O P I N I O N S

EDITORIALS

Mumbaikar Deshmukh
CM should be asked to step down
Political leaders like Bal Thackeray and Raj Thackeray targeting “outsiders” in Mumbai was bad enough. But Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh himself blaming them for all the ills of the metropolis is not only the worst, but also the most reprehensible form of regional parochialism.

Biofuels not the answer
Cure may be worse than disease
AS the world struggles to come to terms with food shortages and increasing prices, it is becoming clear that the biofuel alternative, once touted as the answer to everything from climate change and environmental pollution to energy security, is not the answer.

• Thought for the day

ARTICLE

Case for a CBI Act
Need to handle corruption boldly
by R.K. Raghavan
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice has opted for the creation of a separate anti-terrorism division within the CBI to make it a potent enforcement agency. In its 24th report presented to Parliament on March 11, the committee recommends that terrorist acts, trafficking in human beings, smuggling and black marketing should be declared “federal crimes” and brought within the CBI’s ambit.

MIDDLE

Smokers’ paradise
by Kumar Rakesh
There are many things which distinguish Srinagar from most of its capital counterparts in India, but few are as striking to hordes of outside travellers these days as prevalence and, more importantly, acceptance of public smoking.

OPED

A billion times better
Societies are in for more exponential change
by Ray Kurzweil
MIT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that it actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11 million (in today’s dollars) and was shared by all students and faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful.

Keep Olympic flame burning
Maj Gen (retd) Himmat Singh Gill
The Olympic Games today finds itself mired in a politico-centric environment that has little to do with the original charter and spirit of collective human endeavour and organised world sport.

Beijing should choose dialogue over doublespeak
by Anita Inder Singh
China’s prestige has nosedived because of continuing Tibetan unrest, as international outrage over its ruthless violation of human rights in Tibet is reflected in protests against the Olympic torch in many cities around the world. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao would do well to put into practice his assurance, last month, to British premier, Gordon Brown, that Beijing was ready to engage in dialogue with the Dalai Lama, if he renounced violence and support for Tibet’s independence.

EDITORIALS

Mumbaikar Deshmukh
CM should be asked to step down

Political leaders like Bal Thackeray and Raj Thackeray targeting “outsiders” in Mumbai was bad enough. But Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh himself blaming them for all the ills of the metropolis is not only the worst, but also the most reprehensible form of regional parochialism. Since this flies in the face of the avowed pan-India policies of the Congress to which he belongs, the high command must take a very strict view of his statements in this regard. No wonder, his stand has come in for gleeful praise from Shiv Sena and BJP leaders. His method to keep the outsiders at bay is draconian. He wants anti-encroachment restrictions to be so strict that no outsider can get a roof over his head. Apparently, his ire is only against those migrants who have no resources to buy or rent a house. This should be one of the most ill-thought out exhortations by any Chief Minister.

Apparently, all this is being done by him clearly in league with Raj Thackeray because he finds his position as Chief Minister shaky. He and the Shiv Sena have found a common enemy in Narayan Rane who is a claimant to the top job. But the method Deshmukh has chosen to gain popularity is so mischievous that he deserves to be shown the door for this very reason, if nothing else.

It is a pity that some leaders of today tend to see a national city like Mumbai as only a Maharashtra town. They simply fail to comprehend that it could not have risen to the level of a metropolis that it is if it was not made their abode by millions of people from outside. It is they who have lent it its unique cosmopolitan character. Yes, its growing population makes big demands on its resources. To fulfil them is the responsibility of the government. If Deshmukh cannot discharge that responsibility, he should make way for a more competent person, who does not drive a wedge between people and people. Thackerays of all sorts and men like Deshmukhs of Vilasrao’s kind are out to harm the unity and integration of the nation.

