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Naxalite raj Cloudy weather |
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New IITs
Another historic blunder
The tailor
Deal with confidence Terror watch list ‘invaluable’ Special security forces needed for Indian embassies
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Naxalite raj THE increasing activities of Naxalites in many states have become a threat to the system of governance. On Thursday, 17 personnel of Orissa’s Special Operations Group (SOG) were killed in Malkangiri district. This comes close on the heels of the June 29 incident in the same district which claimed the lives of 38 personnel of the SOG and Andhra Pradesh’s elite anti-insurgency unit, Greyhounds. Though the problem has intensified in Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, these states seem to be clueless about the Naxalites’ modus operandi and have, therefore, failed to tackle the menace. Unfortunately, they consider it a mere law and order problem. In December 2007, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admitted at the chief ministers’conference that the Naxalite groups feed on the perceived lack of development. Correcting this perception requires a lot of administrative effort and investment to ensure improved road and rail connectivity and better delivery of basic services. While the Naxalites draw their sustenance from the socio-economic deprivation the people experience, the states are unable even to motivate their employees to serve in the affected areas. They consider it as a punishment posting from which they want to wriggle out at the earliest. Movements like the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh have only compounded the problem. The deprived realise that polite requests for basic amenities like potable water and access to fair price shops and schools fall on deaf ears. As death from hunger and curable diseases does not affect the political and bureaucratic masters, the people are made to believe that they can take recourse to violence. The states have a constitutional obligation to uphold the rule of law. The use of force is, unfortunately, unavoidable. The Naxalite activists basically exploit the economic backwardness of the areas concerned. In their desperation to thwart new industrial plans, including steel plants, they project development as an agent of displacement and destabilisation, though not entirely incorrectly. Ideally, the people who are displaced by such projects should have a stake in their success as mere monetary compensation is not enough. It is through effective implementation of developmental programmes and poverty alleviation schemes that the states can rescue the misguided people from the stranglehold of the Naxalites and assimilate them into the national mainstream.
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Cloudy weather THE global oil price rise has forced airlines to cut costs and shed flab. Their demand for a reduction in sales tax on aviation turbine fuel, supported by the Civil Aviation Ministry, has evoked little response. The Airports Authority of India and private operators have rejected their plea for slashing airport charges. This has led them to raise fares, which has slowed passenger and freight traffic. In June, a school holiday season, the number of domestic fliers fell by 15 per cent. Their losses in the current financial year are likely to double. Private airlines, which went on acquiring new planes to cope with the rush, have been compelled to reduce flights and staff. Some are even thinking of removing ovens and coat hangers to lower aircraft’s weight to save on fuel. India’s spectacular growth story and declining fares have brought air travel within the reach of a rising middle class. However, given the rate at which crude oil prices have been increasing in the international market, it is doubtful whether they will be able to fly for long. Many of them have already moved back to railways, much to the delight of Railway Minister Laloo Yadav. Though infrastructure development has picked up, it is not enough to keep pace with the increasing pressure of cargo and passenger traffic.The metropolitan airports have got so congested that aircraft are forced to wait for long before they are allowed to land, thus wasting fuel and raising operational costs as passengers fret and fume. Pilots and airport traffic controllers are overworked and complain of exhaustion. Some even fall asleep at the controls. This can be risky. Two pilots overshot Mumbai airport recently. Now is the time to sit back and plan for a soft landing for the aviation industry. Weak players are likely to become takeover targets and some are happily going in for marriages of convenience. This is the time to speed up airport construction and expansion work. When the next boom takes off, at least, adequate infrastructure should be in place. Faced with a financial crunch, private developers plan to build low-cost airports. This is also the time to train manpower to meet future needs.
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New IITs INDIA faces a shortage of skilled and talented people at all levels. The premium on quality personnel will only go up, as the economy continues to expand and grow. The imperative for greater social and geographical inclusiveness will be a key factor in promoting higher education, in a way that reaches more people. The cabinet decision to approve new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) across the country is thus welcome. The eight new IITs, at a cost of Rs 6,080 crore for a six-year period, will come up in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh in the northern region, apart from Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Orissa, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The National Knowledge Commission, in its recommendations on higher education, has focused on the need for “a massive expansion of opportunities.” It envisages a requirement of at least 1500 new universities, including 50 national universities. It also stresses the need for reform, restructuring and expansion of existing infrastructure, besides changing the way institutions are funded, managed, and staffed. Public-private partnerships are also crucial in this regard. India’s youthful demographic profile indicates a growing economic force. But their skill levels must be augmented for this potential to be realised and the draft National Policy on Skills Development has recognised this gap. Bridging this gap will be a huge challenge, considering that a small percentage of the labour force has been estimated to possess vocational skills. This has to change if economic growth has to be kept up, whatever the external pressures. Both vocational and higher education are key components to a higher skill profile. The new IITs are only a small step in this regard. Of course, mere quantity will not do the trick, and standards should not be diluted. India’s economy will continue to demand not only more people in the workforce, but better skilled ones, across the spectrum. Everything should be done to feed that demand.
