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Accord in
Jammu When cops
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Poor
Buddha
Political
talaq in Pakistan
Chairman
Birla
Burmese
days Children
need to be taught what is wrong Chatterati They cannot fathom the reason behind their senior
politicians’ decision to confer Z-plus security on many so-called
leaders who really don’t face any security threat and only want it
as a status symbol.
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When cops turn killers
Policemen
seem to think they have a licence to kill – not only criminals but also innocent citizens. Their mindset has been conditioned that way because their predecessors were an instrument of repression under British rule. In Punjab, their belief got further strengthened during the terrorism days when they were given unfettered powers. The end result is that they wear two hats – that of the keepers of law occasionally, and of cold-blooded murderers usually. Some Moga policemen were wearing the latter on Friday when they set up a naka near Daulewala village. A scooterist, Pritam, was signalled to stop but his scooter was at speed and he could stop it only a few yards away from the naka. That was provocation enough for the almighty cops to beat him up ruthlessly. His cousin, Gurpal Singh who was riding pillion, was also given similar third-degree treatment. The badly thrashed Pritam was taken to hospital – not by the policemen but by his companion – where he died a few hours later. This is the beastly face that the lower constabulary presents to the public at most mofussil places and still wants the public to cooperate with it. Like it or not, the general impression among the public is that the police force is the most well-organised band of criminals. Even more shameful is the fact that the normal laws of the land are softened to the maximum extent by the policemen when the wrongdoers are their own colleagues. Action against them is so mild that it seems that they enjoy some kind of immunity. Things have gone too far, with policemen having been found to have been engaged in everything from deaths in custody, rapes in police stations and extreme brutality of the Moga kind. It is high time senior officials woke up to what is going on right under their nose. Going soft on such criminals will further increase the hate level towards the entire force. If the war on crime and terrorism is not being won by the police, it is mainly because the public treats them as a class enemy. The Moga policemen have proved once again that the reputation is well earned.
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Poor Buddha
West Bengal
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee rarely puts his foot in his mouth. Actually, at times when he decides to open up and thereafter opens his mouth, the party bosses rush to put their foot in it and shut him up. This they have done again soon after Mr Bhattacharjee said that he was against bandhs. “Personally, I don’t support bandhs. Bandhs do not help us or the country. Unfortunately, I belong to a political party. They call strikes and I keep mum. But I have decided to open up the next time.” These were his memorable words in response to a question from a business executive at a meeting of ASSOCHAM in Kolkata last week. Barely had he delivered himself of the pronouncement than party apparatchiks rose in unison fuming at his “unbecoming remarks”. It was not just the CPM and its allies that struck out against the Left Front Chief Minister, but the Congress and Trinamool Congress, too. All of them asserted in chorus that to stage a bandh was a “fundamental right”. Mr Bhattacharjee saying that this was his personal view did not end the criticism. In fact, the CPM’s State Committee secretary Biman Bose made it clear that the party did not share the Chief Minister’s view. Clearly, in a political culture where the party is supreme and takes precedence over the country’s Constitution — as Speaker Somnath Chatterjee found to his dismay – and the government, a mere chief minister could not have expected to get away with such “heresy”. There was no way the government could be at variance with the party. Soon enough, the CPM politburo declared that the right to strike was a fundamental right. Mr Bose clarified, for the benefit of those still in doubt, that this was nothing less than a “public censure” of the CPM’s Chief Minister. It has been conveyed to Mr Bhattacharjee in no uncertain terms that he should keep his mouth shut. So much for his promise to “open up next time”. This is one party Mr Bhattacharjee could not have enjoyed. At least he has not been denounced as a “capitalist
roader”.
