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Gujjar war Mush under pressure |
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The State and the
citizen India also needs to respect human rights The references to India in the latest human rights report of Amnesty International are certainly unedifying for the country. Sixty years after Independence, India has been castigated for being insensitive to economic, social and cultural rights of the people, with 300 million still in poverty.
Congress after
Karnataka
Thank you for the
music
Oil: It is the
addiction that is causing the crisis Delhi
Durbar To ban or not to
ban, the cluster bomb
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Mush under pressure What
PML (N) leader Nawaz Sharif said in Lahore on Wednesday about President Pervez Musharraf was not necessarily his own view or that of his party. An overwhelming majority of the Pakistanis wants Mr Musharraf to look for the exit route. The people expressed this clearly through their electoral verdict. Mr Sharif has, however, gone a step further, saying that the former Chief of Army Staff, who grabbed power through a bloodless coup in October 1999, must be tried for “high treason”. Mr Musharraf is being accused of not only derailing democracy in 1999 and trampling the constitution during his rule but also attempting to do so even now when his party, the PML (Q), has been voted out of power. Mr Sharif’s claim that he has the support of PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari for launching an impeachment drive against President Musharraf may not be without a basis. The two had a lengthy meeting a day before Mr Sharif talked of not allowing Mr Musharraf a safe exit. They discussed the 62-point constitutional package, finalised by the PPP. The package has it, besides other things, that the President must be stripped of the special powers he has like the sacking of the democratically elected government and the national and provincial assemblies. Of late, Mr Zardari has stopped talking of a harmonious relationship with the presidency as he did only a few days ago. Perhaps, he is finding it difficult to go against the general mood in his party and the public. The pressure on Mr Musharraf to resign and go has been mounting ever since his party suffered a humiliating defeat in the February 18 elections. The new Army Chief, Gen Ashfaque Pervaiz Kiyani, once considered close to President Musharraf, may also be wanting the President to vacate the Army House in Rawalpindi he has been occupying despite relinquishing his charge as Army Chief. Earlier his most loyal Army officer in charge of the command of the Triple-One Brigade, which looks after the security of the President of Pakistan, the federal capital and Rawalpindi, was replaced. President Musharraf has only the constitutional provisions got enacted by him without a mandate to defend himself, but under the circumstances he cannot muster courage to use them. The most honourable course left for him is to call it a day and cease to be a hindrance in the way of democracy in Pakistan. |
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The State and the citizen The
references to India in the latest human rights report of Amnesty International are certainly unedifying for the country. Sixty years after Independence, India has been castigated for being insensitive to economic, social and cultural rights of the people, with 300 million still in poverty. Not being able to uplift the masses is bad enough. The way many of them are on the wrong end of the stick does not give credit. The report talks in graphic detail about how state and non-state actors continue to enjoy impunity for torture, deaths in custody, abductions and disappearances. Such atrocities are all the more prevalent in Jammu and Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Nagaland and Assam. India’s record has been further sullied by Nandigram about which the report laments that “Here private militias owing allegiance to the ruling Communist Party of India (M) battled for territorial control. A range of human rights violations happened, including unlawful killings, forced evictions and excessive force”. Ironically, the communists had made much of the Amnesty criticism of America’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp. One wonders what they will have to say about Nandigram in the state governed by the Left Front. The report also takes a dispassionate look at the track record of 153 other countries and asks their governments to “apologise for six decades of human failure”. After all, people are still tortured in at least 81 countries, face unfair trials in 54 countries and are not allowed to speak freely in 77 countries. Instead of being dismissed as impractical suggestions of a group of Good Samaritans, the objections of Amnesty International should galvanise a bout of self-appraisal and self-improvement. And this requires a concern for the basic rights of every citizen, more so when he or she is not well placed in life. |
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The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
— Tacitus |
Congress after Karnataka
