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Tentacles of SIMI Clear the cloud |
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Pride of Punjab
The Kosovo precedent
East and West
Power of the sun Under assault from toxins, our bodies struggle to cope Zimbabwe’s free fall
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Tentacles of SIMI The
arrest of 13 top leaders of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) during a dawn raid in Indore on Thursday shows how widespread their network is. The tentacles of SIMI — which are already there in Kerala, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh — and are now spreading to other states. Despite being on the scanner of the police ever since it was banned in 2001, the notorious outfit has managed to create several new arms for purposes such as publicity, weapon procurement and financing. Perhaps, one reason for this proliferation of its network and operations is that while most of its strikes have been in large cities like Mumbai (July 11, 2006 serial blasts in suburban trains), many of its sleeper cells are located in smaller places like Indore and Ujjain. Since the police network in such cities is not fully geared to meet the challenge, the terrorists have been having a good run. The success of the police in Indore will, hopefully, widen the campaign against the terrorists, with equal, if not more, attention being paid to their activities in moffussil areas. These places not only provide them the benefit of anonymity but can also prove to be “soft targets” for carrying out their strikes when the time comes. What has helped SIMI in this endeavour is its ability to recruit several upper-middle class persons, including many trained engineers, doctors and IT professionals. They not only help it to run the outfit in a corporatised manner but also play a big role in motivating more people to join the wrong cause. A nationwide drive will have to be launched to weed out its faceless operatives, many of whom have no criminal record. The terror challenge has become all the more serious following reports that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence has made Dawood Ibrahim’s gang “D-Company” to merge with the Lashkar-e-Toiba’s terror network. While the Dawood gang has its formidable smuggling network in India, LeT will be providing the edge of religious fanaticism to the unholy alliance. The two make a deadly combination, indeed. Urban gangsters driven by misplaced fanatic zeal may pose a big threat. While there is no need to overestimate their power, it will also be wrong to underplay its significance.
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Clear the cloud The
Orissa Assembly session has been virtually paralysed in the past three days following the charge of sexual harassment levelled against Speaker Maheswar Mohanty by a suspended woman employee of the House. On Thursday, the House could barely meet for 12 minutes. It was adjourned till March 29 after it witnessed uproarious scenes with members from both the treasury and Opposition benches indulging in fisticuffs. The FIR, filed by a women’s rights activist on the victim’s behalf in the Bhubaneswar police station, says that Gayatri Panda, an assistant marshal of the Assembly, was assigned duty after office hours and out of her jurisdiction at the Speaker’s behest. The Speaker, according to the complaint, “was making lewd gestures and sending his driver and other staff to persuade me to have a sexual relationship with him”. Whatever the nature and seriousness of the allegation, Mr Mohanty should subject himself to an inquiry because the office of the Speaker is implicated and he has to clear himself of the charge, even if it be frivolous. The Speaker holds a constitutional office. He is the custodian of the House and the guardian of its powers, privileges and immunities. As the office commands great respect and holds immense value in the constitutional scheme, Mr Mohanty would do well to rid himself of the cloud cast by the allegation. The Opposition may gain some brownie points by demanding the Speaker’s resignation and a CBI probe into the charge. However, this has the potential of politicising the Speaker’s office which should be avoided at any cost. Keeping in view his constitutional position, the issue should be put above personal and partisan considerations. Moreover, one is assumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty by a credible process. Consequently, it is up to the House itself to decide the exact mode of inquiry. Investigation by the police or any other agency may lead to jurisdictional problems. Thus, it would be better if the Assembly itself takes a judicious decision on the matter. In fact, the House does have the prerogative to examine the issue and take appropriate action with the consent of the Speaker and members of the House.
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Pride of Punjab There
are two ways for the government of a cash-strapped state like Punjab to handle its resources. One is to curb spending, cut overheads and go on an austerity drive. The other is to just splurge what the government has at its disposal on the premise that since the situation is so bad, it cannot get any worse; and, therefore, it is more important to feel good when the going is hard. This philosophy – that an Innova for an MLA today is better than innovative husbanding of scarce public resources for a better tomorrow – seems to be the guiding force of the Parkash Singh Badal ministry. Last year, when the Punjab government decided to spend over Rs 5 crore to add 25 vehicles to the Chief Minister’s fleet, understandably there was no protest. Everyone believed that once such perks were provided for the Chief Minister and his family, including son Sukhbir Singh Badal, similar goodies would follow for ministers and MLAs, too. The Punjab government, genuinely concerned that no member of the elected elite should feel deprived, has now decided that all 117 members of the Assembly will be provided with the luxurious Innova vehicles for their personal use. Lest the MLAs fear that no more goodies would be forthcoming after this, Mr Badal has let it be known that there is more to come. For instance, when one legislator said that every MLA should also get a grant of Rs 2 crore under the Local Area Development Fund Scheme, the Speaker suggested that he should take it up with the Chief Minister. Mr Badal stood up promptly to declare that this is already under consideration. Further benefits on fuel expenditure and telephone bills may also be in the pipeline. When this generous government has taken care of its ministers, MLAs and their families, it is sure to turn its attention to the needs of the people. It is only a matter of time.