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Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need. — Khalil Gibran
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Political talaq in Pakistan Hardly
anyone, except perhaps the most diehard optimists, expected the marriage between the PPP and the PML(N) to last very long. But very few wanted the marriage to break, and certainly not so soon. The PPP-PML(N) coalition — along with the ANP, the JUI and the MQM (in Sindh) — was Pakistan’s first experiment with a national government, something that political pundits believed was the only way Pakistan could address not only its existential problems but also reach some sort of a consensus on the future contours of the state. The conditions under which this government came into being — by completely outmanoeuvring an all-powerful President — coupled with the challenges of governance facing Pakistan, had raised the hope that the politicians will not repeat the mistakes of the past. But statesmanship and power politics don’t mix well easily and often result in the bitter after-taste that Pakistan has just started experiencing. No doubt, after the ouster of Mr Pervez Musharraf from the presidency, the coalition partners were rid of their main compulsion to stick together. They no longer needed to make the compromises and accommodation that Mr Musharraf’s presence imposed on them. But the real test of statesmanship was never about coming together; it was always about staying together after the ruling coalition had seen Mr Musharraf’s back. Both Mr Asif Zardari and Mr Nawaz Sharif have failed this test and that too within a week of getting rid of Mr Musharraf. While Mr Nawaz Sharif might claim the high moral ground —after all, he has quit on a matter of principle — and Mr Zardari’s image might have taken a beating, if not among the masses then at least among the chattering classes, the fact is that whatever advantages they hope to gain from their political moves are probably only short term. In the long run, the damage they have inflicted on the political system will once again pave the way for the military to call the shots, first from the sidelines and eventually from the centre-stage. Mr Nawaz Sharif was clearly feeling boxed in by the imperatives of coalition politics. By nature he is not the sort of man who will patiently make moves on the political chess-board to consolidate his position. His style is confrontational, and once his mind gets set on something, then heavens can fall but he will not change his mind. As long as Mr Musharraf was in power, Mr Nawaz Sharif had no choice but to stay on in the coalition. Had he broken off then, he would have been out in the cold and would have to suffer the mortification of seeing his nemesis continue to rule the roost. With Mr Musharraf gone, there was nothing to restrain Mr Nawaz Sharif from getting back to his natural self. While, ostensibly, Mr Nawaz Sharif walked out of the coalition because of the delay in the reinstatement of the judges, there is something more to his decision than meets the eye. Notwithstanding the fact that Mr Nawaz Sharif had painted himself into a corner on the judges issue and made a big show of being left with no choice but to pull out of the coalition, in the end the judges issue was probably only an extremely convenient excuse for a move that he was itching to make, and for quite valid reasons. For one, Mr Nawaz Sharif did not want to be a party to granting indemnity to Mr Musharraf for his actions as President, something he would have to do if he remained a part of the government. Since the indemnity deal has been brokered by Mr Nawaz Sharif’s Saudi benefactors, he would have found it difficult to antagonise them. At the same time, his following would have suffered if he had not opposed indemnity for Mr Musharraf, In the opposition, he can oppose giving a safe passage to Mr Musharraf, knowing full well that his demand will be ignored by the government. This way he will keep his vote-bank intact and let the PPP take the public flak for letting Mr Musharraf go. What is more, he will have avoided rubbing the Saudis, the Americans and the army the wrong way on the Musharraf issue. Mr Nawaz Sharif was also feeling a little marginalised, if not ignored, as far as the decision-making in the government was concerned. For quite some time he had been complaining that the government is not taking him into confidence on critical issues like the military operations against the Islamists, the appointment of the Governor of Punjab, and the rise in fuel prices. Even when he was consulted, the government pretty much felt free to ignore his views when it took the final decisions. Mr Nawaz Sharif was also riled by the repeated violation by Mr Asif Zardari of the agreements on the issue of restoring the position of the judges, which were making Mr Nawaz Sharif look like a simpleton before his party men and voters. Already suffering from a feeling of being led up the garden path, the last straw for Mr Nawaz Sharif was Mr Zardari’s comment that political agreements are not Quranic injunctions that are inviolable. Unprincipled though it may sound, Mr Zardari’s take on the sanctity, or the lack of it, of any political agreement is a truism; only it should never be said publicly, certainly not by a politician. After once you publicly announce that you don’t stand by what you promise, no one will ever strike a deal with you on any issue. Mr Nawaz Sharif, like any other politician worth his salt, has also violated political agreements, but, unlike Mr Zardari, he never shot himself in the foot while reneging on his side of a political deal. In Mr Zardari’s case, the problem is compounded by the fact that he has still not been able to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the powerful Punjabi elite and middle class. Be that as it may, now that the coalition has lost an important constituent, the problems of running the government will become that much more difficult. The government will be susceptible to political blackmail and pressure from smaller parties like the ANP, the MQM and the JUI, each of whom will demand their pound of flesh for supporting the government. The government will also face a very strong and vocal opposition in the PML(N), which will question each and every difficult economic, political, diplomatic and security decision that the government will be forced to take. As far as the judges issue is concerned, unless the PPP decides to pass an executive order reinstating all the judges after Mr Zardari wins the presidential election, it is unlikely that the entire judiciary will be restored. If the PPP insists on restoring the position of the sacked judges as part of a constitutional package which includes provisions to curtail the powers of the judiciary and reducing the term of the chief justice, then Mr Nawaz Sharif will find it impossible to support such a package. The most serious implication of Mr Nawaz Sharif walking out will be that this will sharpen the ideological divide inside Pakistan. The chasm between the moderates and liberals on the one hand, and the right-wing, conservative and reactionary forces on the other hand will become unbridgeable. This will make it impossible to evolve a national consensus on the nature and character of the Pakistani state. Had the coalition worked, there was a chance that this most critical question would be resolved on middle ground. But now it appears that a long-drawn-out political and ideological battle will be fought for the soul of Pakistan. The future peace and prosperity of Pakistan and indeed of the South Asian region will hinge on the outcome of this
battle.
