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Singhs on a song Surrender first |
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What’s in a name? If name is good, you better be good COURTS normally don’t bother what name you have. But things may change soon. If you happen to be a criminal, and also share your name with a national icon, you are in for deep trouble. That is what happened the other day to a rapist with a grandiose name, Jawaharlal Nehru. The Supreme Court observed that such culprits had no right to share names with exalted national leaders. A vacation bench comprising Justices Arijit Pasayat and P.P. Naolekar even observed that it was high time something was done to change the names of criminals who had their names after national icons. If the threat is indeed carried out, the criminals would lose more than what they had bargained for. In a way, the apex court is right. “Jawaharlal Nehru convicted of rape” does not make a very good headline. Even worse would be the misunderstanding if the national figure were alive.
Hillary’s defeat and after
Glimpses of hope
Hackers from China break into Congress computers Delhi Durbar
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Singhs on a song THE selling of India’s largest pharmaceutical company, Ranbaxy Laboratories, in one of the biggest such deals to Japanese drug major Daiichi Sankyo has taken the market, industry and investors by surprise. There is also shock at the decision of the promoters’ family to sell their entire stake to Daiichi, which will be a majority shareholder with 51 per cent in Ranbaxy. There are few instances of promoters of a listed Indian company, especially one with a global footprint and enviable brand value, selling out as the Ranbaxy CEO and Managing Director, Mr Malvinder Mohan Singh, has done. The deal has triggered a lot of questions and speculation, too, which may continue to engage the market and industry, particularly the pharma sector for quite sometime. Mr Singh has said that the sale of Ranbaxy, which will now be a Japanese company in all but name, was for reasons of “strategic growth” and in the interests of the company and its shareholders. If this is not convincing, the reason is that Ranbaxy has been on an aggressive take-over spree in the recent past. The company, with a strong pipeline of products, has been doing well and expanding globally. It appeared to be more in take-over mode rather than waiting to be taken over. Yet, it has been bought out. Does the taking of Ranbaxy by Daiichi signal a trend where more Indian drug manufacturers will sell out? Or, will this send out a message that pharma companies in India should look to consolidation and synergise their diverse capabilities from research and development to branding and marketing? It is difficult to say with any measure of clarity where the pharma sector may be headed in India given the modest prospects at home in contrast to the promise held out by markets abroad. Government policy and price control measures, too, are grievances aired by the pharma industry. The dismay over loss of an Indian multinational with global brand recognition should not cloud perceptions about which way the industry should proceed. Going forward, one clear message is that there can be no room for emotional attachments to companies; the hard decisions should be strictly on financial considerations. There are lessons in the Japanese taking over Ranbaxy, perhaps for the government also, and the sooner these are learnt the better for the pharma sector. |
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Surrender first THE Supreme Court has rightly expressed its concern over the indiscriminate grant of anticipatory bail even to “rapists, triple murder accused and most corrupt” by the high courts and sessions courts and ordered that the accused will have to surrender first before the trial court and then seek anticipatory bail. In the interest of justice and fair play, the trial court should hear the bail petition on the same day it is filed. A vacation bench has ruled that the trial courts’ failure to enforce the law properly has led to the flagrant abuse of Section 438 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Not long ago, former union ministers Shibu Soren and Jai Prakash Yadav, accused in criminal cases, had sought pre-arrest bail and then absconded for long. Monday’s order is expected to help check this abuse of the law. Anticipatory bail is per se not bad. It is primarily intended to help a person who has reason to believe that he may be arrested on accusation of having committed a non-bailable offence. However, the judges do not apply their mind properly and grant bail to the accused in a huff. What value will this provision carry if even hardcore criminals and rapists are promptly granted bail? No doubt, there are elaborate guidelines and conditions on the pre-arrest bail, but courts do not follow them in letter and spirit. The legal fraternity fears that the applicant will be arrested in the event of rejection of his petition if he is present in the court. He may even be deprived of the opportunity of moving the higher court. However, the Supreme Court has time and again ruled that “the power of arrest should not be exercised in a mechanical manner but with caution and circumspection”. The mere fact that the bail application is rejected is no ground for directing the applicant’s immediate arrest, it said. In 2002, it ruled that the question of granting bail did not arise in the case of those who absconded from the normal judicial process. There is a clear message in all these observations for the judiciary, the police and the investigating agencies, each of which has to perform its distinctive functions properly and judiciously. |