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Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. — Frederick Douglass
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The Kosovo precedent The
partition of a country along ethnic lines tends to be a messy business, particularly when engineered by foreign powers. We, in India, know it all too very well, thanks to the partition of 1947. That is why Indians, more than anybody else, can empathise with the convulsions currently taking place in Kosovo. The province that is mostly ethnic Albanian and unilaterally broke away from Serbia on February 17 with western support, after nearly nine years under United Nations administration, is in throes of another revolt by minority Serbs. The Serb-dominated north of the newly independent country is already up in arms with all the puny force at its command. The hostile Serb population killed one Ukrainian UN policeman and forced the pullout of UN personnel from the northern town of Mitrovica, which is under NATO’s de facto control. Serbia’s Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has accused NATO troops and the UN Police of using “snipers and banned ammunition” to quell the riots in the northern city of Mitrovica. Whether one believes him or the UN and NATO, which are equally emphatic that the violence was instigated by Belgrade, the fact remains that the region has once again been transformed into a dangerous powder-keg. No attention seems to have been paid to fact that the spark for World War I had been provided by this very area. If the US and its allies in the European Union were right in actively promoting the secession of Kosovo, they have no other option except to bless yet another division, by the very same logic. That they certainly won’t, considering that the Serb-inspired fragmentation of this mini-country would be contrary to their interests. It is not only Serbia which has suffered because of this balkanisation. The Kosovo precedent has fanned the flames of rebellion in many European countries. The domino effect may even be felt elsewhere in the world. Separatists in China, Russia, India, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Spain, Iraq, Bosnia, Belgium and many other countries are looking at Kosovo with unconcealed glee. However, what has actually made Kosovo cross the rubicon is the blessings of Washington. If the US does something similar, there can be tit for tat also between it and Russia and its breakaway statelets – South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, Nagarno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan and Transdniestria in Moldova. The end result of this game of attrition could be an uptrend in balkanisation in other parts of the world. Russia is strongly opposed to the Serbian dismemberment. President Vladimir Putin is rushing humanitarian aid for the Serb minority living in Kosovo. He did not say anything on whether Kosovo’s government, which Russia has described as illegitimate, will be consulted. For Moscow, it is good enough that the Serbian government in Belgrade asked for medicines, medical equipment, non-perishable food supplies and hygiene products for Serb-populated enclaves. Russia has also sounded a grim warning that if force is used against Kosovan Serbs, “a new frozen conflict will appear in Europe”. All these clearly indicate that confrontation will only grow in the days to come. The US has tried to hit many birds with one Kosovo stone. One, the state will now have a strategic US base at Camp Bondsteel – one of the largest military bases ever to come up in Europe. Two, it is now in a better position to build a trans-Balkans oil pipeline bypassing Russia. Three, a Russian ally has been cut down to size. And above all, by siding with Albanian Muslims, the US has sought to convey a conciliatory message to the Muslim world also. It is another matter the Muslim card is not giving as good returns as it was expected. Even the members of the OIC are wary of recognising the newest “country” of the world, which came in existence in clear defiance of international law and UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which asserted the “commitment of all member-states to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, of which the Federal Republic of Serbia was the successor state. All this has been done ostensibly to end the ethnic atrocities committed on the Albanian Muslims by the then President of Yugoslavia and Serbia, the late Slobodan Milosevic. The US called him the “new Hitler”. It was on March 24, 1999, that NATO began bombing strategic targets in Serbia and kept it up relentlessly for 78 days until Milosevic agreed to pull out his forces from Kosovo and end the killing of Albanian civilians in a counter-insurgency war. Kosovo has been run by the UN and patrolled by NATO troops since June 11, 1999, under Resolution 1244. But, by now it has emerged quite clearly that the tales of the so-called ethnic cleansing were as exaggerated as the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq. To call Kosovo a country is actually a travesty. It is out and out a protectorate of the European Union and NATO. The less than 11,000 sq km abode of just two million people – of which around 120,000 are Serbs — is currently administered by over 2,000 officials with its security ensured by a NATO-led force of nearly 17,000 men from 34 nations costing it billions of dollars. Annexure 11 of the blueprint set out by the UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari enshrines NATO as the ultimate authority in Kosovo. The “supervised independence” that this former President of monolithic Finland had proposed for Kosovo just did not take into account its pluralistic character. Muslims (Albanians, Bosnians and Turks) comprise 89.8 per cent of the population. The Christians (Serbs, Romanians, Croats) number about 8.8 per cent while native Serbs and others are 1.5 per cent. It is virtually run by a mafia. Poverty and corruption are endemic and criminalisation of society is on the increase. The country has barely completed one month of its troubled existence and the director of the only international airport at capital Pristina is already behind bars for alleged fraud and mismanagement. There are no jobs on offer. The local populace is frightfully poor. Even basic necessities are luxuries. The western take on the situation is that the Serbian protests are being engineered by Belgrade in the run-up to the May 11 elections in Serbia, and things will settle down after that soon enough. But it may not really come about that way. Kosovo just does not have the critical mass to survive as an independent country. It may be a long time before the foreign forces leave the seventh state to emerge from the breakup of
Yugoslavia.
