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Setback to Modi Freed, not reinstated |
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Hoodwinking MCI?
The cry of freedom
Hair today, hair tomorrow
Taint of money power Who spoilt my Italian cheese? Spain votes for pluralism
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Setback to Modi The
Supreme Court has rightly ordered a reinvestigation of 14 post-Godhra communal riots cases by a five-member special investigation team (SIT). The order by a three-member Bench headed by Justice Arijit Pasayat, belated though, is expected to put the derailed investigation on the right track. The Bench directed the five-member SIT, with two officers from outside Gujarat, to submit a report in three months after which it will decide whether these cases should be shifted out of Gujarat. Unfortunately, because of official patronage and a collusion between the police and the prosecution, free and fair trial has become impossible in the cases, including the Gulberg, Ode and Sardarpur massacres, and the Naroda Gaon, Naroda Patiya, Baranpura, Machipith, Tarsali, Pandarwada and Raghovpura killings. The reopening of the riots cases is a well-deserved setback to Chief Minister Narendra Modi because several riot victims have charged his government with shielding the guilty and framing innocent people. The public prosecutors were biased and the police had ignored eyewitness accounts, they alleged. Mr Harish Salve, amicus curie, told the Bench that there was a “huge cleavage between the state’s version and the victims”. The manner in which bail was granted to those accused of heinous offences and the government’s approach in the matter was questionable. As the situation in Gujarat is not at all conducive for a fair trial, the National Human Rights Commission and the Citizens for Justice and Peace had petitioned the apex court in 2003 for reinvestigation and the transfer of trials outside Gujarat. It is only after the Supreme Court transferred the Best Bakery and the Bilkis Bano cases to Mumbai that the accused were convicted. But then, the Chief Minister and his mandarins seem reluctant to ensure an impartial trial of the other riots cases. Worse, Mr Modi reinstated P.C. Pande as the DGP despite his dubious role during the riots and strictures by the Supreme Court. He was forced to shift Pande only after an Election Commission directive. The retrial of the cases outside Gujarat has become imperative because the state police has failed to fulfil its constitutional duty to uphold the rule of law. The criminal justice system cannot function in a state when the rioters roam about freely, the administration helps the rioters and the police force is communalised to the hilt.
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Freed, not reinstated One
of the first acts of the new Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani has been the release of deposed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary from house arrest. In fact, he ordered the release on the floor of the National Assembly in his acceptance speech itself, well before he was to formally take over as Prime Minister. The release from house arrest has spread a wave of joy in the country which had witnessed violent protests by lawyers and others on his incarceration. But the next logical step is his re-instatement as Chief Justice, given that his removal was patently illegal. But that is easier said than done under the present circumstances. One harsh reality that cannot be wished away is the presence of Pervez Musharraf as President. Had he not been on the scene, the reinstatement would have only required a simple resolution in Parliament, as has been opined by eight former Judges of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, including three former Chief Justices. But Pervez Musharraf continues to be President despite the National Assembly elections. Musharraf’s aides insist that the order sacking the judges could be reversed only through a constitutional amendment passed by a two-thirds majority in Parliament. That is preposterous, considering that Article 270-AAA and 270-C (2) in this regard are just not part of the Constitution because they have never been adopted by a two-thirds majority of Parliament. Musharraf had unlawfully appropriated this power. Nawaz Sharif is in favour of reinstatement of the judges. But supposing the new Parliament passes a resolution, the present Supreme Court packed with judges hand-picked by General Musharraf can be depended on to declare this move illegal. That will lead to a confrontation which the beleagured country can ill afford at this stage. Perhaps the two sides will only find broad rules of co-habiting till such time as the nation is stable enough to free itself from the yoke of a President who is a constitutional authority only in name.