Biofuels not the answer
Cure may be worse than disease

AS the world struggles to come to terms with food shortages and increasing prices, it is becoming clear that the biofuel alternative, once touted as the answer to everything from climate change and environmental pollution to energy security, is not the answer. While rising demand is one main reason for the food crisis, it is also a fact that world wide, many farmers have made the switch from growing food crops to growing only corn, a key source for making ethanol. This has largely been in response to the drive to use biofuels by the United States. Last December, raising demand further, US President George Bush mandated that by 2020, 36 billion gallons of biofuel be used per year. Clearly, this drive has affected world food crop.

When flamboyant Virgin group founder Richard Branson launched the first flight of a passenger airliner fuelled with a mixture of traditional aviation fuel with biofuels, the reaction was not quite what he expected. Around the same time, scientific studies from institutions such as Princeton University and Nature Conservancy were showing that growing more corn and sugarcane for ethanol, particularly on freshly cleared land, was adding much more to the carbon footprint than the fossil fuels they were replacing. Earlier studies had warned of the impact on the food supply situation as well. We are already facing the consequences. Brazil, earlier considered a model in using biofuels, is now struggling with enhanced air and water pollution, and devastating deforestation.

With a billion-plus mouths to feed, India should be particularly careful about jumping on to the biofuel bandwagon. The government has been mulling over incorporating more ethanol into traditional petrol, and the oil companies have already got into the act. What is more, land use changes are already happening in pockets around the country. There are certainly environmental issues associated with traditional, water-hungry, crops like rice, but diversification into non-food avenues will mean trouble. India had better stay away. As for energy security, India, blessed with abundant sunshine, should focus more on solar technology, which has been making significant advances of late. India should also tap wind energy by putting more windmills in various states.

Bronze Age
Maya casts herself for posterity

PHOTOGRAPHS of people in flesh and blood standing beside their wax statues in Madame Tussaud’s museum are a teaser as it is difficult to make out the real from the melt-able. Since bronze statues of living persons are seldom made, this problem does not usually arise. On Tuesday, most newspapers carried photographs of UP Chief Minister Mayawati standing in front of her own statue she herself unveiled in Lucknow the previous day. She had an explanation for the bizarre event: Kanshi Ram had decreed that whenever a statue was built for him, there should be one for her beside him. Clever as she always is, the Chief Minister conveniently kept enough distance between the two statues, though they are on the same pedestal.

To lend the statue an element of routine, the Bahujan Samaj Party leader used the occasion - the birth anniversary of Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar - to unveil another two-in-one statue. The reference is to Dr Ambedkar’s statue she unveiled the same day on the banks of the Gomti. No other leader, including Mahatma Gandhi, has as many statues as the “founder” of the Indian Constitution has to perpetuate his memory. What makes the new statue different is that it has another statue for company - that of Dr Ambedkar’s first wife Ramabai. Why the first wife and not the second wife is a question Ms Mayawati alone can answer, though a conjecture is that while the first was a Dalit, the second was a twice-born.

One advantage of letting leaders commission and unveil their own statues, as Ms Mayawati pointed out, is that they also can “cherish their statues”. How many leaders would like to see their statues covered with birds’ droppings is yet to be found out. But Ms Mayawati is certainly one of them. After all, she has ordered that no statue of Kanshi Ram would hereafter be built without one for her beside him. That is no maya, but real parivartan.

Thought for the day

A smile is a curve that sets everything strait.

— Phyllis Diller

ARTICLE

Case for a CBI Act
Need to handle corruption boldly
by R.K. Raghavan

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice has opted for the creation of a separate anti-terrorism division within the CBI to make it a potent enforcement agency. In its 24th report presented to Parliament on March 11, the committee recommends that terrorist acts, trafficking in human beings, smuggling and black marketing should be declared “federal crimes” and brought within the CBI’s ambit.

This should warm the hearts of those who had been watching with dismay the gradual erosion of authority of the elite investigating agency. The CBI has been systematically emasculated by a wide spectrum of forces, including those who were not only in power but had aligned themselves with unethical forces outside the polity for neutralising investigations against people in high places.

No single party alone can be blamed. There is near unanimity among parties of all hues that the CBI should succeed only against minor players and not against major perpetrators of the crime of bribery. The slogan that seems most popular across the political divide is that the CBI’s overzealousness is dangerous and shall be frustrated at all costs!

