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Denial mode Sarabjit is innocent |
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Preying on tourists
How India won its best war
Panic at Palwal
Ten years of Sonia Inside the slave trade over the Bangla border Delhi Durbar
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Denial mode Punjab
has this ill-advised habit of not only looking a gift horse in the mouth but also refusing it altogether. It happened in the case of the Bathinda oil refinery once. Now the same obstinacy is being displayed in the case of converting Panjab University, Chandigarh, into a Central university. The government has taken it in its head that the conversion will weaken its territorial claim over Chandigarh. Despite stout assertions that this is not the case, the state government has been resisting all attempts for upgrading the university in Chandigarh. Ironically, this obduracy is accompanied by a clamour for more Central universities in the state. The Prime Minister had announced the setting up of 30 new Central universities last year. Since Panjab University is his alma mater, the teachers here had started a signature campaign to persuade the Union Government to declare it a Central university. There was also scope for Punjab getting another Central university, probably in the Malwa belt, but the Punjab Government’s inexplicable opposition is coming in the way. The state’s apprehension that the Centre may link the status of the university to a territorial dispute is far-fetched. If this opportunity is lost, it will be a great setback for the state. As it is, the university is suffering from the paucity of funds. While 40 to 45 per cent of its annual budget of Rs 130 crore comes from its own resources, it also gets an annual grant of Rs 38 crore from the Centre. The Punjab Government chips in with Rs 16 crore. The Central Government used to increase its annual allocation to the university by 8 per cent, but has stopped doing so ever since Punjab froze its yearly financial support at Rs 16 crore. Though Panjab University is one of only four federal universities in the country, its financial health is very poor. Many ongoing programmes are suffering and even routine maintenance work is not being carried out. No wonder, the quality of research work, too, is affected. The Central university scheme could have turned the situation around, but the Punjab Government has come in the way. It must review its position before it is too late.
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Sarabjit is innocent Sarabjit
Singh, the Indian national who has been in jail in Pakistan for the past 17 years, is going to be hanged on April 1 if no effective last-minute efforts are made to save his life. President Pervez Musharraf, who has rejected his mercy petition, can be persuaded by justice-loving people to have another look at Sarbjit’s case, which is nothing but a case of mistaken identity. He was arrested as Manjit Singh, accused of being involved in a series of bomb blasts in Lahore and Multan in 1990, claiming 14 lives. He was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging despite his plea that he was not the man the authorities had been looking for. The Pakistan Supreme Court also rejected his plea for clemency in March 2006. Sarabjit’s case, it seems, had become a matter of prestige for the law-enforcement authorities in Pakistan. They cooked up spying charges against him and produced false witnesses to ensure his conviction. Since he belonged to an enemy country, his plea that he was not the person called Manjit Singh, who was suspected to have been behind the 1990 bomb blasts, fell on deaf ears. No thought was given to the argument that this resident of Bhikhiwind, a border village in India’s Amritsar district, strayed into Pakistani territory in an inebriated state. There is still time to prevent a grave injustice being done in the case of this innocent villager. As India has conveyed to Pakistan, this is not “the best way to deal” with the issue involved. Of course, Sarabjit has not been as lucky as Kashmir Singh, now back to India after waiting on death row for 35 years in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat Jail. Kashmir Singh, who attracted the attention of Pakistan’s Human Rights Minister Ansar Burney, was treated as having suffered enough after his arrest on spying charges. This appreciable gesture on the part of Islamabad was considered a major boost to the peace constituency in the subcontinent. Sparing the life of Sarabjit Singh, who has been simply unlucky all these years, will be a far greater contribution to the cause of peace between India and Pakistan.