THERE is striking unanimity among non-partisan analysts that the Congress lost Karnataka to the Bharatiya Janata Party because of their contrasting styles of electioneering. The BJP was focused on issues of real concern to the people of the state, such as price rise, stability and power shortage; had taken care to douse down the factional strife between the party’s state leader, Mr Ananth Kumar, and Mr B. S. Yeddyurappa, its clearly projected chief ministerial candidate; and had shunned the Hindutva card. The Congress was both lackadaisical and over-confident. Instead of projecting a nominee for the office of chief minister, it let eight aspirants jockey for the position. Its selection of candidates in distant Delhi proved disastrous. And it naïvely believed that the electorate could be persuaded to accept that price rise was “temporary”. Six days before the voting, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil made the astounding statement equating the cases of Afzal Guru in this country and Sarabjit Singh in a death cell in Pakistan, inviting the comment that he should pay to his policy statements “at least a fraction of the attention he bestows on his attire”. Two other factors also came into play. The first was the increasing stranglehold of caste. The consolidation of the Lingayat vote in favour of the BJP (Yeddyurappa is a respected Lingayat leader) and the division of the Vokkaliga vote between the Congress and Mr H. D. Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular) contributed materially to the election’s outcome. Remarkably, the BJP won more Scheduled Caste constituencies than did the Congress. This may be a surprise to many even in the Lok Sabha that more Scheduled Caste members are in the BJP ranks than in that of the Congress. Secondly, the deserved deflation of Mr Deve Gowda’s party is not so much a rejection of regional politics as a punishment to it for its abominable conduct towards both its Congress and BJP allies one after the other. The saffron party earned a rich dividend on the JD (S)’s “betrayal”. As the triumphant BJP has rubbed it in, this is the Congress party’s 14th defeat in assembly elections since its return to power at the Centre in 2004. Unless it learns the lessons taught by Karnataka voters, its plight may soon be much worse. Sadly, the Congress leaders, like the Bourbons of France, learn nothing and unlearn nothing. In this context, leaving aside the ground that has been trodden already, let me concentrate on what is the Congress party’s bane in not just Karnataka but all across the country: its deliberate and firm resolve never to allow a leader to emerge in any state who has a power base of his or her own, and could therefore be a potential challenge to the Central leadership, present or in the making. The luckless S. M. Krishna’s fate fits into this pattern perfectly and underscores what went wrong in Karnataka. He was a competent chief minister of the state and was indeed held out as an example. No wonder, in 2004, when the Congress had no option but to form a coalition ministry with Mr Deve Gowda, Krishna was replaced by Mr Dharam Singh, and banished to a gilded cage, the Raj Bhavan in Mumbai. When fresh elections in Karnataka loomed, the Congress “high command” realised that Mr Krishna was needed in his home state. But in the best Congress tradition, the top leadership procrastinated. Mr Krishna’s translocation to Bangalore was too late. Worse, all the other seven satraps, never reluctant to stab each other in the back, suddenly closed ranks and ganged up on him. What they said to the “high command” privately then, they are now saying publicly, loud and clear. Against this backdrop it is shocking beyond belief that of all people, Ms Margaret Alva — who should know better, if only because she is known to be one of Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s confidantes — has made a demonstrably false statement. She has claimed that the Congress “is a democratic party and its chief ministers are elected by legislators”. Would she care to mention in which state this has happened and when? If she is referring to the period between just before Independence and the end of the Nehru era, she is on firm ground. After all, in 1945-46, despite a clear indication by the Congress Parliamentary Board, consisting of such titanic figures as Nehru, Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Azad, that Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari) should be the “premier” of Madras, the state legislature party elected first T. Prakasam and then O. P. Ramaswamy Reddiar to that post. No heads rolled. In 1952, Rajaji did become chief minister; two years later K. Kamaraj toppled him and took over. Since Indira Gandhi’s establishment of her supremacy in the Congress and the country in 1971, no Congress legislature party has ever elected its leader. Yes, Congress MLAs do meet, but only to request “the Leader” to nominate the state party’s chief. After Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1980, the process was carried to bizarre extremes. On a famous occasion, the entire Congress legislature party of Madhya Pradesh was summoned to Delhi. Meeting in the lawns of the Prime Minister’s House, it accepted the resignation of the then state chief minister, Shyama Charan Shukla, that he had never submitted, and made the usual request to her to nominate Shukla’s successor. She chose P. C. Sethi. That state of affairs virtually persists till today, a decade after Sonia Gandhi took over the reins of the Congress party and four years after she vastly strengthened her position by forswearing the office of Prime Minister when it was rightfully hers. However, she surely knows that the Congress’ sway in the country isn’t what it used to be. On the day of Indira Gandhi’s tragic assassination, the Congress had a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Parliament, and the party ruled all except three states. Today, the Congress representation in the Lok Sabha has shrunk to 140 out of over 530 seats. Moreover, apart from Andhra and Maharashtra (in the latter, it is in coalition with Mr Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party}, it is in power, alone or in coalition, in relatively small states such as Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and some of the northeastern states. In the circumstances, would it not be in the Congress party’s best interest for Sonia Gandhi to nominate the party leader in a state before it goes to elections instead of after it loses the
poll?