The collusion of the higher civil service in promoting such a campaign for weakening the CBI cannot be easily hidden. When someone writes a candid history of the CBI — I do not know who will bell the cat — the truth of this caustic observation will become all too evident.

The parliamentary committee’s report is possibly in pursuance of a long-standing demand that there should be a whole-time Federal Investigating Agency (FIA) to look into offences against the State, especially cases of terrorist violence and violations of the Official Secrets Act prejudicial to national security.

This stand can hardly be faulted. What is questionable, however, is the mischievous propaganda that the CBI is unequal to the task of investigating such illegal activities. If the FBI in the US can successfully investigate cases involving terrorists and others of an equally dangerous class, why can the CBI not do the same? Merely beating the CBI with the stick that it is not competent to take up the task is being tendentious and illogical.

It is true that, as presently constituted, the CBI does not have the resources. With a mere 3000 and odd investigators, its hands are already more than full dealing with a wide spectrum of offences, from anti-corruption to homicides.

Not many know that the CBI, in its previous appellation of the Delhi Special Police Establishment (SPE), was founded only as an anti-corruption agency. In the course of time, when it became the CBI in 1964 under the charismatic leadership of D.P. Kohli, it was entrusted with the responsibility of investigating general crime such as homicides, and economic offences such as bank frauds.

The fact that this was done after due deliberation and taking into account the changing crime scenario would itself reflect the confidence it had built over the years in the minds of policy makers. To now say that it cannot assume new responsibilities such as investigating offences against the State is preposterous and tendentious.

The fact that the CBI has become an eclectic organisation deriving its expertise from different disciplines is one sure reason why it should be expanded to meet the new challenges rather than create a new agency.

Going for another outfit, as some policy makers and senior civil servants would urge the government to do, is one sure way of squandering public money and also downgrading the CBI’s image to a mere anti-corruption agency.

One should also remember that the CBI Director, after the apex court’s hawala judgement, is an exalted authority carefully chosen after a lengthy process from among the best in the field in the whole nation. If such a senior functionary with recognised professional skills and integrity cannot give leadership to the proposed anti-terrorism cell, few others in the Indian Police Service can do.

A fact that is often not clearly understood is that the CBI does not enjoy suo motu authority to take up investigation of general crime unless it is reported in a Union Territory. This is because “police” is a State subject under the Constitution, and without the consent of the states, the CBI cannot operate within a state or investigate local crime however sensational it may be. Even judicial authority to order a CBI inquiry without consulting state governments is under challenge.

Any attempt to form a new police agency will, therefore, be a non-starter without the approval of the states. A few years ago, when the Ministry of Home Affairs under the stewardship of Mr L.K. Advani convened a conference in Delhi to discuss the FIA idea, the proposal was unceremoniously shot down by most Chief Ministers. This was attributed to the fear that such an agency could be used by the Centre to intimidate state governments of a different political persuasion.

Empowering the CBI to take up investigations in a state on its own is possible only if there is a CBI Act that would scrupulously avoid conferring on CBI officers the powers of investigation under the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr. PC), 1973.

Just now there is no CBI Act but a mere Delhi Police Establishment Act that gives the legal clothing to the CBI. As long as it does not refer to CBI officers as police officers as in the case of the Cr P.C., a new law outside the Cr. P.C., will be constitutionally valid.

Under such a law CBI officers can be conferred investigating powers similar to those vested in income-tax or Customs officials. State governments cannot object to such a move, although it would be politically wise to carry them along after explaining the rationale of the exercise.

This is not a brand new suggestion. It is a course of action that had been commended in the past by many legal pundits and former CBI officers.

I presume the parliamentary committee has fallen in line with such a sensible argument. There is no reason why the Manmohan Singh government cannot pursue this zealously, if only it is interested in handling the menace of corruption boldly.

The writer is a former CBI Director.

MIDDLE

Smokers’ paradise
by Kumar Rakesh

There are many things which distinguish Srinagar from most of its capital counterparts in India, but few are as striking to hordes of outside travellers these days as prevalence and, more importantly, acceptance of public smoking.