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Preying on tourists Goa’s
famed beaches are now gaining notoriety for a spate of molestation cases, particularly of foreign tourists. One more incident, following closely on the gruesome rape and murder of British Scarlette Keeling, has grabbed the headlines. A German tourist from Munich on a week-long holiday has alleged that she had her swimsuit pulled while walking on Cavelossim beach in South Goa. Given the international media coverage of the British teenager’s case, and the efforts to pursue justice by her mother Fiona Mackeown, the police are acting promptly on the new incident. The investigation continues in the Keeling case meanwhile, and more arrests are being made, even as the police claim to have completely solved the case. Already this year, several cases of foreign women being molested have occurred in Rajasthan, Mumbai and Kerala. While some incidents gain media exposure, there may be others that might have gone unreported. In any case, it is clear that the law and order situation on Goa’s beaches is suspect. Proper vigilance is called for, and a systematic effort to police the beaches in a way that potential trouble-makers are identified and kept out. While genuine tourists and holiday-makers must not be hindered, others, whether locals or from outside, intent on indulging in criminal activities and prone to mischief, must be given short shrift. It is a fact that tourists are routinely harassed in a myriad ways. Places of tourist interest, particularly those with high volumes of international visitors, are a draw for unsavoury elements. The increasing tendency to target women tourists and holiday-makers, whether foreign or domestic, must be checked with greater effort and a zero-tolerance attitude from the police. Those giving vent to their baser instincts must be handed out exemplary punishment.
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If you start judging people you will have no time to love them. — Mother Teresa
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How India won its best war
India
got the best military outcome from the 1971 war — its first comprehensive victory in 1000 years. Yet it could not achieve its political objective of resolving the Kashmir dispute. Apologists for the government would say that was not the aim. What was the aim then? It was apparently limited to creating conditions for the return of 10 million refugees to the then East Pakistan. But the Americans had feared that India was out to dismember Pakistan, annexe Azad Kashmir and create an independent East Pakistan, when initially even the capture of Dacca was not on the cards. It was deemed beyond military capability. How India ended the war far in excess of its calculations and far short of American expectations is contained in Conflict and Diplomacy: US and the Birth of Bangladesh-Pakistan Divides by Jaswant Singh and Suraj Bhatia. The revelations on US diplomacy of that period are taken from declassified US documents strung together competently to tell the fascinating inside story of the war, which must be compulsory reading for budding soldiers and statesmen. A similar work, American Papers, by Pakistani diplomat Roedad Khan captures the period 1965-1973. Only two references from it need be made. The rather indiscreet disclosures by Lt-Gen SHFJ Manekshaw, GoC-in-C, Eastern Command, made in conversation with the US Consul-General in Calcutta, William K Hitchcock, on October 12, 1966, on a flight from New Delhi to Calcutta; and Gen Yahya Khan’s biodata sent from Islamabad to Washington on March 26, 1969. Here is an extract: “He more than occasionally drinks and is accused of womanizing, including the reported exercise of droit de seigneur with wives of military subordinates.” Ideally, the two books ought to read in tandem to comprehend the love-hate (mainly hate) relationship between the US and India, and the US tilt to Pakistan. The stellar players in conflict and diplomacy are US President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The supporting cast includes diplomats from the Soviet Union, China, Pakistan and India. The book illustrates the fashioning of US foreign policy in relation to the crisis in East Pakistan. Nixon’s hatred for Indira Gandhi and India and soft corner for Yahya Khan and Pakistan stand out during policymaking in 1971. By deconstructing documents, one learns surprisingly that US diplomacy focused less on preventing conflict between March and November 1971 and more on stopping the war once it had started on December 3, 