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What’s in a name? COURTS normally don’t bother what name you have. But things may change soon. If you happen to be a criminal, and also share your name with a national icon, you are in for deep trouble. That is what happened the other day to a rapist with a grandiose name, Jawaharlal Nehru. The Supreme Court observed that such culprits had no right to share names with exalted national leaders. A vacation bench comprising Justices Arijit Pasayat and P.P. Naolekar even observed that it was high time something was done to change the names of criminals who had their names after national icons. If the threat is indeed carried out, the criminals would lose more than what they had bargained for. In a way, the apex court is right. “Jawaharlal Nehru convicted of rape” does not make a very good headline. Even worse would be the misunderstanding if the national figure were alive. One is not too sure what the court’s reaction would be towards those who are named after religious icons but are convicted of devilish deeds. They may plead not guilty on the basis of the fact that the names were given by their parents and they were not responsible for this contrast in name and deed. But if they, too, are made to change their names, there will have to be mass renaming ceremonies in prisons. Names of suitable villains from history may be in short supply. An apocryphal story says that when Michaelangelo was to paint child Jesus, he selected a boy to be his model after searching far and wide. Decades later, he was to paint Judas and went to a jail to find the man who had the similar mean streak. Only much later did he learn that this was the same boy whom he had painted earlier as Jesus. So, men will be men, whatever their names may be. |
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If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time. — Marian Wright Edelman |
Hillary’s defeat and after
EARLY in September last, when I went to Washington for a longish stay, there was striking unanimity across the United States that as a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton was unstoppable. By the end of November, some analysts had begun to demur. But the feeling that it would be a “McCain versus Hillary” presidential election remained overwhelming. She was far ahead in popularity polls, had a well-oiled machine behind her, and was flush with funds although the source of some of that money proved to be embarrassingly dubious. How then has she made a hash of things and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory? In an article, under the heading “The Fall of the House of Clinton”, The Economist has commented: “Mrs Clinton has not only lost the nomination. She has also humiliated herself … She has engaged in phoney populism, calling for a temporary break on petrol taxes, praising ‘hardworking Americans, white Americans’, vowing to ‘totally obliterate’ Iran” and so on. She also overplayed the feminist card as also her “experience”, compared with “rookie Obama”. Her Senate vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq added to her woes but far more damaging was the “mean streak” she displayed during the campaign. After all, didn’t she make racial and religious slurs on Mr Obama, and even discussed publicly his likely assassination a la Robert Kennedy’s? She had absolutely no answer to Mr Obama’s riposte to her boast about her “entitlement” on the basis of her “experience”. Who could be more experienced, he had asked, “than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and look at what they have done”? The huge funds she had, Mrs Clinton squandered “like a drunken sailor”. Consequently she had to lend her incompetent campaign managers $ 11 million from her own resources. No great loss this even if the cash is not returned because the declared worth of the Clintons is $ 103 million, with more dough coming in. This brings me to the exquisite irony that what should have been Senator Clinton’s biggest asset — her husband, former President Bill Clinton —turned out to be her biggest liability. This is a peculiarly American paradox. For, while Mr Clinton is an international super-star, he is also seen by many Americans to be a “cad and a narcissist”. There was widespread apprehension that should “Hillary win the White House, Bill would virtually become an un-elected Vice-President”. Overriding all these factors, however, was what would go down in history as the most distinctive feature of the presidential election 2008: Senator Obama, the first black to be a presidential nominee of one of the two major parties was seen as an embodiment of change, while Mrs Clinton and her “crunching machine” wallowed in the dated politics of the 1990s and remained mired in the Washington establishment that is much despised. It seems Mr Obama’s clarion call for change — even if its contours remain undefined — has struck a responsive chord among the American people, especially the youth. It is futile to speculate at this early stage on how the contest between Senators John McCain and Obama would unfold. But it would be no great surprise if the call for change has the same effect in the US today as Indira Gandhi’s slogan of Garibi Hatao had had in India in 1971. During the recent weeks of Hitchcockian suspense over the Democratic race to the White House, I have been struck by the huge support for Mrs Clinton here. But that is immaterial to the American voters. On the other hand, who sits in the Oval office matters materially to India, as it does to other countries. Despite the slump in America’s prestige and economy during President George W. Bush’s watch the US remains the world’s most powerful country, militarily, economically and technologically, with soft power and clout to match. It is in this context that there already are signs of worry in New Delhi’s corridors of power over the prospect of Mr Obama extending his triumph in the Democratic nomination battle to the vote in November. As Washington-based Indian correspondents and analysts here have pointed out, if Senator Obama stands for change, Senator McCain does for continuity. He intends to stick largely to Mr Bush’s policies. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is right in declaring that there has been no American president as friendly to India as Mr Bush. Mr McCain is expected to adopt the same approach, whereas Mr Obama has left nobody in any doubt that he intends to reverse every Bush policy, not just those on Iraq and Iran. What is troubling Indian policy makers the most is that while the Republican candidate has publicly committed himself to honouring the Indo-US nuclear deal, Mr Obama is opposed to it. He did not vote for the Hyde Act that enabled the subsequent 123 Agreement to be signed. Indeed, he has announced that he would work for nuclear nonproliferation instead, and there is no dearth of “nonproliferation Ayatollahs” in the Democratic Party. Nor is this all. While demanding of Pakistan to abandon its policy of running with the hare and hunting with the hound in relation to the Taliban and Al Qaeda straddling Pakistan-Afghanistan border, he has been promising also a proactive American role in promoting an India-Pakistan settlement of the vexed Kashmir issue. Moreover, he is opposed to free trade and outsourcing, thus endangering Indian interests. However, in all fairness, one must enter at least three caveats. First, that it is the political discord between the Congress and its Left Front allies in this country that is preventing the clinching of the nuclear deal within the remaining months of the Bush presidency. Very soon the lingering window of opportunity for this purpose would also be shut. Secondly, Senator Clinton might have voted for the Hyde Act finally, but during the debate on it she backed five amendments any of which could have been “deal-killer”. During the primaries she has dropped broad hints that India would have to sign the CTBT before her administration could take up the nuclear deal. Senator Obama would want India also to cease production of fissile material for weapons ahead of the conclusion of Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT). The third and most important caveat is that policies actually followed after capturing the White House do not necessarily conform to the rhetoric during the election campaign. Already Mr Obama is shifting his position on
outsourcing.
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Glimpses of hope
There is a popular Punjabi saying, ‘Parr Paya Te Saak Geya’ i.e. the generational ties are dissolved when suffix “Great” is added to “grand’.” Not in Anichya’s case. Anichya was born in America 10 years after his great-grandfather expired. His father and other members of the family often narrated to him the moral, intellectual and physical qualities of his self-effacing great grandfather. So, he developed great love and reverence for him. As a bright student of Yale University he was selected this year for the summer job by a prestigious company in Delhi. The day he joined, the next day happened to be his great grandfather’s birthday. Spontaneously he decided to distribute sweets to the domestic staff of his grandfather and uncle. I was feeling depressed that day by the frustrating political situation of the country. This gesture of Anichya cheered up my spirits. I realised that unnecessarily we keep on harping about “Brain Drain” and opportunism of our young students who decide to take up jobs abroad. We do not understand that when we talk about globalisation, it is not only commercial exchange or mutual military ties. The true global spirit is in the broadening of minds. The awakening of mind by exposure to various cultures can give birth to the real compassionate and humanitarian spirit. Universal peace, progress, clean environment and equalitarian society is our global need. The students of today are laying the foundation stone of this grand edifice of tomorrow. Studying Anichya at close quarters I find he is perfectly at ease with the surroundings. India, America, England, Italy — he has close relatives living at all these places and that leads him to the exposure of various cultures. Anichya is not a unique case. His friends at Yale University and earlier at Phillips Academy have all developed the same humanitarian spirit. Boys and girls from affluent families volunteer to serve the sick and poor e.g. a group of youngsters from Phillips Academy served at Mother Teresa’s Centre, Kolkata. Similarly, there are various other groups trying to eradicate the evils of society. The consistent striving of these noble- minded youngsters is bound to tackle the complex problems facing our
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Swindlers and suckers FIVE years ago, I got an e-mail informing me that I had won a lottery prize. The letter said my e-mail address was chosen at random from among thousands by a computer. All I had to do to claim the money was contact an agent who lived in Paris. I was advised not to inform anyone till I received the money. In an instant I was on way to becoming a multimillionaire. I have forgotten the exact amount of the prize but it was enough to buy a five-kanal bungalow in Chandigarh and wallow in luxury for the rest of my life. I contacted the Paris agent who immediately sent me a form, which I had to get notarised. In the form, I had to give some details, including my address and my bank account number to which the money could be transferred. I wanted to play along to find out their modus operandi. Though I had little money in my bank account, I was scared of giving its details for fear that I might eventually land in trouble. I, therefore, decided not to respond to the agent’s letter. A week later, I was warned that I