When civic activism, though a few trenchant critics say that things are being stretched to the point of civic terrorism, has pushed smokers into corners of their private spaces, Srinagar is very much a smoker’s delight.

Walk into any restaurant and you will find ashtrays at every table and men — woman smoker is an oxymoron in the valley’s patriarchal society — exhaling smoke bubbles, reminding you of good old Coffee House days. Politeness may demand that you seek permission of your companion, more so if a lady is beside you, before you take your puff, but any niceties here are at best considered an import.

In my early days I tagged along with a local friend to a family function and was very much shocked to see him take out a stick in most casual manner and begin smoking while conversing in drawing room. You should have not smoked there in front of everyone, I tut-tuted as we drove back. Taken aback, it took him some time to understand what I meant and he laughed that it was not Chandigarh, from where I had come.

In a few days I realised how right he was. Whether it was a government office or an eating joint, lobby of a hotel crowded with people watching live T-20 matches or a passenger Sumo, your chances of finding a no-smoking zone is as good as discovering a smoking zone in Chandigarh, declared India’s first smoke-free city.

Blowing smoke serenely in public transport may sound like a throwback to a previous era when our anti-smoking crusader health minister Dr A Ramadoss was still learning his lessons. It does not invite much sneer in the Valley. Weeks back when I was on, my way to Jammu from Srinagar by road, a man protested his co-passengers smoking. It was met first with surprised looks — has he come from some other planet types — and then outright dismissal of his point that it made him feel sick. Arguments continued till he decided to change his seat.

Locals believe that it’s an ingrained part of their lifestyle and even if it does no good to their health, there can’t be any stigma attached with smoking. So it’s most unlikely that you will ever see local media doing a story here for demanding banning puffing in public. Chances are that every second editor will be taking his daily editorial meeting over tea, Kashmiri roti and, of course, cigarette.

OPED

A billion times better
Societies are in for more exponential change
by Ray Kurzweil

MIT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that it actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11 million (in today’s dollars) and was shared by all students and faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation you can buy per dollar.

Yet as powerful as information technology is today, we will make another billion-fold increase in capability (for the same cost) over the next 25 years. That’s because information technology builds on itself – we are continually using the latest tools to create the next so they grow in capability at an exponential rate.

This doesn’t just mean snazzier cellphones. It means that change will rock every aspect of our world. The exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a solution to global warming, unmask the secret to longer life and solve myriad other worldly conundrums.

This exponential progress in the power of information technology goes back more than a century to the data-processing equipment used in the 1890 census, the first U.S. census to be automated. It has been a smooth – and highly predictable – phenomenon despite all the vagaries of history through that period, including two world wars, the Cold War and the Great Depression.

I say highly predictable because, thanks to its exponential power, only technology possesses the scale to address the major challenges – such as energy and the environment, disease and poverty – confronting society. Take energy. Today, 70 percent of it comes from fossil fuels, a 19th-century technology. But if we could capture just one ten-thousandth of the sunlight that falls on Earth, we could meet 100 percent of the world’s energy needs using this renewable and environmentally friendly source.

We can’t do that now because solar panels rely on old technology, making them expensive, inefficient, heavy and hard to install. But a new generation of panels based on nanotechnology (which manipulates matter at the level of molecules) is starting to overcome these obstacles. The tipping point at which energy from solar panels will actually be less expensive than fossil fuels is only a few years away. The power we are generating from solar is doubling every two years; at that rate, it will be able to meet all our energy needs within 20 years.

Nanotechnology itself is an information technology and therefore subject to what I call the “law of accelerating returns,” a continual doubling of capability about every year. Venture capital groups and high-tech companies are investing billions of dollars in these new renewable energy technologies. I’m confident that the day is close at hand when we will be able to obtain energy from sunlight using nano-engineered solar panels and store it for use on cloudy days in nano-engineered fuel cells for less than it costs to use environmentally damaging fossil fuels.