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East and West
“UNCLE, how could the whole world be asleep at India’s midnight hour? You know the earth rotates around the sun from west to east and completes one rotation in 24 hours which we call a day. Yes, India and some of the eastern countries would be asleep at the stroke of Indian midnight hour but certainly not the western world where it was daytime”. This was none other than my naughty nephew, who I was trying to baptise into the Indian ethos, expressing his partial disagreement with Pt. Nehru who made a historic speech on the granting of Indian Independence on Aug 14, 1947. “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we should redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when....”. My US-bred nephew Aayush who is with us for a vacation could be persuaded to listen to me further only after I acknowledged his “logical”, as he put it, observation. Little did I know that more was in store when I spread out before him the political map of pre-and post-Independence India. Waxing eloquent I said, “This is our mother India. Her feet are washed in the south by the unfathomable Indian ocean whereas her Queenly head is adorned by the majestic mountains of the great Himalayas. The 13 year old cast his glance up and down, left and right of the Indian map and raised his hand, “Tell me, uncle”, he pleaded, “if the Chinese were to glorify their homeland in the same manner as you did for the mother India, you as an Indian will feel offended, won’t you Uncle?” Sensing my unease, Aayush turned sombre for a while. Suddenly he brightened up to enquire, “Uncle, have you been up the Himalayas? I want to conquer the Mount Everest like Edmund Hillary. Can we make it this summer, uncle?” I was nonplussed. I was lost in thought. Why so many Indians, including me, never ever noticed what my nephew espied in no time. This is the age of risqué reason and laundered logic. If nationalism was the credo then, the Gen Next worships internationalism. In what way is a mountain conquered because someone manages to reach its top? There is certainly an element in the West’s psyche that celebrates human domination, that sees man’s relations with Nature as competitive and as ruling out any apperception of it as a source of harmony and well being. The Japanese climb Mount Fuji as homage to all it stands for. Any idea of “conquering” it will be regarded as cultural, aesthetic, philosophical and religious anathema. As a Haiku poem
runs.
