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The Sahnewal crash Maldives tastes
democracy King’s move |
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End of the Chennai
drama
A requiem for
October 31
Change in US Time to change
gears for fuel efficiency Delhi
Durbar
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Maldives tastes democracy With
the election of Mr Mohammed Anni Nausheed as the new President of the Maldives, the forces of democracy have succeeded in defeating another authoritarian ruler in South Asia. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who had ruled the Maldives since 1978 under a constitution designed to perpetuate his control over power, had been facing pro-democracy protests for a long time. But he dealt with his political opponents by sending them to either jail or an uninhabited island. Mr Nausheed, popularly known as Anni in the tiny Indian Ocean country comprising a number of small islands, had to spend his life mostly in detention. Educated in the UK and Sri Lanka, he plunged into politics after a short stint in journalism. Fortyone-year-old Nausheed has unseated 71-year-old Gayoom in an interesting manner. Mr Gayoom polled 40.1 per cent votes in the first round of the elections held on October 8 whereas Mr Nausheed of the Maldivian Democratic Party could secure only 25.1 per cent. But no one was declared a winner as the amended constitution had it that the victorious candidate must have got at least 50 per cent of the votes cast. This led to a second round of polling on Tuesday when most of the opposition parties withdrew from the contest, announcing their support for Mr Nausheed, the most popular face of the movement for democracy. The result was that he trounced the longest surviving ruler of Asia with 54.25 per cent votes against 45.75 per cent secured by Mr Gayoom. Yet Mr Nausheed has promised that he will do nothing to earn the reputation of a vindictive President. He wants to nurture the multi-party democracy that has finally taken root in his impoverished country. The Maldives, a beautiful archipelago, could have been developed into a major tourist destination, but Mr Gayoom had little time to spare for such projects. Mr Nausheed may herald a new era of prosperity along with building democratic institutions by concentrating on exploiting the tourist potential of his country. But first of all he has to ensure a successful conduct of parliamentary elections due early next year.
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King’s move
For
India, 2008 is turning out to be a landmark year for sport as our players in different events are notching up new successes. Just two months ago, in August, the Indian contingent returned from the Beijing with an unprecedented haul of medals, including the first gold. Then came the cricket Test where India whipped world-beaters Australia in the second match of the series, which will be remembered for master-blaster Sachin Tendulkar overtaking Brian Lara to emerge as the world’s biggest run-getter in both Test and one-day cricket. The run of good luck seems to be in full flow with Indian Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand winning the World Championship title in Bonn against the formidable Russian Vladimir Kramnik. With this victory, Anand is the undisputed king of chess in all forms of the game. He is already the world champion in the tournament and knockout formats. Now he has bagged the world title in the match-play format, too. There was never any doubt about the iconic Indian chess player being the world No. 1. Anand has won the World Championship title twice before the face-off with Kramnik. However, there were critics who raised questions about his standard of match-play. Now that he has triumphed in the match-play format against Kramnik in one of the most challenging contests of his career, all questions about his credentials as the numero uno of the chess world are irrelevant. In the beginning of this year, both Anand and Kramnik were number one in the world, as Anand had recalled before setting out for Bonn. Never for a moment during the long months of preparation did Anand underestimate his opponent, as Kramnik is a classical player most comfortable in match-play. The games were keenly fought, and Kramnik drew the ninth game before inflicting a surprise defeat on Anand in the tenth. Therefore, the taste of success for Anand must be all the more sweet. |
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When shall we three meet again/ In thunder, lightning, or in rain? — William Shakespeare
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End of the Chennai drama
FROM day one it was clear that the simulated anger and agitation in Tamil Nadu, masterminded by none other than the state Chief Minister and patriarch of the Dravid Munnetra Kazhagam, Mr M. Karunanidhi, was nothing more than political playacting. Its denouement on Sunday amply confirmed this assessment. Mr Karunanidhi, who is also a key ally of the Congress in the United Progressive Alliance ruling in New Delhi, was whipping up sentiment ostensibly on behalf of the Tamil minority of Sri Lanka but actually his objective, with an eye on the approaching Lok Sabha election, was to see to it that the reprehensible Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), now at the end of its tether, could somehow be saved from total defeat. No wonder then that he confronted the Union government with a demand that was both untenable and impossible to accept. He wanted New Delhi virtually to force the government of Sri Lanka immediately to order a ceasefire in its fight against the LTTE, one of the worst terrorist outfits in the world. Failing that, he warned, all MPs from Tamil Nadu or, at any rate, all members belonging to the DMK and