in the case of Iraq, the Brotherhood has largely sat out the war. Even in Saudi Arabia, the mother ship of virulently anti-American, anti-Shiite, anti-moderate Muslim Wahhabism, the lack of commitment has been striking. We should have seen thousands, not hundreds, of Saudi true believers descending on Iraq. Throughout the Arab world, fundamentalism today is much stronger on the ground than it was in the 1980s. Yet the fundamentalist commitment to the Iraqi Sunni Arab insurgency pales in comparison with that made to Sunni Afghans. A second striking fact about Islamism and the Iraq war is that the arrival of foreign holy warriors is deradicalising the local population – the exact opposite of what happened in Afghanistan. In the Soviet war, the “Arab Afghans” arrived white-hot – their radicalisation had occurred at home in the 1960s and 1970s, when Islamic fundamentalism replaced secular Arab nationalism as the driving intellectual force. On the subcontinent, Arab holy warriors accelerated extreme Islamism among both Afghans and Pakistanis. We are still living with the results. In Iraq, as we have seen with the anti-al-Qaida, Sunni Arab “Awakenings,” Sunni extremism is now in retreat. More important, the gruesome anti-Shiite tactics of extremist groups, combined with the much-quoted statements made by former Sunni insurgents about the positive actions of the United States in Iraq, have caused a great deal of intellectual turbulence in the Arab world. It’s way too soon to call Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida spiritual outcasts among Arab Muslims, but they have in fact sustained enormous damage throughout the region because of Iraq. The lack of holy-warrior manpower coming from the Muslim Brotherhood is surely, in part, a reflection of this discomfort with al-Qaida’s violence.
The writer was with the American CIA.
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THE Muslim province of Kosovo of Serbia has declared itself independent. Thereby it becomes the fourth Muslim state in Europe after Albania, Bosnia and Turkey. The US and the European Union have recognised the independence of Kosovo while Serbia and Russia have denounced it.