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Hoodwinking MCI? It is nothing but scandalous the way teachers — not one or two, but as many as 25 — were shifted to the Patiala medical college from the other two medical colleges at Faridkot and Amritsar ahead of an inspection by the Medical Council of India. The Director, Research and Medical Education, admits there is a shortage of teachers in the three government medical colleges, but calls these as routine transfers despite news reports pointing to the contrary. The MCI has called the authorities’ bluff by considering only such teachers as have been working regularly in the college at Patiala since October, 2006. If still there is any dispute, the MCI should conduct a simultaneous inspection of all the three medical colleges. During the last MCI inspection in 2006, at least two of the three medical colleges were found short of teachers and infrastructure and they had given an undertaking to the MCI to remove the shortcomings within three months to escape disaffiliation. But the deadline passed without either college complying with the MCI guidelines. The Tribune had carried a series of reports highlighting the sad state of affairs in the medical colleges and hospitals. The medical college at Faridkot still operates from godowns. In the absence of teachers and infrastructure, what kind of training future doctors must be getting can be well imagined. Despite the state’s financial constraints, an honest effort should be made to meet the MCI requirements, which are meant to standardise medical education in the country. The retirement age of medical teachers can be raised to 65 as has been done by the AIIMS. The Punjab Planning Board rightly proposes to hire retired Army medical teachers. The salaries and working conditions will have to be improved to attract and retain good teachers. The state government will have to spend more on education and improve the standards of the existing institutions instead of opening more and more universities. |
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A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing. — George Bernard Shaw
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The cry of freedom Rumblings
in Tibet over the high-handedness of the Chinese authorities in paying little heed to popular grievances have spilt over into the streets not merely in Lhasa but even beyond the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region to Kham and Amdo resulting in spirited demonstrations, clashes and several deaths. Troops and armoured vehicles have been called out to subdue unarmed but defiant monks and youths. The protests were timed to coincide with the 49th anniversary of the 1959 uprising that forced the Dalai Lama to flee and seek refuge in India. The causes remain the same: Beijing’s reluctance to concede autonomy and cultural freedom to the Tibetan people despite solemn promises. The authorities obviously hope to pacify and sanitise Tibet behind a cloak of censorship, keeping away prying eyes while silencing dissident voices. Modern technology, however, makes this a difficult task. Moreover, such a policy must, as always, adversely affect the credibility of whatever version Beijing tries to sell the world with the expected ideological gloss about having frustrated the alleged machinations of the Dalai Lama and his henchmen who have long been in league with Imperialist forces to “split” and undermine a resurgent China. The Dalai Lama has been straining to bring the Tibet issue to an honourable and just resolution with genuine internal autonomy and guarantees for Tibetan cultural rights in regard to religion, language and the region’s ecology. He himself has said he would like to retire as an ordinary monk, with governance being left to a leadership responsible to a freely elected assembly, and with external affairs and defence left to Beijing to manage. Despite several rounds of dialogue, the Beijing seems adamant about continuing with a coercive policy of forcing demographic and cultural change as a means of tilting the balance increasingly in its favour. It has thus far regrettably never been able to see the tremendous advantage of changing tack and using Tibet as a bridge rather than as a bastion in the exercise of regional and even global power that reveals unsatiated hegemonistic tendencies. The Dalai Lama has appealed against resort to violent protest. But the Chinese seem bent on a crackdown that will only add to the bloodshed and bitterness. The bankruptcy of China’s Tibet policy has once again been exposed at the very time that Beijing is readying to showcase its undoubted achievements and prowess to the world on the occasion of the forthcoming Olympic Games. The Games were founded to bring people together to compete in sport and the arts of peace in order to build friendship. But a country at war with itself is not going to be able to sell technology and growth as absolute values. The current unrest clearly disproves oft-repeated official claims that the Tibetans are happy and contented and only a handful of trouble makers are out to disturb the peace. The Indian Government and people have been restrained in their support of the Tibetan cause even as they host the Dalai Lama and his administration in exile in Dharamsala. But there is no mistaking where the nation’s sympathies lie. India’s ties with Tibet go long back in time and a Tibetan delegation was present at the Asian Relations Conference in March 1947 in Delhi along with representatives of the then Government of China. Delhi abandoned all subsisting extra-territorial rights in Tibet formally in 1954, having accepted Chinese sovereignty over it some years earlier on the basis of declarations of “national regional autonomy” incorporated in the 17-Point Agreement of May 17, 1951 between Tibetan representatives and the new People’s Republic of China. Beijing’s hope that, at worst, Tibet will submit after the passing of the Dalai Lama and that time is on its side is misplaced. The freedom movement is more likely to become more radicalised and demanding and there are already straws in the wind that suggest that a new Dalai Lama incarnate will be found among “free Tibetan people”. Indeed, it is China that might well discover that the aspirations unleashed by deregulation and economic growth will increasingly seek a more open and democratic political and cultural dispensation. The faultlines are already there and could deepen and widen quite dramatically. Intolerance is not only evident in China. In Iran, where the conservatives have again been returned to power in the latest elections, there is legislation on the anvil to amend its penal law to deal with “apostasy, heresy and witchcraft” which is aimed at even more stringent persecution of the long-suffering Bahais than hitherto. But why turn to Iran or China or the West, where too multiculturalism and liberal values are under serious threat in Iraq, Afghanistan and within the domestic jurisdictions of the Great Powers that pretentiously set the rules. There has been a marked rise of intolerance in India too against which the Supreme Court has inveighed. Majority and minority communalism are equally dangerous. So is regional chauvinism, the arrogance of power and syndicated crime that largely flourishes, as most recently seen in Goa, because powerful men and interests are behind
it.