its allies in the state would quit. He then orchestrated the comic opera of these “loyal” MPs, including his estranged nephew Dayanidhi Maran, submitting their resignations not to the Speaker of the Lok Sabha or Chairman of the Rajya Sabha but to Mr Karunanidhi himself. In doing so, Mr Karunanidhi, who is serving as Tamil Nadu Chief Minister for the fifth time, conveniently forgot that during the years the Government of India, with the consent of the Sri Lankan government, was engaged in peace-making and peace-keeping, he had condemned the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF), and insulted it when it returned home. Unsurprisingly, his main rival in the state, Ms J. Jayalalithaa, pertinently asked him whether India could interfere in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs without encouraging other powers to interfere in India’s internal affairs. She, as chief minister, had cracked down on the LTTE after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, and is opposed to giving any encouragement to this dangerous organisation even behind a smokescreen of sympathy for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, especially those stranded in the field of battle between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan security forces. After a while things started getting out of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister’s hands, partly because he had overdone things. Some of the groups that had agreed with the so-called all-party conference of Tamil Nadu (quite a few organisations, including Ms Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK, had stayed away) developed second thoughts over resigning. More importantly, the people of the state saw through that Mr Karunanidhi was trying to divert attention from problems that, apart from the anti-incumbency factor, would make things difficult for him in the parliamentary poll. He alone may not be responsible for the phenomenal price rise, but can he absolve himself of the blame for the prolonged power shedding against which he is being flooded with telegrams? Moreover, Mr Karunanidhi’s tactics inevitably triggered a competition in wild rhetoric. The general secretary of the MDMK, Mr Vaiko, who had parted company with the DMK sometime ago, had to be arrested because of his fire-eating speeches, giving a call for arms to defend the Sri Lankan Tamil race, “threatened with extinction”, and even hinting at Tamil Nadu’s secession from India, should New Delhi fail to impose a ceasefire on Sri Lanka. All the time Mr Karunanidhi also knew that while his intransigence might create problems for the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre, estrangement with the Congress could jeopardise his own government in Chennai, too It was in this context that constructive discussions took place between the governments of Sri Lanka and India. After these, the UPA’s man of all seasons, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee flew to Chennai, met Mr Karunanidhi, and the crisis “blew over”. Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa sent to New Delhi his special adviser and brother Basil Rajapaksa (incidentally, another brother is that country’s Defence Secretary) who addressed Indian concerns satisfactorily. At the same time, President Rajapaksa in Colombo assured the Tamil minority that it would be safe under his government. About the only legitimate demand of the Karunanidhi-led combination was that the innocent Tamil people stranded in the battle zone called Wanni should be provided with food, fuel, medicines and other essential goods unavailable so far. The visiting Lankan envoy assured his interlocutors that this would be done. India is dispatching 800 tonnes of essential supplies that would be distributed through the agencies of the UN, the International Red Cross and the Indian government. It might have been better if this had been arranged earlier but then, as they say, better late than never. Other countries are expected to join the humanitarian mission, and there is some talk of persuading Norway to resume its role of facilitating the process of settling the conflict politically rather than militarily. India has done well to impress upon Sri Lanka that there must be an earnest effort to implement, as quickly as possible, the 13th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution that embodies the agreed plan for devolution of powers to provincial governments within the framework of a united and federal Sri Lanka. The Rajapaksa government has agreed. An encouraging development in Sri Lanka amidst a lot of negativity has been that, because of a major split within the LTTE ranks, the democratic process of sorts has begun in the eastern province. This must be strengthened. Significantly, Sivanesathurai Santhirakanathan, formerly an LTTE fighter and now the Chief Minister of Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province, has pointed out, in a newspaper interview, that “excessive pressure” by India on the Government of Sri Lanka would only be to the advantage of the LTTE, which was trying to “extricate itself militarily” through the “emotional outpouring in Tamil Nadu”. These are wise words. Another voice of sanity, which the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister should heed, emanates from the leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), Mr V. Anandasangaree, who has discussed with President Rajapaksa details of the arrangements for the relief and welfare of the nearly two lakh Tamils stranded in the war zone. He has, in fact, written a letter to Mr Karunanidhi emphasising that if these luckless people are not able to come out into “cleared areas” it is because the LTTE is not allowing them to leave. It is indeed using them as human
shields.