It’s important to understand that exponentials seem slow at first. In the mid-1990s, halfway through the Human Genome Project to identify all the genes in human DNA, researchers had succeeded in collecting only 1 percent of the human genome. But the amount of genetic data was doubling every year, and that is actually right on schedule for an exponential progression.

The project was slated to take 15 years, and if you double 1 percent seven more times you surpass 100 percent. In fact, the project was finished two years early. This helps explain why people underestimate what is technologically feasible over long periods of time – they think linearly while the actual course of progress is exponential.

We see the same progression with other biological technologies as well. Until just recently, medicine – like energy – was not an information technology. This is now changing as scientists begin to understand how biology works as a set of information processes. The approximately 23,000 genes in our cells are basically software programs, and we are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes that cracking the genome code has unlocked.

We also have new tools, likewise just a few years old, that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers. For example, when the fat insulin receptor gene was turned off in mice, they were able to eat ravenously yet remain slim and obtain the health benefits of being slim.

They didn’t get heart disease or diabetes and lived 20 percent longer. There are now more than a thousand drugs in the pipeline to turn off the genes that promote obesity, heart disease, cancer and other diseases. We can also turn enzymes off and on, and add genes to the body.

The important point is this: Now that we can model, simulate and reprogram biology just like we can a computer, it will be subject to the law of accelerating returns, a doubling of capability in less than a year. These technologies will be more than a thousand times more capable in a decade, more than a million times more capable in two decades.

We are now adding three months every year to human life expectancy, but given the exponential growth of our ability to reprogram biology, this will soon go into high gear. According to my models, 15 years from now we’ll be adding more than a year each year to our remaining life expectancy.

Clearly, the transformation of our 21st-century world is under way, and information technology, in all its forms, is helping the future look brighter ... exponentially.

By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Keep Olympic flame burning
Maj Gen (retd) Himmat Singh Gill

The Olympic Games today finds itself mired in a politico-centric environment that has little to do with the original charter and spirit of collective human endeavour and organised world sport.

One of the symbols of the Olympic Games is the lighted torch that travels within the confines of the host country, as also around the world, before the games actually begin. It is sought to be extinguished by uncaring bodies of men and organisations who do not understand the vital difference between playing politics and sport.

In India, the torch will be carried on April 17 along Rajpath in New Delhi. Some of the Tibetan exiles in residence in the country, who wish to embarrass China over the Tibet issue, will form the vanguard of demonstrations against it. In addition, some lightweights and nobodies, who wish to remain in the limelight forever, and who were rather unnecessarily invited by the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) to carry the torch, will fret and fume to their hearts’ content till the flame is transported out.

Those of us who agitate all the time need to understand that the Olympics will go on as usual in Beijing, even if the journey of the torch abroad is terminated at some point of time. Actually, the practice of the journey of the torch came in much later and was not a part of the original proceedings when it all began in Greece.

The extinguishing of the torch in Paris recently has little relevance to the actual holding of the games, where every athlete and sportsman worth the name would love to vie with one another for the world crown.

It makes little difference if a few diplomats and world dignitaries do not attend the Games, for ultimately they will be the only losers. The right forum for resolving or airing a political issue is the conference table and bilateral talks, and not the arena of the sports field where healthy competition is all that matters.

Even diplomatically, it would be better for China to remain bonded in with the comity of world nations as witnessed during an Olympics. Keeping it engaged alongside other nations would better facilitate a resolution of political and human right issues, that are otherwise touchy subjects with any country.

The torch relay must go on without any let or hindrance on the scheduled day. The Dalai Lama — for his own sake, as otherwise his own standing as a leader will drop rapidly — needs to ensure that his supporters now camping in Delhi do not disrupt the proceedings in any manner.

Though it is an International Olympic Committee (IOC) event being staged in India, the IOA must be assisted in every manner by the Home and Sports ministries, so that there is no foul up. In all this side show, China may yet have the last laugh by mustering the largest medal tally. All our busybodies will then, of course, have to find another issue to agitate about.