1971, as the Americans had accepted the inevitability of an independent East Pakistan. In US Intelligence estimates, Indian intention and capabilities were grossly exaggerated. Nixon was convinced that India’s real aim was the disintegration of Pakistan. He believed that leaving four divisions and the Mukti Bahini in the east, India would pounce on West Pakistan and Azad Kashmir. The dismemberment of Pakistan into four states had to be prevented. Some troops were shifted to the West after the ceasefire in a defensive move but not as claimed on December 15 by Kissinger: “I have a file of Indian plans to knock off West Pakistan.” The intelligence overbid was not tampered by the claimed leak by an Indian Cabinet minister of India’s war plans: surrender in the East and holding operations in the West. Americans figured that East Pakistan would be lost in 10 days and there were only three days off the mark. Had the Americans wanted, conditions could have been created for the return of refugees to East Pakistan. US coercive diplomacy began early targeting both India and its strategic ally, the USSR. India was informed that the Chinese invasion in response to India’s incursion into East Pakistan will be treated differently from the events of 1962. There would be no US help. Nixon believed that Chinese moves in Ladakh and the Chumbi Valley would “scare those goddamn Indians to death”. Kissinger explained to Chinese Ambassador in Washington Huang Ha that “we have particular respect for Pakistan as it helped bring us together”. Chinese action in Ladakh and the Chumbi valley did not materialise as Beijing preferred discretion to valour despite Yahya’s duff message to Gen AAK Niazi that “friends from the North will arrive in 72 hours”. In any event, the USSR had warned China against any military overtures against India though Washington had assured Beijing that it would counterbalance Moscow. Nixon was bitterly disappointed with the Chinese. He even considered leaking President Kennedy’s assurance of November 5, 1962, about US military assistance to Pakistan in the vent of aggression by India. He did order USS Enterprise on the pretext of evacuating 200 Americans from East Pakistan. USS Enterprise, nicknamed Oh Calcutta - Task Force 74 was operating south-east of Sri Lanka on December 16 when Dacca surrendered. By December 18 a Soviet naval task force was also approaching the Bay of Bengal. Breaking diplomatic relations with India, cutting off $10 billion aid and sending NATO forces were also on Nixon’s options list. US military aid was covertly shipped to Pakistan - two squadrons each of F-104 from Jordan and Iran and other military equipment from Saudi Arabia and Turkey. US-led diplomatic offensive in the UNSC sought to secure a ceasefire to scuttle the Indian Army’s race to Dacca, especially after air raids over Karachi had reduced strategic reserves of fuel to two weeks in Pakistan. The Indian Army was rapidly closing in on Dacca. Kissinger worked on the Soviets to secure a guarantee from India that it would not attack West Pakistan and seize Azad Kashmir. He warned the Soviet Ambassador that if he did not respond by the morning of December 12, the US would act unilaterally. The guarantee was provided on time. Nixon was livid with the USSR for helping India dismember an ally. Action in the UNSC through Soviet vetoes bought time for the Indian offensive into East Pakistan to convert the offer of a ceasefire into one of capitulation. Conflict terminating resolutions were presented by the US, the UK, France and the USSR - Poland. These varied from ceasefire to withdrawal to pre-December 3 positions to ceasefire and repatriation of forces but no surrender. The opposing commanders in the field had to negotiate the terms to terminate the war. Although a Staff Officer, Lt-Gen JFR Jacob must be credited for obtaining an unconditional surrender from Niazi. The Indian account of the 1971 military victory has not been declassified presumably due to the monumental political failure to force a settlement on Kashmir. The Hamoodur Rehman Comission of Enquiry report in Pakistan is a startling indictment of the handling of the crisis. Among the many questions it asks, the most relevant is whether an honourable ceasefire was possible, and whether the forces could have held on beyond December 16. The authors note that the birth of Bangladesh was not a totally positive event. Similarly, they observe that the Bangladeshis have shown little gratitude or done a good turn. This is a phenomenon peculiar to India’s neighbourhood, not just
Bangladesh.