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Thank you for the music
LISTEN to the notes carefully,” said my music teacher to our class of tiny fifth graders watching intently as he strummed an “A Major” on his Roland six-string guitar. Taking rhythm guitar lessons from him was no joke, as it involved hours of practice and sometimes missing homework. While his gentleman-like ways made up for the intensity of learning complex octaves and progressions, it certainly didn’t hurt that he was handsome in a charming, old-school kind of a way. My first musical memories dated back to when mom and dad used to play their favourite songs on their longplaying record player. Those records are still lying around somewhere in the attic, in their dusty jackets, meticulously dated and signed in blue ink. When I listen to those songs now, they bring back delicious associations from years ago — such as the aroma of warm butter mingled with baking soda as mom used to bake madeleines on Sunday evenings while listening to The Carpenters and The Beatles. As the years went by, I started to move away from the golden oldies to discover my own brand of music. At thirteen, I was ready to buy my first album — a very carefully deliberated investment. I did my due diligence and decided to purchase George Michael’s ‘WHAM!’ as was recommended by my cousin, who I considered to be the ultimate barometer of coolness. Soon, I had a tiny collection of my own that I guarded with an intense teenage loyalty. The albums ranged from Michael Jackson pop to dark Nirvana grunge. As my taste evolved, I learned to appreciate more complex and varied compositions. My cassette collection, however, disappeared somewhere in the twilight zone between the end of analogue music and the advent of CDs. The only collection I could claim myself to be the owner of was a bunch of arcane mp3 playlists that were ripped off friends’ hard drives. Ironically, in the midst of the confusing haze of growing up, the only music that still remained alive in my heart was my parents’ golden oldies. Sitting in a hotel room on a long and stressful business trip, I now find myself going to Youtube.com to search for some comfort music such as the Beatles’ “While my Guitar Gently Weeps”. The mushy melody plays in semi-CD sound quality, but it does manage to lift my spirits. While I never took up playing the guitar in any big way, I still haven’t forgotten the sound of my music teacher’s “A Major”. It resonates with a very special place in my soul and helps me stay grounded as I play along the symphony of
life. |
Oil: It is the addiction that is causing the crisis This
week, a battalion of angry addicts brought London to a standstill. They snarled up the traffic, then marched on 10 Downing Street to demand their fix at prices they can afford. Across the world, in countries as different as the US and Iran, fellow junkies are rising up in rage. Their addiction is to a gloopy black drug called petrol – and we are all about to go cold turkey. In the past seven years, the price of oil has soared from $30 a barrel to $140. By the end of next year it could be at $200. No matter how much we plead or howl at our governments, it will never go back: the final act of the Age of Oil has begun. The era that is ending began at 10.30am on 10 January 1901, on a high hill called Spindletop in south-eastern Texas. A pair of pioneer brothers managed to drill down into the biggest oilfield ever found. Until then, the dribbles of oil that had been discovered were used only for kerosene lamps -- but within a decade, this vast gushing supply was driving the entire global economy. It made the 20th century – its glories, and its gutters – possible. Humans were suddenly able to use in one frenetic burst an energy supply that had taken 150 million years to build up. A species that died before the age of 40 after a life of boring, back-breaking labour spurted forward so far and so fast that today billions live into their eighties after a life of leisure and plenty. Oil now drives everything we do. It shuttles us across the globe, we fight wars for it, and we even eat it: to farm a single cow and deliver it to slaughter burns up six barrels of oil – enough to drive from New York to LA. That’s why food becomes expensive when oil becomes expensive. It is totally understandable that most of us want to live forever in that sweet niche in history when we had seemingly infinite reservoirs of oil, and no awareness that burning it would, in time, burn us too. But, alas, we need to wake up and smell the fumes. There are three reasons why the placebos demanded by the petrol protesters and the politicians cowering from them across the world – lower taxes! find more oil! dig! burn! – are a delusion. Reality Check One: Petrol is finite. There is a limited amount of oil in the world, and we have already burned more than 900 billion barrels of it. There is a complex scientific debate about when we will reach the point of “peak oil”, when we will have used up more than half of all the supplies on earth. Some geologists think this moment has already passed. Others – mostly oil industry flunkies – think we have as long as 30 years to go. But all agree the remaining oil is harder to reach, and much of it can never be accessed. The facts are stark. All the biggest oilfields on earth were discovered before my parents