Beijing should choose dialogue over doublespeak
by Anita Inder Singh

China’s prestige has nosedived because of continuing Tibetan unrest, as international outrage over its ruthless violation of human rights in Tibet is reflected in protests against the Olympic torch in many cities around the world. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao would do well to put into practice his assurance, last month, to British premier, Gordon Brown, that Beijing was ready to engage in dialogue with the Dalai Lama, if he renounced violence and support for Tibet’s independence.

This sounded reasonable. The nature of the Tibetan uprising is complex. Whether the turmoil reflects China’s failure to respect ethnic differences, the miscarriage of its attempts at political and economic integration, a struggle for freedom, or a challenge to China’s political and moral authority, any differences between the Tibetans and Beijing would best be addressed and sorted out through dialogue, if only because no one knows how many different factors have interwined, inextricably, to spark the current unrest.

But the words and acts of Chinese officials quickly gave the lie to Wen Jiabao’s professed willingness to parley with the Dalai Lama. Roads to Lhasa have been blocked, and the Western media barred from Tibet. India’s ambassador in Beijing was excluded from the officially organised diplomatic sight-seeing tour of Lhasa because India had allowed anti-Chinese Tibetan protests in New Delhi. The inference is that Beijing is far from practicing the peaceful arts of reconciliation.

The doublespeak and bad faith of Chinese leaders has further been revealed by their accusations that the Dalai Lama wants to sever Tibet from China, that he has masterminded the recent violence in Lhasa, and that he is trying to sabotage the Olympics and organise terrorism. They have reviled him as a wolf in a monk’s robe, a devil – and more.

The Chinese authorities are talking nonsense. For one, the Dalai Lama has since long sought dialogue with Beijing and has advocated cultural autonomy for Tibet. He has never called for Tibet’s secession from China. He has even voiced support for the Olympics, underlining his wish to avoid embarrassing Beijing.

Moreover, the Dalai Lama stands out as the contemporary international embodiment of political and social non-violence. He has threatened to resign if Tibetans in China indulge in further acts of violence. That is not because he floats in a spiritual cloud-cuckoo-land. With the hardened realism of a man who, almost half a century ago, fled his country in order to survive, he has no wish to be the moral inspiration behind any Tibetan rebellion that would be crushed brutally by the communist Chinese regime. As he puts it, ‘a young deer [is] in a tiger’s hand... [w]eapons power is immediately there.’

So non-violence offers the only hope of preventing the butchery of his people in any confrontation with the mighty Chinese army.

The prospects of Beijing conducting dialogue with him or with discontented Tibetans are pretty bleak. For some strange reason, incomprehensible to this writer, dictators find it easier to kill people – hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of them – rather than parley with individuals who happen to differ with them. Who can forget the millions of deaths that occurred in the name of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, or the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, in which 10,000 people lost their lives? Like all authoritarian rulers, China’s communist leaders have failed to establish institutions for mediation, reconciliation and compromise. Dialogue is simply alien to their way of thinking and acting.

But China’s rulers are not fools. Beijing’s vilification of a spiritual luminary who is asking for Tibet’s cultural autonomy reflects its angry awareness that meaningful cultural freedom would entail political reform throughout China This idea is anathema to China’s establishment.

To see the current Tibetan unrest largely in terms of Han-Tibetan enmity is to miss the point that the Han Chinese majority, like the Tibetan minority, are denied civil and political liberties. Merely expressing the wish to enjoy human rights gets them sent to “labour education” camps at best – Liu Jie, Lu Gengsong, and Yang Chunlin are just three recent examples – or puts the life of any Chinese dissident at risk.

But dialogue is the hallmark of civilisation. And the consensus that strengthens states can only be built through dialogue. Napoleon Bonaparte, that great – though defeated – soldier, knew that one could do anything at the point of the sword except sit on it.

Talking to the Dalai Lama could reduce tension – and who knows? Dialogue might open a door to peaceful political liberalisation, which in turn could bestow legitimacy on China’s rulers and enhance its world prestige more than any Olympic torch or triumphs ever could.