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Panic at Palwal
The British were still in command of our country, but their rule was on its last legs. I was then just around nine and my family was residing at Jaitu, a commercial town of the princely state of Nabha. Our railway station was a sort of socialising spot. We went there almost every day to spend our evenings in gossip, munching a “papad” or chewing a “pan”, if our pockets permitted. The trains then used to have four classes for the passengers—— the Third, for the Tom, Dick and Harrys like us, the Inter, for the slightly better placed, prepared to pay one and a half times of the normal fare, the Second, mostly for the government servants travelling at government cost and the First, almost exclusively for the British. The passenger trains stopped at the railway station mostly for a minute or so and the bogies used to be often overcrowded. Once a passenger train arrived at the station and the passengers rushed to board it. A bunch of rustic women from a nearby village got into an inter-class compartment in their hurry. One of them then noticed the cushioned seats and shouted breathlessly “Nee dudhe karaey wali hai” (Oh you, it is a compartment carrying one and a half times fare). Meanwhile, the train started coming to motion. The women in their panic almost jumped from the moving train. This reflected the awe in which the government and the law were then held. Nearly 50 years later, when I was travelling in a reserved coach of a mail train bound for Delhi, one of the passengers made the mistake of opening the door at one of the nearby stations in the early hours of the morning. A swarm of commuters floated into the bogie demanding the sleeping passengers to make room for them. The overawed passengers helplessly complied. The groups of unruly commuters then made themselves comfortable here and there. They started playing cards and engaged themselves in noisy discussions, interspersed with filthy words, least bothered about the presence of lady passengers around them. When I tried to get up to confront them my wife weighed me down by clinging to my side. She wisely said that when the Railway Minister and the Prime Minister had failed to deal with this so common a scenario, what chance I stood of succeeding here. The other day I saw the telecast of the mayhem in a reserved railway coach of Bhopal Express. Some goons had got into it at Palwal and misbehaved with the lady passengers. On being resisted, they got violent and are said to have tried to roast the passengers alive by setting fire to the coach. The worried faces of the innocent women who had jumped from the moving train at Jaitu, just because they had boarded a wrong bogie by mistake, flashed before my mind. Surely, the fear of the law is largely gone and the respect for the law is yet to take its
place
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Ten years of Sonia Sonia
Gandhi completed on March 14, 2008, ten years of stewardship of the Indian National Congress. It is the longest stretch in the party office enjoyed by a single individual, in the entire existence of the party since 1885. Sonia Gandhi had, no doubt, inherited a sound political apparatus when she was installed on Match 14, 1998 in an unsavoury manner, in a style that lacked in grace and was devoid of democratic norms. Three wise men of Congress summarily dismissed Sitaram Kesri to make way for Sonia Gandhi. She was presented by the party as the prime ministerial candidate in the 1999 election in a belief that the aura of the Indira Gandhi family and the charisma of Sonia Gandhi would pave the way for the return of the Congress to power. In fact, she had made clear her ambitions of heading the government, outside the Rashtrapati Bhavan, after she staked a claim to form the government on the collapse of the Vajpayee government on the floor in April 1999. Sonia Gandhi, had in her cultivated moves, preferred to remain away from politics for seven years, though she was twice offered the office of the party chief. She stepped in with a promise to help the Congress in 1997. Most Congressmen and their pro-election pundits have often misread the public mood in believing that the Gandhi family was enough to win votes. Failure after failure has not made them revise their opinion. Sonia Gandhi led her party with her family name as her only asset in the 1999 election. She ended up with merely 112 seats, lowest up to that point, in the Lok Sabha. But she had not surrendered the national status of her party, as she had gone to polls all alone without conceding any seat to anyone else. In the four years that followed, a strong yearning for power made her concede territories to strong regional parties in some states, in an attempt to build an anti-BJP mood in the country. It helped in improving the Congress strength in Lok Sabha by thirty, but she had to depend on regional parties to win 63 seats. She gained nothing in terms of territory or strength by surrendering her prime status as a national party. But she did gain in stature when she nominated Manmohan Singh for the post of the Prime Minister, when Left support enabled the Congress to lead a coalition government in May 2004. It was a shrewd move putting all power in her hands, rarely shared in the last four years. She had. However. arrived as the leader without an inherent understanding