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A requiem for October 31 AN elderly man standing in line announced his name. She stopped immediately and asked: “Are you Devaki Nandan Pande of Hindi Samachar?” As was her custom, Indira Gandhi was meeting the public in the morning and the renowned news reader was in the queue to hand over a grievance petition on behalf of the AIR Staff. His chest puffed up to learn that India’s Prime Minister had heard of him. That was vintage Indira, someone with rock solid faith in the motherland, its people and their causes. After the Janata Party lost to the Congress in the 1979 elections, one of the instructions issued from the PMO to all government departments was to the effect that there was no need to call the USSR and US as super powers, referring to them as “big” powers will do - that was a chastened Mrs Gandhi returning to the South Block. Someone whom Baroness Margaret Thatcher saw as being more hard-headed than any other third world leader. “Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto considered her as a hated adversary”, wrote Henry Kissinger in his “Years of Upheaval” and candidly noted in “White House Years” how Mrs Gandhi was relentlessly pursuing India’s national interest with single-mindedness and finesse. She and Nixon were not intended by fate to be personally congenial, he said, adding, “…her moody silences brought out all of Richard Nixon’s latent insecurities. Her bearing towards him combined a disdain for a symbol of capitalism. Nixon considered her a cold blooded practitioner of real politik…” A lesser known side of Indira Gandhi was her liking for French, a language she had studied in school in Switzerland. She remembered it well and in fact when she was speaking she was also thinking in French. Once when she ran into my wife and learnt that she was in the JNU’s Centre for French and Francophone Studies she asked her to help her to keep it up. And so whenever they met they conversed in French and did so almost to the day before Indiraji’s sad gunning down. My wife, Anuradha, has an unforgettable memory of one morning walking back with Mrs Gandhi to her residence after she had met the public in 1 Akbar Road. She bent down to pick up a flower, she ran her fingers delicately over the petals and placed it tenderly on a bush so that no one trampled it! All this while they had continued their conversation in French and it was only later that Anuradha realised what Indiraji had done. My personal memory is of the time she addressed Naval Officers at the annual conference in Sena Bhavan. When she had finished she carefully folded and clipped her papers, then turning to the Naval Chief she said: “I will join you for dinner but I will reach a little late so that you can finish your ‘other business’!” Thoughtful indeed, knowing the defence services’ practice of ‘drinks before
dinner’.
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Change in US
All but lost amid the hullabaloo of the American presidential campaign, the U.S. State Department recently dropped North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Kim Jong Il pocketed a concession that even a year ago would have seemed unimaginable. The American people -- feeling more threatened by Wall Street than by Pyongyang -- managed barely a shrug. Seldom has a historic turning point received such little notice. By cutting a deal with a charter member of his declared "axis of evil," President Bush definitively has abandoned the principles he staked out in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The president who once defined America's purpose as "ending tyranny" is now accommodating the world's last authentically Stalinist regime. Although Bush still inhabits the White House, the Bush era effectively has ended. So, too, has the latest in a series of American psychodramas. In the past year or so, the nation's collective mind-set has shifted, and with that shift have come dramatic changes in the way we see ourselves and the world beyond our borders. The American preference for packaging history as a sequence of great events directed by great men tends to overlook the role played by mass psychology and by the powerful impulses contained within what we commonly call public opinion. The reality is that when it comes to statecraft, policies devised in Washington frequently express not so much the carefully calculated intentions of the nation's leaders as the people's frame of mind. President Polk, for instance, came into office in 1845 determined to separate California from Mexico. Yet what enabled Polk to convert ambition into action was the concept of Manifest Destiny -- the popular conviction that it had become incumbent on Americans to spread freedom westward to the Pacific Ocean. Polk didn't invent Manifest Destiny and didn't really control it, but he shrewdly offered this deeply felt urge an outlet, thereby transforming what might otherwise have seemed a naked land-grab into a righteous crusade. The result was the immensely successful Mexican War. The problem for policymakers is that the zeitgeist can change suddenly and without warning. President Wilson discovered this shortly after World War I, when Americans who had enthusiastically enlisted in his campaign to "make the world safe for democracy" abruptly lost interest and yearned for a return to "normalcy." Accurately