would lose a fortune because of my laziness. Thereafter, I began getting similar notifications of having won such prizes from various lotteries like the Euro, the UK, Yahoo!, Honda etc. Along with such notifications, I got a letter from a Muslim widow from the Middle East, who wrote to me that her husband had left behind a fortune, which she did not know how to handle. She wanted me to receive the money and spend it wisely. My wife would have laughed at the very suggestion that I could handle such a big sum. I also got a letter from an evangelical lady who, too, had been blessed with a windfall, which I could use for God’s work, whatever it meant. One letter I got was from an African whose father had looted the government of a huge sum, which he wanted me to park in my name for which I could take a share of the booty. In between, lottery prizes also came by the dozen. I began deleting the notifications without even opening them. If I had collected all the prize money I would surely have displaced steel baron Lakshmi Mittal as the richest Indian. I was not alone in getting such letters. Someone in Kurukshetra got a letter and he was so thrilled that he informed our correspondent who dutifully filed a story which appeared in The Tribune. A few months ago, I had a surprise when a senior colleague came to me and whispered that he had won a lottery. I asked him a simple question, “Did you buy a lottery ticket to win a prize?” He showed me a printout of the notification he had received. I pointed out the grammatical and spelling errors in the letter to bring home the point that it was the handiwork of a swindler. He was convinced only when I showed him some of the e-mails in my Inbox. However, the worst was yet to come. Eventually it came when I got a letter from a close friend. The letter came from his Hotmail ID, which I was familiar with. The letter said that he had gone to Nigeria for a conference. He lost all his money, passport and air ticket in a taxi. “I am now owning a hotel bill of $1550 and they wanted me to pay the bill soon else they will have to seize my bag and hand me over to the Hotel Management. I need this help from you urgently to help me back home”, the letter said. He said he was writing the letter from a cyber café. For a few minutes I did not know what to do. Then I realised my friend could not have written that letter. His English is better. He is a Catholic priest. If he were in such a situation, he would have gone to the nearest church, and not written to me. More important, he was blind and could not have gone to a cyber café to write a letter. When I called my friend he was shocked to hear about the letter. Obviously, somebody had cracked his password and sent the letter to all the addresses in his ‘address book’. My friend immediately changed his e-mail address and sent a communication to that effect to all his friends. A few months later when we got a similar letter from the e-mail ID of defence analyst K. Subrahmanyam, I could immediately make out that a fraud was again at work. All this shows how widespread Internet frauds have become. That there are many suckers is borne out by the fact that a Nigerian national by the brilliant name Bright was arrested in Chandigarh. He had come to City Beautiful to collect Rs 56,000 from one Balbir Singh of Himachal Pradesh who had already given Rs 1.81 lakh in two instalments to receive his prize money of $1 million. The Nigerian reportedly had nearly 100 mobile numbers of people from whom he had to collect money. If this is true, it means more and more people are falling prey to such frauds. In an extreme case, a young, poor engineer from Kerala committed suicide when he was swindled of lakhs of rupees by an Internet fraudster who gave him a fake employment letter with a salary of $5000 per month. The racketeers are able to thrive only because there are people who are ready to believe them. It may not be proper to blame the Internet when a little search will show that it also provides guidance on how not to fall into their traps. More important, all those who are mesmerised by the fanciful prizes to throw caution to the winds should remember that there is no free lunch in the world and human greed is what the frauds prey upon. After I wrote this article, I got a letter from one Abu Salem, Director of Bank of Africa, Burkino-Faso, who wants me to claim $11.5 million, Mr Andreas Schrammer, a German, who died in an air crash on July 31, 2000, has in his account. I also got a notification from ‘Yahoo! Beta Awards Center’: “This is to inform you that you have won a prize money of 700,000 Great Britain Pounds Sterling in the year 2008”. Readers, beware of such letters! |
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Hackers from China break into Congress computers WASHINGTON – Hackers believed to be operating from China have broken into computers in Congress, apparently in search of information on Chinese dissidents, two Republican lawmakers said. The hackers were not identified, but one of the lawmakers, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., a senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he believed that all signs pointed to the Chinese government. Federal authorities have been increasingly concerned in recent years about the Chinese government’s aggressive deployment of scientists, engineers, foreign businessmen, students and others to sweep up US technology and information. Protecting the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-tech crimes is the FBI’s third investigative priority behind combating terrorism and public corruption. The extent of the intrusions on Capitol Hill, which officials said began in August 2006, was unclear, although Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., whose office had four computers affected, said that other members of Congress were targeted