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Love always unites. It does not divide. — Mother Teresa
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Another historic blunder
“History
will not forgive us if we allow American imperialism to make India its strategic junior partner”, says CPM leader Prakash Karat, citing the prime reason for his rejecting the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement. “History will not forgive us if we fail to ensure India’s energy security for which the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement is a major step forward,” says Dr Anil Kakodkar, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), projecting a diametrically opposite view. Obviously, one of the two assessments is wrong and has to be rejected. While the AEC chief, Dr Kakodkar, a distinguished nuclear scientist, speaks from his 50-year experience in building the Indian nuclear programme, having overseen the year-long negotiations on the nuclear accord with the Americans, Mr Karat, the CPM leader, has been a brilliant student and is a theoretician and ideologue, but with little mass experience. If his theory and ideology do not synchronise with the ground realities, they can play havoc, as appears to be the case in the ongoing debate on the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement. The views of Dr Kakodkar on the Indo-US nuclear accord have been elaborated at length. Taking India out of the international nuclear apartheid and technology-denial regime; a big boost to nuclear power generation for securing India’s energy needs at a crucial stage of its development; removing roadblocks to global scientific interaction obstructing India’s growth as a world leader — all this while assuring full autonomy and non-interference in the development of Indian indigenous thorium programme. As also, in the build-up of India’s strategic nuclear weapon programme. This, in Dr Kakodkar’s view, is what the nuclear agreement means for India. On the other hand, the CPM leader’s reasons for castigating the agreement are still somewhat of an enigma — they are being analysed and dissected. The nuclear accord is American imperialism’s bid to drag India into a strategic alliance, subverting its independent foreign policy is his principal critique of the nuclear agreement. So consumed is he in his resolve to destroy the nuclear agreement that he calls it a “notorious” deal, giving a new epithet to what has hitherto been described as historic and path-breaking. What has gone wrong? The theoretician that the CPM leader is known to be is still viewing “imperialism” as the power of the thirties and forties of the last century, when imperialism was in its hey days. Contrast this with the current scenario of American imperialism — defeated in Iraq, losing control over the oil hub of West Asia and the Islamic world, with Islamic terrorism that it had itself nurtured, now its principal enemy, pulled down from its lofty economic pedestal, and estranged from trans-Atlantic allies: a splintering American imperialism, whose hegemony is breaking up. The civilian nuclear agreement America has offered to India after 20 years of stiff nuclear sanctions and technology denial regime — inbuilt with the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group — is in a way “an act of penance for its past sins” to turn around the relationship, a victory for India and a climb-down for the United States. Unfortunately, the CPM leader does not view the picture this way. A contributing factor to his thinking is also another issue: the American stance towards China. America’s strategic alliance with India is, in the first place, to make India a partner in encircling and isolating China — such is the reasoning. Although not elaborated, this line is anchored in what has been a major flaw in the history of Indian communists of both hues: giving primacy to “communist internationalism”, a credo that has vanished all over the world, but is still faithfully nurtured by Indian communists. Not many are aware of the strong pull of fraternal relations that at one time bound communist parties cutting across nation-states the world over. This phenomenon was termed communist internationalism. Those were the pre- and post-World War-II years, when the Communist International - Comintern as it was called — exercised global pull over communists of all lands. It was a kind of a counterveiling force to the hegemony of Western imperialism, in which Anglo-American imperialism held predominance. This was the colonial era, and the communist challenge to Western imperialism came with a strong revolutionary fervour. The World War-II times have become history and a new global dispensation has taken shape. Along with the demise of colonialism, nationalism and the urge for development have begun to grip the newly independent states of Asia in particular. A corresponding change has swept communist parties the world over — more particularly after the Comintern was wound up. Communist parties everywhere began taking decisions solely on the merit of their national interests. In fact, a new phenomenon emerged when the two biggest communist parties — of the Soviet Union and China - became antagonists. From this metamorphosis, a particularly noticeable development was the strong nationalistic trait acquired by the Chinese communists. So much so that the neighbour state of Vietnam - also under a communist regime built by Ho Chi-minh — became the target of the most vicious. Chinese attacks leading up to a border war that, incidentally, witnessed the mammoth Chinese force being worsted by the small, battle-hardened Vietnamese fighters. The territorial dispute still lingers though the mood on both sides has changed for the better, and hopefully, China and Vietnam will find a negotiated settlement of the ticklish territorial dispute. It is understandable that nothing remains, except fond memories, of the brotherhood labelled “communist internationalism”. However, Indian communists, among the most devout adherents to the bond of communist internationalism to this day, are faithful to this legacy. But this very legacy has done immense harm to the country as well as the growth of the Indian communist movement in the past. It threatens to do further damage unless brought in line with present-day realities. Most damaging was the first major outbreak of “communist internationalism” in India at the time of the World War-II, which Indian communists termed “People’s War” after the Soviet Union’s entry. Subsequently, both Indian communist parties have recognised that opposing the Quit India movement, in the name of anti-fascism, was immensely wrong. This, happily, is now recognised on all hands. Viewing the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement with the same yardstick — with China replacing the erstwhile Soviet Union — would be repeating a blunder. It might be even more damaging to the country because the status of the communist movement in India has been elevated and is that of a national force. Yet another failing of the CPM leadership is his inability to take a fulsome view of its scientific and technological worth of the agreement and to measure the bonanza that it will bring to the country — an un-Marxian outlook that not even regional parties of this country might adopt. The bonanza, as Dr Kakodkar underlined, will be not only in the arena of nuclear technology, but also of all-embracing science-technology growth. In the first place, it is in lifting the ban on advanced dual-use technologies and, secondly, in Indian scientific interaction world-wide. An information technology leader, Jaithirth Rao, has described this latter boon as the “single biggest short-and medium-term gain from the agreement” — India’s entry back into the halls of legitimate scientific and technological research in critical areas of
growth.
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The tailor
Pablo Neruda in his Ode to Clothes talks of how clothes gradually mould themselves to the contours of our bodies, taking on first the shape of our bodies, and then going on to become us. Anyone with a 10-year-old jacket will know how true this is. Unfortunately, Neruda makes no mention of the tailor, who, in the first place, makes the clothing well enough to enable it to adjust to our bodies and to our souls. Readymade clothes were still a thing of the distant future and new clothes had to be stitched. I needed a new woollen jacket and my mother took me When it was brought out I could understand why it had remained unsold; it was a bilious green with a knobbly texture in grey. My mother insisted on buying it and I had not learnt to stand up to her. Sohan Lal, a tailor in the school, stitched a superbly fitting jacket. I wore it all the time and gradually, as Neruda predicts, the jacket became me. When former students from those early years meet me, they ask wistfully, “Sir, do you still have that green jacket?” More than a decade later while pushing my way out of an overcrowded bus, I lost one sleeve of my jacket. The conductor obligingly handed it to me through the open window. I took the jacket and the sleeve back to Sohan Lal. “Can you stitch this up again?” I asked hopefully. “Yes, I can. But I think it is time you retired this coat.” I did retire that jacket and got Sohan Lal to stitch a beige-coloured tweed and 15 years later another jacket in brown herringbone — each in turn becoming an inseparable part of me. Then, last year, my daughter and son-in-law returned from a trip to Almora with a checked tweed in grey-blue. They pointed out that my jacket was frayed at the sleeves and worn out at the elbows. When I looked for Sohan Lal, I was shocked to learn that he had died a year ago. Other than the fact that he had stitched such comfortable jackets for me, I had not really known him. But like many hill folk, he had carried a perennially youthful look on his face, which implied that death was a long way off. I have had the sleeve edges darned and, before winter comes, I will have leather patches put on the elbows to camouflage their sad condition. I am loathe to go to another tailor. I do not think anyone else will stitch my jacket as well as Sohan Lal well enough for it to adopt itself to my body and to me. The new tweed length sits squarely on the upper shelf of my cupboard, waiting patiently to be draped by another tailor around someone
else.