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Chairman Birla ONCE in six months Krishna Kumar Birla would visit his sugar mill in Motihari in Bihar, where Gandhiji launched his civil disobedience movement. In anticipation of his visit, elaborate arrangements would be made in The Searchlight, later The Hindustan Times, office in Patna. The building would be spruced up and stocks of fried and plain cashew nuts and sweetmeats would be made. It is a different matter that Birla never visited the office, at least not during the 10 years that I served there. After his departure, it would be our task — immensely pleasurable — to finish the delicacies stored for the occasion. It was a ritual that was gone through religiously every time he passed through Patna. In faraway Motihari, a different ritual was undertaken. Birla owned a bungalow situated in a sprawling mango grove. The gardener, who was also the caretaker of the bungalow, would unroll a huge red carpet to welcome him. The moment he departed, the carpet would be rolled up, as it was not meant for anyone else. The gardener, an amiable old man, had tales after tales to narrate about Birla. He showed me the special crockery and cutlery he used only to serve his master. There were no mango trees in the plot when Birla acquired it. It was this gardener who planted all the trees. The planting was done in such a way that from whichever angle you looked at the trees, they would all be seen in one straight line. What was more significant, he had written the biography of each tree in a large, red cloth-bound register. He opened it and read out to me the biography of a tree at random. It had such details as the day on which the sapling was planted, the date on which manure was first given and the height of the plant after every six months. It must have been an accident of birth that he was born a gardener, not a historian. The register had also details of the year in which each tree gave fruits. Birla relished the mangoes so much that it was the gardener’s duty to send them to him wherever he was. On his part, Birla would send them with his compliments to his friends and acquaintances like the late Indira Gandhi. Occasionally, I would also get a crate of the mangoes. Birla was so methodical that it was not mangoes alone which he insisted on getting regularly. Every morning, wherever he was, he should get details of the production in his companies the previous day. The details would come in a code language, which he and his senior executives alone would be able to decipher. This was to prevent the information from reaching the wrong hands. Birla depended on his personal sources so much that once when he wanted to change his flight, he did not rely on the words of the Indian Airlines office in Patna. Instead, he called the chief reporter of The Hindustan Times in New Delhi to confirm the changed flight details before he gave his green signal. Soon after the launch of The Hindustan Times in Patna, it was a rare honour for me to be called to Hotel Maurya for a meeting with Birla, who was our Chairman. He did not give me the impression that he was my “anna-data” as Khushwant Singh used to call him. Far from that, he was so polite that he not only offered me tea but also insisted on adding sugar himself. For once, it was difficult to believe that he was India’s preeminent industrialist. He was a perfect
host.