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Hair today, hair tomorrow Change your barber only once in a while, goes an old saying. This dawned on me quite late. I had been getting my hair cut from a barber for almost one decade when suddenly last year one of my close friends mentioned to me of a new hair saloon which had set up shop in a posh marketing area of the town. He sang praises for the new saloon and I thought I would give it a try. And to my great pleasure I found the new barber much better than the one I had patronised for so long even though the charges for a single haircut were almost double than the previous one. Incidentally, the new saloon was located close to the establishment where I had my previous barber. Whenever I went to the new saloon I would always think of the old barber and would think of one excuse or the other in case I came face to face with him as I thought it would be too embarrassing to tell him I had found a better professional who had a more deft hand at haircut. Last month during my routine visit to the market, I met my old barber who came rushing to me and asked me where I had been all these months. His concern seemed to be genuine and out of courtesy I told him that I had shifted out of the town. He took his time to digest the statement and having exchanged a warm talk, though briefly, we parted. I remained a regular at the new saloon till last month when I went to the place for a hair cut. I was surprised to see a computer print at the shop “Closed”. Amazed, I checked up with the attendant of the adjoining computer centre who mentioned that the saloon owner had moved out almost a month back. He also mentioned how the landlord had come to the establishment and demanded rent arrears following which the owner of the hair saloon pulled down shutters and left. Now I was caught in a bind. With my favourite barber not being around, I was forced to go back to the old one. He was delighted as I stepped into his shop. I told him that I had shifted back to the town and so would be his regular client now. But the haircut he gave me was disgusting, or so I thought. May be I was drawing comparisons. But I decided that I would look for another barber than go back to him now. Even as I have been seeking suggestions from my friends about a good hair cut saloon, I am getting worried with each passing day as I stand before the mirror and think of the urgent need to have a
haircut.
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Taint of money power An
interesting study on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has established that there is “a clear lack of transparency” in the election expenditures of political parties in India. The euphemistic assessment of lack of institutional and political checks on how the political parties in India finance their election campaigns, where and how they find the money, and how they spend it, should set electoral reformers thinking and acting. The study was undertaken on behalf of the Center for International and Post-Conflict Governance, and allied institutions, called CORE . Behind the jungle of nomenclatures and their abbreviations is the crux of the matter, that the there is a not-so -hidden nexus between money power and voting in the worlds’ most populous democracy This is despite several attempts at evolving methods of campaign funding by the State. There has been no consensus on their findings. The sticking point was distribution of the funds among parties and the criteria for it, whether it should be the number of seats or popular vote in an earlier general election. The study has grouped India with Australia and Spain among stable democracies” with “large and medium, sized electorates.” The study highlights the Australian feature of letting Parliament periodically change the electoral system in response to changing community standards of democracy” within the framework of the Constitution. It is apparently different from our system under which there is no correlation between votes polled and seats won by the political parties due to the first- past-the-post- system, taken from the UK. In the last general election in 2004, for instance, the Congress party contested 416 seats of which it won 145, which worked out to 35 percent, while the BJP-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) won 138 out of 364 it contested or 37 percent. The percentage of the popular vote of the Congress party was 26.64 whereas that of the NDA was four percentage points less. The NDA was a pre-poll alliance while the Congress party teamed up with ‘like-minded parties’ after the elections to constitute the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). The ethics of parties/ groups crossing over after the elections is not the issue, nor the representative character of persons and groups or parties. What is relevant is the numbers they bring to the combine, in this case, the UPA . Further, the CPI( M) Communist Partry ( Marxist) – with its satellites, CPI, (Communist Party), FB (Forward Bloc) and RSP (a veritable museum piece – Revolutionary Socialist Party of Kerala), with a combined strength of 85 MPs, calling themselves Leftists, sustain the government. Their support from outside lends