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Deal with confidence I would like to analyse my own reaction to the movement of the Indian atomic energy program towards international collaboration. I have great respect for the spirit and achievements of India in this challenging field. Whenever I think of self-reliance, a progressive vision of where we need to take India, I often think of the remarkable people we have led this program. We started with nothing, but we dared to attempt almost the impossible. Right from its origin the directions pursued were our own. There was a special character that imbued our efforts. The design and fabrication of instruments that we could not import, producing those instruments for the use of universities and laboratories all over the country, was not needed in most developed countries. Dr. Homi Bhabha and most people he selected were practical visionaries. Our program was bold and largely self-inspired. We made ourselves learn what we did not know. The direction was to demystify, understand and learn to put things together. We had no instrumentation. Not even simple power supplies. We had no radiation detectors - Geiger counters, proportional counters, nothing. We learnt to build all these. We prospected for Uranium and found some, but not much. We learnt the chemistry and metallurgy. We found rare earths and thorium – this lead to a dream. Pretty early Bhabha realised that we would have to learn to convert thorium into a fissile element – Uranium 233. This gave a direction but the journey was long. The distance has been covered to a large extent and we are close to a goal in which we will be reusing the ashes of the first generation fuel quite effectively. There would be much less waste. We did not sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty because we felt it was highly discriminatory. Those who had large stockpiles were exempt while those a little behind were consigned to a permanently dependent category. Significantly the bosses were the same as those who controlled the Security Council of the United Nations. After our adventures in 1974 and later 1998 the world led by the US ganged up against us to suffocate our program. I am personally not one of those who take pride in conducting nuclear explosions, but highly resent any moralist lectures from those who still own thousands of warheads. Therefore, like many others in our country, I was against signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty while respecting and following its major provisions. No one has been able to accuse India of proliferation. I suppose this apparently contrary stance came from an inborn conviction that true nuclear disarmament can come only when it is total. Why should one not support the effort to escape from this prison of apartheid? Besides the fact that no one is happy to live in the well of discrimination, we have by now the self-confidence that we can contribute significantly to our growth and development – not only ours but also of the world as a whole. Our example has a larger meaning. We are heavily constrained. It is well understood that we do not have enough uranium in our country and we need to find a way to circumvent this embargo, while persuading all concerned that we mean well by them. But what is generally not understood is the fact that we are subject to numerous other embargoes. They relate to materials, chemicals, machines, electronic components, computers and the help of many small industries around the world in the design and manufacture of control systems. We are constrained for our own needs and also in our capability to contribute to others, which we now can. Apartheid is harmful to every one. People generally do not understand that only a small part of the technology involved in a nuclear program is actually nuclear. Similar arguments are also applicable to another arena of our excellence, namely the space program. The second question that can be legitimately asked is why do we have to sign an agreement with only the United States for doing all this? The straightforward answer to this is that there is no other way to get out of the apartheid regime except to first talk to those who were leading the effort of installing such a regime. This is true of the NPT treaty as also the setting up of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. But it should not be seen as a bilateral agreement with that one country to supply us Uranium, reactors and every thing else. After the negotiations with IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group are successfully concluded and the agreement is operationalised, all countries are freed to work with us and we with them. Reactors could come from Russia, Japan, France, Switzerland or Brazil and what we can build can go to them. Not just reactors but all manner to things and know how in nuclear medicine, control systems and perhaps later the energy systems that lie in the future. Many of those who vehemently oppose the nuclear deal do not realize that our nuclear program along with our space program represent the only two examples where the danger of being swamped by external pressure might be minimum. Also, these are perhaps the only areas where we can be on an equal footing with the best in the world. We have no compunction in importing guns, helicopters, fighter planes and what not from all suppliers, no matter whether they come from America, Russia, Great Britain, France, Israel, Sweden or Germany. We do not feel that in doing that we are being sucked into their political or strategic agendas! We need to show more self-confidence in our political acumen; it should match what we have shown in these two technological areas. The writer is former chairman, UGC, and chancellor, JNU
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Terror watch list ‘invaluable’ Myths