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Burmese days
The
world had never seen anything like it. For an entire week last September we were riveted by the sight of hundreds, then thousands, then finally tens of thousands of Burmese monks, walking in bold defiance of the military regime through the streets of their country’s towns and cities. It was quickly dubbed “the saffron revolution” – which was wrong on both counts. Burmese monks’ robes are not saffron in colour but maroon or cinnamon. And “revolution” wasn’t right either. The monks had no banners, no apparent leaders, made no speeches. Nor were they aiming to seize power. Like previous mass protests, the monks’ rising was provoked by the callous stupidity of the regime, which suddenly slashed fuel subsidies without warning in mid-August, sending the price of petrol, kerosene and diesel rocketing by 50 per cent and overnight making life impossible for the impoverished population. People could no longer afford to ride their motorcycles or take the bus to school or to market. Within days the movement had become gigantic. On 22 September, three days after it began, hundreds of monks penetrated the razor-wire barriers shrouding the approach to the house where Aung San Suu Kyi is confined, and Burma’s democracy leader came out of her front gate to greet them and chant sutras with them. Over the next two days the movement peaked when monks invited the ordinary people to join in. More than 100,000 people filled the biggest boulevard in Rangoon, marching through the pouring rain. But the walls of Jericho did not fall down. Senior general Than Shwe, the regime’s ageing strongman, did not lose his nerve. Unlike in 1988, the junta did not buckle under the pressure. Instead it flooded Rangoon and the other cities and towns with troops, forced them to swallow their inhibitions about attacking men of religion, and ordered them to let rip. In a few days it was all over. Thousands of protesters were thrown into improvised jails, many more were disrobed and forced out of their monasteries and back to their homes, and an unknown number were killed, including the Japanese journalist Nagai Kenji, gunned down on camera in central Rangoon. It was another dreadful setback for the forces of Burmese democracy. But the crushing of the revolt, which had been widely predicted, could not erase the fact that the regime had been challenged by a new opponent, one with deep roots among the common people: the Buddhist sangha, the community of monks. Buddhism is of crucial importance in the politics of Burma because most of the civil institutions of the state have either withered away or been deliberately smashed by the generals: parliament, the judiciary, trade unions, most political parties, the independent media, civil society in all its forms. All that remains is the sangha. The rule of the Buddhist kings, the last rulers regarded as legitimate by devout Burmese, ended only 123 years ago. That is the authority – usurped by the British – to which all hark back. The monks’ revolt did not bring the junta down but it had several consequences. One was the first formal action ever taken by the UN Security Council against Burma, “strongly deploring the use of violence against peaceful demonstrators”; another was the dispatching of the UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari to Burma. A third was the decision by the junta to attempt to deflect the world’s anger by submitting a new, pseudo-democratic constitution to a referendum, a step on the return to a sort of democracy – though with a large, built-in role for the military. The referendum was scheduled for 10 May. So it was taken by many Burmese as a very bad omen – karmic payback for their assault on the monks – when, barely a week before the referendum, one of the most destructive tropical cyclones in history came howling in from the Bay of Bengal and ravaged the low-lying, fertile and densely populated Irrawaddy delta. Cyclone Nargis was one of the deadliest cyclones of all time, but we will never know how many people it killed because, when the official figure for the dead reached 130,000, the Burmese military junta simply stopped giving updates. Some experts think the true toll from the cyclone could be more than 300,000. More than a million people were made homeless. The regime proved no more reliable in bringing relief to the victims than in giving out statistics. Intensely paranoid about foreign designs on their country, it provoked a storm of international condemnation when it refused to admit the hundreds of foreign aid workers queuing at Burmese embassies all over the world for visas. “The country is not ready to accept foreign aid workers,” a regime spokesman said. Journalists who entered the country as tourists then tried to cover the disaster were harassed and expelled. The delays in admitting aid were, according to the World Food Programme, “unprecedented in modern humanitarian relief efforts”. Meanwhile, the generals gritted their teeth and pressed ahead with the referendum – only delaying it for a few weeks in areas where bodies were still hanging from trees. And so the strange shadow war that began one year ago with the army’s brutal assault on monks in Pakkoku moves into a new phase. Already the regime is filling the cities with troops in case somebody has the idea of marking the anniversary of the monks’ uprising. But even if it goes unmarked, the challenge of the sangha will not go away. The monks cannot and will not take up arms against the junta. A new message has appeared in Aung San Suu Kyi’s garden, inscribed on a large signboard and visible to her neighbours. It appeared last month, on Martyrs’ Day. The message was simple but cryptic: “All martyrs must finish their mission.” Suu Kyi, in other words, will continue her resistance, and the monks must continue theirs. The struggle goes on. By arrangement with
The Independent
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Children need to be taught what is wrong Where