as well as at least one congressional committee. “They got everything,” Wolf said at a press briefing describing the attack on his office systems. Wolf said that following one of the attacks, a car with license plates belonging to Chinese officials went to the home of a Chinese dissident in the Washington suburbs and took photographs of it. The Chinese government had no immediate comment on the allegations. Wolfe said an FBI probe confirmed the hacking incidents. The bureau declined comment. The hacking report is the latest example of the vulnerabilities of private and public institutions to possible espionage and other crimes. Countries have been using cyber espionage for years to access valuable information in the United States, and China has made no secret of its interest in information warfare. “Congress would be an attractive target for any spy or hacker, especially if there was information on political dissidents and on U.S. policies,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow and technology program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Lewis said while China may be a logical suspect, good hackers are adept at hiding their tracks. “We have a very sophisticated set of opponents. It could be the Chinese. It could be the Russians. It could be somebody else,” he said. “This isn’t an amateur’s game anymore. Particularly when you are talking about an interesting target like a congressman’s human rights files, the folks who are going after that are not going to be teenagers in Mendocino.” The departments of State, Defense and Energy have also reported computer break-ins. In another case, U.S. authorities are reportedly investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a trade mission to China last December by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez. Beijing has denied involvement. Wolf and Smith are both outspoken critics of China’s human rights record. They said Wednesday that they believe they were targeted because of their views. Wolf has urged President Bush to stay away from the summer Olympics because of China’s human rights record. Smith has introduced legislation that would bar U.S. technology firms from cooperating with countries such as China that ban information about human rights and democracy on the Internet. Wolf said the computers affected in his office were used by his foreign policy and human rights staffer, his chief of staff, his legislative director and his staff on the House Judiciary Committee. He said he understood that computers used by the House Foreign Affairs Committee had also been hacked. He said that while he had no hard information, he assumed that Senate computers were also invaded. He indicated in debate on the issue on the House floor Wednesday afternoon that the computers of a third member, Rep. Mark S. Kirk, R-Ill., had also been compromised. A spokesman for Kirk could not immediately confirm that. “The potential for massive and coordinated cyber attacks against the United States is no longer a futuristic problem,” Wolf said during the floor debate. “I have experienced this threat first-hand, and I am deeply worried that this institution is not adequately protected.” Smith said that the hackers obtained access to e-mail correspondence between his office and human-rights groups, the identities of Chinese dissidents, and records from more than two dozen congressional hearings on human rights abuses.
By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
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Delhi Durbar The BJP has resorted to dinner diplomacy in its efforts to project its “pro-minority” face in the run-up to the next general elections. The party’s sole Muslim representative in the Lok Sabha Shahnawaz Husain threw a lavish dinner early this week ostensibly to celebrate his nine-year-old son Adeeb’s birthday. Mediapersons covering the BJP beat had never witnessed such brouhaha over a little boy’s birthday even when Husain was a Union minister. But with the invitees including a host of national and local BJP leaders, the real purpose was to provide the Muslim guests an opportunity to socially interact with the BJP leaders. The only flaw, however, in this plan was that the Muslims largely hovered around the seekh kabab counter, which denied the largely vegetarian BJP leaders a chance to socialise with their special guests.
Focus on child rights Never have child rights issues made so much news as they did last week. First it was about Arushi Talwar’s gory murder being televised by Balaji Telefilms for commercial gains – an issue which the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights handled deftly in favour of the deceased child. On the roll all week, the commission has now trained its guns on reality TV shows to find out how the producers of such programmes are treating children on the sets. Shoots take hours to conclude, and while they are on, children are technically “at work”. Soon, reality TV producers might find themselves in the dock for promoting child labour.
This Army unit never sleeps It is one unit of the Army which never seems to sleep. This is the Army headquarters’ transport company which chauffeurs the top brass of the Defence Ministry.
The company, which was raised in 1942 and celebated its 66th anniversary this week, has the unique distinction of providing transport support round the clock, throughout the year to the ministers, Indian defence forces and the ministry’s bureaucrats. Its vehicles cover a distance of over one million kilometers every month ferrying officials in Delhi and neighbouring towns. A carefully computed man-management programme ensures that the drivers’ whereabouts are known at any given time, making for a precise operation.
Contributed by Faraz Ahmad, Aditi Tandon and Ajay Banerjee |
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