about the US terror watch list continue to grow in just about every report and retelling. As director of the federal Terrorist Screening Center, I offer five facts to remember: – It helps fight terrorism. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ independent investigative arm, reported in October that its review of outcomes from watch-list encounters shows they “helped to combat terrorism.” The GAO report stated that the watch list “has helped federal, state and local screening and law enforcement officials obtain information to make better-informed decisions when they encounter an individual on the list as to the threat posed and the appropriate response or action to take.” – It enhances information-sharing. During a traffic stop last year, a police officer in a major metropolitan area used the watch list to identify three subjects of separate FBI terrorism investigations in the same car. Their association had previously been unknown. In just this instance, important dots were connected and vital intelligence was shared across federal, state and local agencies. There are many examples like this one, which prompted the GAO to note that the watch list “enhanced U.S. counterterrorism efforts” because encounters provide “the opportunity to collect and share information on known or appropriately suspected terrorists with law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community.” – It is constantly checked to reduce misidentifications. Separate from the redress complaints travelers can submit, the Terrorist Screening Center runs quality-assurance checks on watch-list data every day. One GAO study, “Efforts to Help Reduce Adverse Effects on the Public,” made no recommendations regarding the list’s maintenance – a very rare occurrence for GAO audits – “because agencies have ongoing initiatives to improve data quality, reduce the number of misidentifications or mitigate their effects, and enhance redress efforts.” A recent example is the Terrorist Encounter Review Process. Under this process, the records of individuals who have frequent encounters with the watch list will be automatically reviewed. – Its “records” are not the same as “individuals.” Terrorists work hard to evade our multiple layers of security, including creating myriad false identities. To counter those efforts, the center creates a separate record for each alias, fake date of birth, fraudulent driver’s license and name variation associated with an individual. – Its size corresponds to the threat. It’s a big world. Even the minuscule percentage of people involved in terrorist activities can equal large numbers. There are slightly more than 1 million records on the watch list, which correspond to approximately 400,000 individuals. The vast majority of those individuals aren’t in the United States right now – and the watch list was created to keep it that way. The United States has more than 300 million people. Of the individuals on the terrorist watch list, approximately 95 percent are not American citizens or legal residents; the number of U.S. persons is relatively minute. The same is true for the others on the watch list – these individuals are drawn from across the globe and represent a tiny fraction of the more than 6.6 billion people on our planet. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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Special security forces needed for Indian embassies The
recent bombing of the Indian Embassy at Kabul has centre-staged the question of a complete review and overhaul of the security apparatus that protects our interests abroad, in the various Mission Headquarters and their Consulates. Our Foreign Office has no choice but to now meet this reality headlong with a comprehensive and near safe protective strategy, that has not been in evidence in recent years. There are two kinds of security cordons that normally protect any Mission abroad. One is the covert and overt security cover provided by the host government, and the other is the local security that all Missions are supposed to manage within their own resources in and around their Chanceries and Consular Sections. At Kabul the Afghan government failed to identify, trail or neutralise the lurking danger that lay waiting to ram the Embassy gate, or, as is known so far, give any warning or alert of a possible extremist attack which took place a few hundred metres from their Interior Ministry. It also needs to be examined, in case, unknown to us, the Afghans had given such an advisory, what the action was that was taken by our Mission. We cannot lose very competent and exceptional officers of the kind that we have lost, who are picked out of thousands to look after Indian national interests abroad. Secondly, coming to our Mission itself, there was during my time, over two decades ago, a plot of land being purchased in the diplomatic enclave of Wazir Akbar Khan, where the Indian Embassy was to be relocated. The reason for doing so was that the current location was bang on the road where even a passerby could have hurled a grenade or fired a rocket launcher over the perimeter wall into the Mission offices. One is not aware as to why in all these years, we never moved into the new location where well laid-back offices, with long drive-ins, that in themselves assure security of depth, was not considered as a viable option. If we can give a Shanti Path to the foreign Missions in Delhi, then why cannot we ensure similar open spaces for our own Missions in foreign capitals? If India is to reach out as a global power in today’s troubled environment then any consideration including financial should not really matter. Within the Embassy, not only in Kabul but world wide, our Foreign Office must also consider an additional and separate security cover (with spotters in plain clothes) for our Consular Sections, where the citizens, the soft targets, assemble in large numbers and which areas are easier to attack and get away from. All our Missions, whether they are in our neighbourhood, Europe, South East Asia or Africa, which get a low priority at the best of times, but which could next be in the crosswire, must have a new, dedicated and properly trained security force to protect its personnel and establishment. The Americans have regular Marines to protect their Missions. As seen from personal experience these combat soldiers are as good if not better than the American Army and have done a fine job securing their Missions in trouble spots like Saigon and Kabul. There is a case here for a similar force drawn from the Indian Army/Rashtriya Rifles or even the Assam Rifles currently under the charge of the Home Ministry, to bridge the security gap, which is so glaringly obvious. The sophistication of attack these days requires a sophisticated response, where we can enable our Ambassadors and their Military Attaches to better protect our interests. I mean no disrespect to any organisation but the time has come when station chiefs heading the intelligence agencies that are found in any country’s Mission, under some garb or the other, will be unable to meet the new threats. And neither can the ITBP, which actually we had rushed to cover the road construction sites in Afghanistan, after our engineers were killed. They are not trained or equipped to carry out the task now being assigned to them in our Missions and Consulates. The ISI will continue to haunt India but what is needed in these times is a dedicated force officered by the best, with its own trained manpower and logistics, placed under the Head of the Mission, to protect India’s interests. An attack on a Mission is as bad as the attack that took place on the country’s Parliament some years back. The sacred memory of all those who recently perished at Kabul calls for expeditious remedial measures.
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