the combination a numerical strength of 300. Repeating that there is no direct State funding of election campaigning in our country, the study points out that campaign funds are mostly from private contributions, although some contributions from public companies are permiited (up to 5 per cent of the profits of the company as per the Indian Companies Act of 1956 as amended in 1985.) “Private contributions generally come from the business community, many members of which are thought to expect special attention if their candidate wins. There is absolutely no transparency in this area”. B.G. Deshmukh, in his memoirs, From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Office, A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back (2003, Harper Collins, New Delhi in collaboration with India Today) recalls: ‘reacting to the then Karnataka Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde’s proposal for State funding of elections, Rajiv asked: ‘why should I give money to the opposition parties to fight me?’ In other words, he thought that the State funds were Congress party money! Deshmukh was the Prime Minister’s principal secretary/ cabinet secretary. More earnest efforts to find means of transparent funding of elections were made by ‘United Front’ governments set up after P.V. Narasimha Rao failed to win a second term for his minority government in the 1996 general election. He hit on the proxy dispensation method to enable access to power for the regional parties. In the process, he recovered the whip hand over the arrangement for the Congress party. The United Front Governments set up the Dinesh Goswami Committee, the first in the series. It estimated that Rs.6,000 crores to Rs.7,000 crores would be required in a six-year cycle for State funding of elections. Against that background, the Inderjit Gupta Committee (1998) came out with a down-to earth suggestion that State funding should be in kind in the form of campaign aids like deposit-free telephone/ telephones for candidates, free postage, copy/copies of electoral rolls, printed voter slips etc rather than cash. As stated, consensus evaded their findings, the sticking point being the criteria for distribution of the funds among the parties. Earlier, in 1974, Jayaprakash Narayan set up a committee under Justice V.R.Tarkunde to study over-all electoral reform from a judicial perspective. It concluded that State funding was not feasible and a proper means to electoral reforms. Instead, it opted for basic changes in the poll procedure and the electoral system. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had come out with rulings which required all registered political parties to have regular organisational elections and that they should file annual returns of income and expenditure under the Income-tax Act. In sum, it seems to be the proverbial bureaucratic characteristic of committees begetting more committees at the cost of hours, if not days, to gain minutes. Every political party has a vested interest in it because incumbency yields the opportunity to manipulate elections if not with ‘muscle and mafia power’, at least with money power.
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Who spoilt my Italian cheese? It
may be the moment when the throwaway society meets its retribution. A shadow this weekend hangs over one of the great staples of modern European life – Italy’s mozzarella cheese. The topping on a billion pizzas, the magic ingredient in a million salads, is at the centre of a major food scare involving pollution, corruption, the Mafia and southern Italy’s remarkable crisis in waste management. It centres on the buffalo milk used to produce the purest form of the rubbery, cream-coloured delicacy, now as prized an Italian export as extra virgin olive oil – mozzarella di bufala. High levels of dioxins, potentially hazardous pollutant chemicals, have been found in buffalo milk in a group of dairies in Campania, the southern province centring on Naples where most mozzarella production takes place. Italy’s public health authorities believe that the contamination is the result of illegal dumping of toxic waste in Campania, where the waste industry is under the control of the Camorra, the local branch of the Mafia, and where Naples and its region are undergoing a major waste management crisis, with disposal facilities either broken or full, and rubbish piling up in the streets. The scale of the problem is such that it is becoming the cautionary tale par excellence of the modern throwaway society, showing how a major city can be swallowed up by its own refuse and making Naples and its region a symbol for filth around the world. Over the past week, Italian authorities have searched dozens of buffalo dairies and seized milk samples for tests after higher-than-permitted levels of dioxins were discovered in products from 29 mozzarella makers. After government chemists had analysed milk samples taken from some 2,000 herds of buffalo, the herds attached to 66 dairies have been quarantined pending further investigations, and prosecutors in Naples have placed 109 people under investigation in connection with the inquiry, on suspicion of fraud and food poisoning. Already, sales of mozzarella across Italy