were born. The discovery of new oilfields peaked in 1965, and has been falling ever since. The last year in which humans found more oil than we burned was the year I was born: 1979. So we have a diminishing supply – at the very moment when billions more people want access to it. Car ownership in India has trebled in the past decade, and it will treble again by 2020. In China, three-quarters of urban Chinese say they plan to buy a car in the next five years. These factors mean we are unquestionably moving from having a world with growing pools of cheap oil to dwindling supplies of expensive oil. Reality Check Two: Even if we had infinite supplies of free petrol, we couldn’t afford to use it without dramatically destabilising the climate. To use just a few examples: Spain and Australia are currently suffering their worst droughts since records began, and several cities are on the brink of running out of drinking water. The oceans are rapidly turning more acidic, to levels scientists didn’t expect to see until 2050. The Arctic is now completely free of ice in the summer. This is all with just one degree of global warming. The world’s climatologists agree that if we burn up most of the remaining dribbles of oil on earth, we could be on course for six degrees this century. The last time the world warmed so quickly was 251 million years ago – and 95 per cent of everything on earth died. Reality Check Three: Our addiction to oil means we can never undermine the Islamic fundamentalists who want to kill us – and often actually help them. Most of the world’s remaining oil is in the Middle East. In order to access it, we have a twin-track policy. To start with, we support the most repressive dictatorship in the region – the torturing, sharia-law enforcing House of Saud – because they keep the supply running nicely. The Saudi state then uses the money we pay at the pump to fund a vast network of extreme madrasahs and mosques across the world – including within the US and Europe – preaching that democracy is “evil”, women should be subordinated, Jews are “pigs and apes”, and gays should be killed. We do not query this because, as the writer Thomas Friedman put it, “junkies don’t tell the truth to their dealers”. Where we cannot find a friendly local tyrant, we invade the country in order to control the oil ourselves. Even John McCain admitted this month that Iraq was about oil, arguing that energy independence would “prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.” (He later claimed with a red face he was talking exclusively about the first Iraq war.) On their own, each of these inconvenient truths would be enough to require us to begin an urgent transition away from petrol. Together, they are unanswerable. Every penny now should be spent not on perpetuating petrol, but on developing and disseminating alternative fuels. The addiction that began a century ago on a hill in Texas is ending – and we have no choice but to check en masse into petro-rehab. By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Delhi Durbar The
results of the Karnataka elections were out on Sunday and by Monday morning huge hoardings heralding Arun Jaitley as the architect of its first victory in the South were on display right in front of 11, Ashoka Road, the party’s headquarters, and several other parts of the Capital. These hoardings do not have the name or photo of any national leader of the BJP other than Jaitley. The only other known name along with photo is that of Jaitley’s secretary in the party office, Om Prakash Sharma, which is placed somewhere at the bottom of the hoarding. This has set off a debate in the BJP circles about whether Jaitley is eyeing the Delhi chief ministership since the Delhi Assembly elections are due this year-end. There are others in the party who claim that the Delhi chief ministership is too small a post for him and that Jaitley is actually eyeing the Deputy Prime Ministership on the assumption that the BJP will come to power next year. However, Jaitley’s publicists do not seem to be doing a very effective job of it. Instead of spreading the message across the city, they have put up at least three hoardings around Jaitley’s Kailash Colony residence. Chak de Punjabi Trust Punjabis to inject some flamboyance into the dullest of surroundings. The other day, when a group of 13 Pakistani social activists from the International Commission for Human Rights assembled in the capital to talk about the reinstatement of sacked Pakistani judges, one thought it would be a serious deliberation, ending in routine resolutions. There were indeed deliberations, but not the usual ones where parties involved wear stern expressions, talk business and go home to ready themselves for another day’s work. The guests from Pakistan were too enthused to be tamed for the day. So when they had finished talking business, they got down to celebrating the cross-border union by presenting to their hosts one traditional gift after the other. The delegations had come loaded with a variety of special Pakistani fabrics and garments sourced from the best craftspersons. The luckiest among the Indian hosts was president of the International Council of Jurists. He got a special award – a red-coloured head gear akin to the Indian “sehra”. The gathering was prompted to ask, “Where is the bride?”. It was indeed a truly Punjabi affair. Raw deal The divide between the bureaucracy and the armed forces is widening as the discussions over the recommendations of the sixth pay commission get heated with each passing day. The protest by the ex-servicemen to demand a a better pay package was watched with great interest on both sides of this divide in the Capital’s South Block, which houses the defence minsitry. Predictably, officialdom was highly critical of this protest, saying this was no way for the disciplined “fauji” to behave. The men in olive just scoffed and said “what else could the “fauji” have done given the raw deal he has got?” Contributed by Faraz Ahmad, Aditi Tandon and Ajay Banerjee |