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Power of the sun The
Sun is believed to be 4.6 billion years old and it has never ever failed to show up. No one owns the sun and yet everyone owns it. It supplies its energy free to all who wish to take it. Supplies are inexhaustible. There are no rate hikes. In fact, no rates at all and no one holds or can hold any rights or monopoly over it. It is 93 million miles away. It takes only eight minutes for it to arrive at earth. In fact, it is always here in some part of the earth. It is the biggest reactor the world can ever have but it leaves no radio active wastes or any kind of pollution. In spite of all these attributes, it remains broadly untapped as a source of electric power supply. Only very recently, harnessing solar energy has sparked great interest the world over for the following serious concerns: 1) Impending global environmental disaster because of relentless use of fossil fuels, burning of coal for power generation and resultant enormous emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other toxic residuals; 2) Uncertain and unsteady supplies of crude oil because of political and social instability and 3) Steeply rising cost of crude oil and natural gas. Crude oil, coal and natural gas with proven or unproven reserves are finite quantities, which will last only for a few more decades. Supplies are diminishing as demand for these commodities is constantly growing the world over, at an alarming rate. China and India are the relatively new massive gobblers of fossil fuels as their economies accelerate. The United States is the largest consumer of fossil fuels and the biggest emitter of global pollution. India is the fourth largest emitter of carbon dioxide after the US, China and Russia. In the long haul, fossil fuels are not sustainable and cannot be relied upon for ever. Therefore, there has to be transformation of economies by switching over to the abundant and endless supply of renewable energy. Nature is awash with such renewable, eco-friendly energy sources. Energy that reaches earth from sunlight in one hour is more than that which is used by all human activities on the earth in the whole one year. The sun has been used for drying clothes, ripening of harvests, fruits and vegetables, baking bricks to build monuments and homes for centuries. It is only recently that the sun is being exploited to generate electricity to power light in homes and buildings, in streets and towns, in addition to heating and cooling homes and buildings, running tractors, helping drawing water for irrigation purposes and so on. Fortunately, there are now a host of technologies for tapping into solar power, servicing a variety of fields. Advanced technologies and energy resources are now available to build sustainable solar and wind based economy that can reduce dependence on oil and improve global climate. Electricity produced through wind energy is an indirect form of solar energy because it is the temperature variations that drive turbines. Getting energy from the wind is as old as the invention of sails for boats. The Romans used windmills to grind grain and the Dutch used windmills for agricultural and domestic uses, including water diversion. What are the various ways in which the sun’s energy is tapped? There are three well established ways of doing so. The first is by using solar cells, called photovoltaic or photoelectric cells, that convert light directly into electricity. A basic solar power system consists of a photovoltaic module, an inverter for converting direct current into alternating current, and peripheral devices including a controller. A residential solar power system has the highest conversion efficiency rating of about 16 per cent. A photovoltaic cell is a non-mechanical device usually made from silicon alloys. The second is solar water heating, where heat from the sun is used to heat water in glass panels over the roof. Flat plate and evacuated tube collectors have efficiencies of about 60 per cent during normal operating conditions. The third way is by solar furnaces, which use a huge array of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy into a small space to produce high temperatures. The heat is used to generate steam, which then turns turbines, which in turn drives generators to produce electric power. The photovoltaic cell was discovered in 1954 by a US company, at that time known as the Bell Telephone Company, while researching sensitivity of a properly prepared silicon wafer to sunlight. For the first time, in 1958, use of photovoltaic modules as power source for a Vanguard satellite was successfully applied. Thin film solar formula, a relatively new technology in which cells are created in roughly the same way that memory is created on dense storage devise like hard disk devices, is less costly but has a long way to go before it can increase its energy output to compete with silicon. Thin, sleek new technology, however, will one day be applied on windows of skyscrapers and high rise apartment buildings, harnessing energy for exterior and interior lighting, heating, and cooling to provide comfortable working and living environments. It is attractive and cheaper than bulkier solar panels made from silicon. Currently, average crystalline silicon solar cell module has an efficiency of about 16 per cent while an average thin film cell solar module has efficiency of about 6 per cent. However, thin film manufacturing costs are potentially lower and progressive increases in efficiencies and manufacturing economies would over foreseeable time make them easily marketable product.
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Under assault from toxins, our bodies struggle to cope Two