are said to have fallen by up to 50 per cent. Many Italians are naturally linking the buffalo milk contamination to the local waste and pollution scandal. “Of course we don’t know for sure scientifically, but the high rate of dioxin is most likely linked to what the buffaloes ate,” an Italian environmental official admitted yesterday, adding that the buffalo “grazed in areas where we know that toxic waste has been dumped in recent years”. Health officials are stressing that Italian mozzarella itself is perfectly safe to eat. However, the growing crisis is causing national alarm, and yesterday the consortium of buffalo mozzarella makers in Campania took out full-page advertisements in La Repubblica and other national newspapers outlining the system of controls that are in place for its top-branded mozzarella, which carries the designation – Denominazione d’Origine Protetta – meaning it has certain protection and quality guarantees. Health officials, police, agricultural and cheese authorities all guarantee the safe production of DOP mozzarella, the advertisement said, adding that the dairies involved in the police seizures were not members of the consortium. “Considering these norms, buffalo milk – before being transformed – is placed under the most stringent health and chemical controls which guarantee the safety and quality of Campania’s DOP buffalo mozzarella,” the advertisement said. The Minister for Agricultural Policy joined producers in reassuring the public that the risk from dioxins is minimal. The Italian agricultural lobby Coldiretti called for a rapid investigation, since buffalo mozzarella is such an important brand internationally as well as domestically. Earlier this year, health authorities in Naples began screening residents for dioxin contamination amid accusations that toxic waste was being illegally dumped in the area. A recent study by the World Health Organisation found that people living in Campania were not as healthy as residents in the rest of Italy. Mortality rates, particularly from some forms of cancer, are higher in the areas around Naples where the rubbish crisis is at its most severe. By arrangement with
The Independent
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Spain votes for pluralism After
their rout in Germany and France a year ago, and with a fast dwindling electoral base in Britain, the European social democrats are on the back foot. The spectacular triumph of the socialists in Spain’s parliamentary election this month gives them some succour. Within days of the Madrid victory, socialists in neighbouring France won crucial mayoral posts in Paris, Lille, Toulous and Starsburg. Madame Segolene Royal, who just missed being France’s first woman head in the 21st century, has reasons to feel elated. The message that the Spanish parliamentary election gives to the depressed socialists in Europe is what one of their defeated kings had centuries ago learnt from the spider. Given the political will and a well designed election campaign, voters can be swayed by focusing on issues of mass concern. Jose Louis Rodrigues Zapatero and his Socialist Workers Party did only this. His voters dispelled his conservative rival Popular Party chief Mariano Rajoy’s notion that Zapatero was a “prime minister by accident.” In the last election (March 2004,) an Al-Qaida bomb blast on a Madrid train just four days before polling had moved the voters in the socialists favour. But this month’s election confirms that Zapatero is not a prime minister by fluke. The conservatives had campaigned for a powerful centre, unwavering leadership to curb secessionists, like the Basques, and the end of a labour-intensive economy. Rajoy’s party hoped Spanish youth would stay home and not come to the polling booths. They were disenchanted because of the stagnant economy, rising unemployment and crisis in the construction industry. But the youth turned up in full strength. Generally the youth has been for socialists in Spain, as elsewhere. The appeal by the all-powerful Church to vote out the immoral, who made same-sex marriage legal, also did not cut much ice. On his part, Zapatero, an advocate of conflict resolution through dialogue, never feared to negotiate but as John Kennedy, said, “did not negotiate out of fear” with the Basque separatists and the Catalans. His action of legalising the bulk of immigrants in Spain must open the eyes of the Marathi outfit in Mumbai, which brands out-of-state Indians as illegal immigrants. The Spanish parliamentary elections for Indians is purposeful and significant for two reasons. A major issue before Spanish voters was whether the Church and the State should be separate. In the 30-year-old democracy in Spain, the Church has been dictating State policies, Another was whether religious education in schools should be limited. The Spanish people gave an adverse verdict. “This is a victory for the idea of politics that defends dialogue, plurality and cohesion,” said socialist spokesman Jose Blanco. Indians in the next Lok Sabha election will soon have to decide whether secularism means that the law is equal for all Indians and, not merely, that all Indians are equal before the law.
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