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To ban or not to ban, the cluster bomb LONDON – More than 100 countries reached an agreement on Wednesday to ban cluster bombs, controversial weapons that human rights groups deplore but the United States, which did not join the ban, calls an integral, legitimate part of its arsenal. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose personal intervention led to final agreement among representatives of 111 countries gathered in Dublin, called the ban a “big step forward to make the world a safer place.” In addition to the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan – all of them major producers or users of the weapons – did not sign the agreement or participate in the talks. The weapons consist of canisters packed with small bombs, or “bomblets,” that spread over a large area when dropped from a plane or fired from the ground. While the devices are designed to explode on impact, they frequently do not. Civilians, particularly children, are often maimed or killed when they pick up unexploded bombs, sometimes years later. In staying away from Dublin, US officials argued that the talks were not the right forum in which to address the issue and that cluster bombs remain an important part of the country’s weaponry. “While the United States shares the humanitarian concerns of those in Dublin,” said Navy Commander Bob Mehal, a Pentagon spokesman, “cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility, and their elimination from US stockpiles would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk.” The US military says that it keeps the weapons in its arsenal as a defence against advancing armies, a strategy closely linked to conventional Cold War approaches to conflict, and that it has not used the bombs since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. US officials argue that technological advances will ensure that future cluster bombs reliably explode or quickly disable themselves, so they will not become a hazard to civilians later. Israeli forces carried out the largest recent use of cluster bombs, dropping large numbers on southern Lebanon in their 2006 war with the Hezbollah militiamen. Many of the bombs did not explode immediately and have left a lasting humanitarian hazard. Advocates of the ban said they hoped that the agreement, which was supported by rich nations and poor from Scandinavia to Africa, will have the same effect as the 1997 ban on land mines, reducing use of the weapons even among non-signatory countries. Simon Conway, co-chair of the Cluster Munitions Coalition, said that Myanmar is the only nation still using land mines and that the United States has not fired a single one since the ban went into effect. Already, controversy over cluster bombs has led the United States to stop exporting them for now – a law that went into force this year bars the foreign sale of cluster bombs that have less than a 99 percent detonation or disabling rate, conditions that current versions of the weapons do not meet. And as a matter of policy, the NATO alliance does not use cluster munitions in Afghanistan. The Dublin meetings were part of a process begun in February 2007 in Oslo. The nations met again in Lima, Peru, in May 2007; Vienna in December; and Wellington, New Zealand, in January. “We decided not to go to Oslo,” Stephen Mull, acting assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, told reporters last week, “because we don’t want to give weight to a process that we think is ultimately flawed, because we don’t think that any international effort is going to succeed unless you get the major producers and the users of these weapons at the table.” The United States argues that the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons is a more appropriate forum in which to talk about cluster munitions with major world powers at the table, Mull said. Rachel Stohl, senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said the Pentagon gets “nervous” over discussions on restricting use of a weapons system it has in its arsenal and has used in previous conflicts. She said the fact that in the past five years no situation has arisen in which US forces have needed cluster bombs should be evidence that they are not critical to modern warfare. “The fact that these 100-plus countries have been able to come together and develop a convention text signifies that the rest of the world is ready to move forward with international agreements that are pro-humanity,” Stohl said. “In the end, the victims of cluster munitions have won.” By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
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