I live, you can tell the different tribes of children from their clothes. The African children, marching nicely behind their parents, are kitted out in little suits and frilly satin dresses, like some kind of Strictly Come Dancing for tiny tots, except that the show is Strictly Come to Church or Mama Will Give You a Big Wallop. The Muslim children look as though they’ve stepped straight out of a nativity play, in long robes with little lacy caps (for boys) and little head-scarfs (for girls). And the Hasidic Jewish children, whey-faced and dark-eyed, look like extras from Fiddler on the Roof. For the children on the council estates – white, black and mixed race – there is one choice only: the track-suit bottom, unisex, universal, uni-size, accessorised with a hooded top. And then there’s the biggest tribe of all, or at least the one that makes its presence most acutely felt. These are the yawning, whining, screaming little Lord Fauntleroys, with long curls and long shorts, sipping mango smoothies and scattering the crumbs of their banana muffins on the floor; while their parents hone their novels and their blogs. You can’t tell everything from clothes, of course. You might guess that the little Jewish boy with the ringlets and the skull-cap had his fore-skin removed a week after his birth, and his first ceremonial haircut at three. You might guess that the little black girl in the frilly dress is made to say her prayers before she goes to bed and that the little boy in the long shorts is warmly encouraged to eat his And you might guess that the boy in the long robe and the lacy cap has been learning to recite the Koran. What you probably wouldn’t be able to guess, however, is whether he has been told to flog himself with sharp, curved blades on a bundle of chains. This is what happened to two boys in Manchester earlier this year. At a Shia ceremony in a community centre to mark the death of the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, a 44-year-old warehouse supervisor, Syed Zaidi, handed the zanjeer (yes, this handy religious instrument is mass produced and has a name) to a 13-year-old boy and his 15-year-old brother and told them to use it. “This is part of our religion,” he said. “It was an emotional time and the children were happy.” Actually, the children were slightly less happy by the time they got home, with serious bleeding and multiple slash wounds, and by the time they were taken to Manchester Royal Infirmary. Their mother wasn’t too happy either and the result – a British legal first – is that Zaidi was convicted on Wednesday on two counts of child cruelty. “This,” said Carol Jackson of the Crown Prosecution Service, “is a very unusual case.” It may be an unusual case, but it’s hardly the first time that extreme religious belief has resulted in cruelty to children. Now that the “misery memoir” has become a cliché of contemporary publishing, it’s worth remembering that many of the most significant accounts of childhood misery have been associated with religious repression. One of the first, and still one of the best, is Edmund Gosse’s account of his evangelical childhood, Father and Son. Here, among many descriptions of his parents’ attempts to control every aspect of his life – including a funny, but poignant incident with an “idolatrous” Christmas pudding – one of the saddest is his simple assertion that “I had not the faintest idea how to ‘play’.” The hardships that Gosse endured did not, however, involve physical violence. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (a novel, but based, she has said, on the stories of people she knew) the charismatic Catholic patriarch actually breaks his children’s bones. And in Memoir, one of hundreds of books chronicling brutal Irish Catholic childhoods, John McGahern writes of a life in which sudden physical blows were followed by sudden instructions to bow down in front of a crucifix (a fetishisation of extreme violence if ever there was one) and pray. “Authority’s writ ran from God the Father down and could not be questioned,” he says. “Violence reigned... in the homes as well.” We live in a country in which the proliferation of schools established only to impose particular sets of religious prejudices on young children unable to know, or seek, better is encouraged. By arrangement with
The Independent
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Chatterati Top officials in the Home Ministry and the Indian security establishment are a puzzled lot these days. They cannot fathom the reason behind their senior politicians’ decision to confer Z-plus security on many so-called leaders who really don’t face any security threat and only want it as a status symbol. Some of them came to the UPA government’s rescue. Some, whose presence in national politics has so far been entirely on account of their more than enviable ability to engineer seemingly impossible political alignments, by no means need any security. Such alignments, while of questionable import for the health of our democracy, have done little to undermine the
terrorist menace. Films on Sonia A Hollywood producer is camping in Delhi inquiring about the possibility of a film on Sonia Gandhi. This comes after her lawyers have stopped many before this. Suddenly, Sonia seems to have caught the imagination of film-makers everywhere — as much in the West as in India. T D Kumar has already made a low-budget Hindi film, “Sonia, Sonia” without taking prior permission from 10 Janpath on the ground that his film is based on a fictional account of her life. Industry sources claim that Prakash Jha’s “Rajneeti” will be about Rajiv Gandhi’s life with quite a bit of Sonia coming
into it. Interest from the tinsel town in Sonia’s life and times should have been good news for the Congress managers. But they are actually a worried lot. A whole cottage industry seems to be flourishing with keen interest in making films about
Sonia Gandhi. While carrying the party on her shoulders through the rough and tumble of a long election
season ahead, Sonia is worried about this new interest of movie-makers. Since the film will be subjective and without any control, 10 Janpath appears to be apprehensive of the final outcome. Sensationalism is what the Congress is worried about, it seems. Maya’s obsession What is Mayawati’s new obsession? Well, earlier, she was interested in getting her and Kanshi Ram’s statues installed. Now she seems to have lost all interest in the affairs of the state because of her obsession with becoming the Prime Minister. She is now full time hobnobbing with the Third Front.
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