of the mechanisms of power and party structures. She left the party structure alone without the much needed fundamental change, except for some cosmetic touches. It did not open doors for the young with political understanding and ability to motivate people. Compromises were made to maintain peace and unity in the party. Personal loyalty remained the sole criterion for new recruits. Youngsters with their elders firmly saddled in the party structure alone could gain entry. Power was not used for four years to strengthen and widen the party base, because too many fears stood in the way. The party gains in the various assembly polls in 1998 were credited to Sonia Gandhi but no one was willing to blame her for the subsequent losses in the polls that followed, till 2007. Even failure in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat was blamed on the inability of the party to convert the goodwill that she and her son Rahul Gandhi had generated during their intense campaigns, without anyone questioning why the party machinery failed. Not only did the Congress not gain more political space in the last four years, its allies in the United Progressive Alliance have also not fared well in the same period. The Congress president cannot depend on these allies to deliver the 63 seats that they had won in the May 2004 elections. Sonia Gandhi has not passed the acid test of winning states in assembly polls in the last two years. She has to face more challenges during the eleventh year of her stewardship with little hope for better prospects. She is still operating on a base minimum of armoury. Her one and only asset is her son Rahul Gandhi, and not a well-oiled party machinery. In four years, fuel prices have almost doubled and in their cascading impact, prices of all other commodities, including vital ones, have also doubled. The farm sector continues to be a problem area affecting food security. The lack of better inputs, including water management, affects productivity, leading to a perennial crisis for farmers. Instead of seeking a lasting solution, the Congress leadership has indulged in the politics of tokenism by throwing crumbs at farmers and the deprived in rural areas. Writing off farm loans might provide short term relief. Without increase in productivity, farmers would again have heavy burdens around their necks with new farm loans. The Rural Employment Guarantee scheme raised expectations but the faulty delivery system does not satisfy the needs, leading to deeper frustration and anger. There is hardly any significant achievement in the credit ledger of Sonia Gandhi, to prove that her ten years of leadership would have helped the party to turn the page for a better future. Even on the nuclear deal the Congress leadership has proved that it had clay feet and did not have courage to take up the issue boldly and seek a fresh mandate on it. She does not have a programme with which the masses will identify. She needs to bring about a metamorphosis of the party. Her son alone would not be an effective instrument for her to realize her dreams, even if she continues to hold office. There is certainly no challenge to her from within the party. But the need to win the mandate of the people is a greater political challenge for her. And she does not appear to be equipped to meet
that challenge.
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Inside the slave trade over the Bangla border This
is the story of the 21st century’s trade in slave-children. My journey into their underworld took place where its alleys and brothels are most dense – Asia, where the United Nations calculates one million children are traded every day. To a dungeon in the lawless Bangladeshi borderlands where children are padlocked and prison-barred in transit to Indian brothels. To an iron whore-house where women have spent their entire lives being raped. To a clinic that treats syphillitic 11-year-olds. But this story begins like all these stories begin: with a girl, and a lie. Sufia comes to talk to me in a centre for children who have been rescued, funded by Comic Relief. She has only ever talked about it to her counsellors here. But she wants the world to know what happened to her. She comes into the room swaddled in a red sari, with big premature black bags under her eyes. She tells her story in a slow, halting mumble. Sufia grew up in a village near Khulna in the south-west of Bangladesh. Her parents were farmers; she was one of eight children. “My parents couldn’t afford to look after me,” she says. “We didn’t have enough money for food.” And so came the lie. When Sufia was 14, a female neighbour came to her parents and said she could find her a good job in Calcutta as a housemaid. She would live well; she would learn English; she would have a well-fed future. “I was so excited,” Sufia says. “But, as soon as we arrived in Calcutta, I knew something was wrong,” she says. “I didn’t know what a brothel was, but I could see the house she took me to was a bad house, where the women wore small clothes and lots of bad men were coming in and out.” The neighbour was handed 50,000 takka – around Ł500 – for Sufia. Then she told her to do what she was told and disappeared. Here, Sufia’s halting monologue stops altogether. She looks away; she rocks slightly. And then: “I wasn’t allowed to ever leave. I had to see 10 men a day.” Another long pause. “I