years ago, I lay paralysed in a hospital bed, unable to use my arms or legs, to hug my young son or daughter, or to type a word to meet an impending book deadline. Autoimmune diseases, a group of about 100 conditions in which the body’s immune system turns on the body itself, are reaching epidemic proportions. In the past decade, 15 top medical journals have reported rising rates of lupus, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, Crohn’s disease, Addison’s disease and polymyositis in industrialized countries worldwide. Over the past 40 years, rates of Type 1 diabetes have increased fivefold; in children 4 and under, it’s increasing 6 percent a year. My paralysis was caused by Guillain-Barre syndrome, in which body’s immune system destroys the nerves’ myelin sheaths, short-circuiting messages from the brain to the muscles. I’ve been paralysed twice in the past seven years. Months of rigorous physical therapy and treatment have enabled me to walk again. But remnants of the disease – and other autoimmune conditions that have simultaneously ravaged my body – have left me with a pacemaker, little feeling in my hands and feet, legs that can’t ice skate or chase a child, a low white blood cell count and gastrointestinal problems that can land me in the hospital in a blink. I’ve spent the past two years interviewing leading experts at top medical institutions nationwide to find out why cases of autoimmune disease are skyrocketing. In recent years, many allergists and immunologists have attributed the rise to the “hygiene hypothesis” - that germ-free homes and childhood vaccinations have eliminated challenges to our immune systems so they don’t learn how to defend us properly when we’re young. The scientists I interviewed tended to discard the idea that this alone is responsible. Nearly all agreed that our daily exposure to environmental toxins, through the air we breathe and the chemicals we absorb through our skin, is a major trigger of autoimmune disease. In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sampled 2,500 people nationwide looking for the “body burden,” or amount of chemicals and pollutants each individual carried. They found traces of all 116 chemicals and pollutants they tested for, including PCBs, insecticides, dioxin, mercury, cadmium and benzene, all highly toxic in higher doses. Then, in 2005, researchers from the Environmental Working Group found something more alarming: a cocktail of 287 pollutants – pesticides, dioxins, flame retardants – in the fetal-cord blood of 10 newborn infants from around the country. Because most toxins are found in only trace amounts, it has been difficult to gauge what effect they might be having on our health. Yet studies of both lab animals and people provide disturbing insights into how even low exposures can cause our immune systems to go haywire. Evidence from occupational studies is even more worrisome – because the “guinea pigs” are people. Last year, scientists from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Washington released the findings of a 14-year study of 300,000 death certificates in 26 states: Those who worked with pesticides, textiles, solvents, benzene, asbestos and other compounds were significantly more likely to die from an autoimmune disease than people who didn’t. We may all be unwitting participants in an uncontrolled experiment as we wait to see whether rising levels of toxins and pollutants in our blood are the cause of climbing rates of autoimmune disease. Our children are the high-stakes pawns in this game: Pound for pound, they eat more food and drink more water than adults, and their immune systems are still developing and vulnerable. How can we lower the stakes for future generations? We could take a page from European environmental policy and its “precautionary principle” of preventing harm before it occurs. Last June, the European Union implemented legislation that requires companies to develop safety data on 30,000 chemicals over the next decade and places responsibility on the chemical industry to demonstrate the safety of its products. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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Zimbabwe’s free fall Once
it was Africa’s shining city on a hill, a beacon of prosperity and economic growth in the gloom of a continent shrouded by poverty. Upon the firm economic infrastructure he had inherited, Robert Mugabe, our first black leader, built a health and educational system that was the envy of Africa. Zimbabwe became the continent’s most literate country, with its highest per capita income. The Zimbabwe dollar was at near parity with its American namesake. Fast forward to today, and the country is unrecognisable. Zimbabwe now has the fastest-shrinking peacetime economy in the world. This week, one U.S. dollar will fetch you 55 million Zimbabwe dollars on the street. Hyperinflation there has soared well above 100,000 percent. Zimbabweans must carry huge wads of cash around in shopping bags, and by the time they reach the checkout desk at the shortage-racked supermarkets, the prices have already gone up. Commercial agriculture – the backbone of the economy – lies shattered. From being a food exporter, Zimbabwe would now starve without U.N. famine relief. And even with it, half the population is malnourished. Education and healthcare have collapsed. Ravaged by AIDS, life expectancy has plummeted from around 60 years old to about 35, the world’s lowest. Zimbabwe has more orphans per capita than almost any other country on the planet. Water is undrinkable, power infrequent, roads potholed, fuel scarce, corruption endemic. Why? It comes down to one man: Robert Mugabe, now in his 28th year in power and still refusing to go. Why do Zimbabweans continue to put up with Mugabe? In large numbers, they don’t. Since 2000, most have tried to vote against him in presidential elections, but these were blatantly rigged. He rules as a dictator through a network of army officers. It is on them that he will rely once more to mastermind the presidential election on Saturday. It is an election in name only, with no hope of being “free and fair.” Mugabe has banned most independent observers, instead inviting teams from China, Russia, Iran and Angola – nations with no modern history of free and fair democracy. And finally, the more than 4 million in the Zimbabwe diaspora are not allowed postal votes. None of this bodes well for Mugabe’s two main opponents. Morgan Tsvangirai, of the Movement for Democratic Change, is a veteran of several rigged poll defeats and seems unlikely to fare any better this time, despite the enthusiastic crowds he draws to his rallies. Mugabe’s other threat is Simba Makoni, a member of Mugabe’s own politburo until he was expelled recently for daring to compete for the presidency. The only real hope is that the men responsible for carrying out the rigging – Mugabe’s secret police, his senior government apparatchiks and the army leadership – may have lost faith in their longtime leader. Perhaps they will refuse to fiddle the vote, especially because Makoni, the former Cabinet minister, is running as a “reformist” candidate, presenting the prospect of change with continuity. It is a very slim prospect. By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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