didn’t know anything about men before. It was the most terrible thing.” She saw what happened to the older women there. They are forced to ‘breed’. Their daughters are raised to be prostitute-slaves. After three months, two other girls imprisoned in the brothel approached her with an escape plan. They would save up the sleeping pills they were given at night – to stop them sobbing and howling and putting off the ‘clients’ – and slip them into the drink of the ‘Mashi’ who was imprisoning them. Then they would run as far and as fast as they could. It worked. “I had no idea how to get around the city but they were very clever girls,” Sufia says. When she finally saw her parents’ house once more, she made a resolution to herself: “I could never, never tell my family what happened.” She knows she should have an HIV test. She has booked to have one twice. But she can’t go through with it. She can’t bear to know. On the side of a dirt-track in Jamalpur, a small Bangladeshi city, is an iron gate. It leads to a dense warren of flimsy huts with iron roofs and, in each one, is a woman, waiting. Sitting on a bed in one of the huts, I find Beauty, a 34-year-old woman. When I tell her I want her to talk about her life, she offers a big, perplexed smile. “My brother-in-law sold me to the Mashi here when I was 13,” she explains. “When I arrived, the Mashi whipped me and told me I could never leave this brothel. I was devastated.” There is one route out of the brothel for these women: to become a Mashi themselves, to set up their own brothel and ‘earn’ their freedom. But Beauty says she can’t do it: “No, no, I would hate to be a madam. I’m a bad girl but I’m not that bad.” She runs her fingers though her hair and says: I know it is sad. That is my life story. It is not much, is it?” It is not hard to trace the routes of the traffickers. The border between India and Bangladesh is a long and rippling river. As I stand there, in front of me, there is the world is largest democratic republic. Behind me, there is a dungeon with iron bars, where Bangladeshi women are held before being sold to India. Dhaka – capital of Bangladesh – is a city of immediate, brain-melting sensory overload. In this megalopolis of 14 million sardine-people, every crammed street-scene glimpsed for a second is filled with more detail than you could absorb in a week. Amid this ceaseless roll, there are 300,000 street-children, living (and dying) on their own. They sleep in clusters, around the boat terminal and the bus station and in the crannies of half-built buildings across the city. They are the traffickers’ dream, a pool of prey with no defences. By arrangement with
The Independent
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Delhi Durbar When former US vice-president Al Gore called on Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee last week, the Communist leader drew the visiting leader’s attention to India’s democratic traditions and gave him details about the number of times people have thrown out governments, and the ongoing efforts to ensure a fair and free election through the introduction of electronic voting machines. Gore,who was listening intently to Chatterjee, perked up immediately at the mention of voting machines, remarking ruefully,” Voting machines ....vulnerable..very vulnerable.” Gore was obviously reminded about how the voting machines failed him in the last Presidential race. Chatterjee, however, was quick to point out, “But I thought you were done in by the judiciary and not the voting machines” to which Gore replied, “Fair enough.” Sullen opposition Finance minister P.Chidambaram was at his acidic best when he replied to the debate on the general budget in the Lok Sabha last week. He used every possible opportunity to emphasise how successfully the UPA government has been handling the economy which had resulted in high growth rates which, in turn, had made the farm loan waiver possible. He contrasted the present ruling coalition’s track record with that of the BJP’s finance ministers – Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha – to point out how they failed to achieve the same revenue buoyancy during their tenures. This prompted a backbencher to shout out, “That’s why the two are sitting in the Rajya Sabha now.” Clearly, the BJP benches did not take kindly to Chidambaram’s gentle needling or this spontaneous swipe at their leaders. But the opposition party merely looked Sorry, no chai Congress president Sonia Gandhi is known to have simple habits but this is often misunderstood. This is exactly what happened last week when senior party leaders, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, called on her at her residence to greet her on completing 10 years in office. Besides presenting her with flowers and a shawl, she was also gifted a silver plaque which carried the names of all members of the Congress Working Committee. Although Sonia Gandhi is always very correct in her dealings with her party colleagues, there was some surprise that those who had made the effort to call on her fairly early in the morning were not offered even a cup of tea. Of course, the loyalists were quick to defend her, saying there was little time for such nicieties as Sonia Gandhi was leaving for Andhra Pradesh. Contributed by Anita Katyal, Bhagyashree Pande and
Prashant Sood
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