gauging the shift in the popular mood, the Senate voted in 1919 not to join the League of Nations, in which Wilson had invested such hopes. The president was left high and dry. George W. Bush has experienced a similar fate. His presidency began with the Age of American Triumphalism at its zenith. When Bush entered office in 2001, America's status as sole superpower was self-evident and seemingly irrefutable. As the indispensable nation, the United States presided over a unipolar order. The emery board of globalization was sanding away the world's rough edges and gradually remaking it in America's own image. Commentators vied to find the appropriate historical analogy. The consensus: America was the new Rome, only more so. Bush's response to the Sept. 11 attacks reflected this widespread sense of assurance and entitlement. The Bush doctrine of preventive war, the president's impatient, with-us-or-against-us attitude, his disdain for international opinion and international law, his confidence that American military power, once unleashed, would quickly bring evildoers to justice or justice to evildoers -- and above all his conviction that the people of the Islamic world thirsted for freedom, American-style -- all of these made explicit precepts that had been germinating during the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s. Bush was merely expressing in a crude vernacular -- "Bring 'em on!" -- ideas and attitudes to which the majority of Americans already subscribed. Today those ideas and attitudes have become the equivalent of an oversize SUV: They no longer sell. Not least among Bush's errors in judgment has been his failure to appreciate just how ephemeral the Age of Triumphalism would prove to be. Americans are no longer in the mood to chase after distant evildoers. They care about jobs, affordable energy, decent health care and restoring their 401(k) accounts. Fix what's broken abroad? No, thanks; not until we've fixed what's broken at home. This defines the new normalcy. The central theme of the presidential election is change, with both John McCain and Barack Obama promising to radically overhaul the way Washington works. In a real sense, however, change already has occurred. Even before the people have voted, they have spoken. The Age of Triumphalism has ended. The Age of Salvaging What's Left is upon us. The writer, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism." — By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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Time to change gears for fuel efficiency We
have the chance to remake the automobile industry, to strengthen America's technological muscle. But we are frittering away the opportunity. We are mired in nonproductive, ideological arguments over "socialism" vs. "free enterprise." Worse, I fear, we are being suckered by the siren song of cheap gasoline. The national media are celebrating the fall of pump prices below the $4 a gallon for regular unleaded nearly all of us were paying this summer. In many parts of the country, pump prices have now sunk below $3 a gallon. Statistical evidence does not yet support suspicion of recidivism in the matter of American consumer profligacy in the consumption of fossil fuels. But there is anecdotal reason to worry. I have been getting calls and receiving e-mails from readers asking whether now is a good time — to paraphrase the sense of those communications — to buy a truck or a full-size sport-utility vehicle. The thinking goes thusly: Almost all car companies are offering massive rebates on slow-selling trucks and SUVs. That makes them a bargain. Big rebates plus falling gasoline prices now make those big rides a good deal. It is delusional thinking, but no more so than that taking place in the halls of Congress, where lawmakers apparently are laboring under the illusion that we have time to save the domestic automobile industry, to beef up America's prowess in fuel-efficient technologies. We don't. American car companies and the tens of thousands of jobs connected to them, directly and indirectly, are in bad shape. Soaring gasoline prices this summer and frozen credit this autumn have walloped their sales. Global regulatory changes requiring increased fuel efficiency and cleaner emissions rapidly are increasing product development costs. We can wag fingers and self-righteously shout that the domestic car companies are reaping the unhappy fruits of the thoughtless seeds they planted. Schadenfreude is joy in hypocrisy. We bought all of those big trucks and big-engine cars. And we demanded more of them as long as we had access to the developed world's cheapest gasoline. But we whined like babies and screamed for more fuel-efficient vehicles like infants crying for nipples when gasoline topped $4 a gallon. Put another way, we — consumers and politicians — were complicit in the automobile industry's reluctance to do better in the arenas of fuel economy and emissions control. The natural tendency in a purely profit-oriented, capitalist system is to give consumers what they are demanding at a price that returns a handsome reward on investment in product development. Increased fuel efficiency and emissions controls usually require increased development costs. If consumers aren't demanding those things and, by implication, are not willing to pay more for them, why invest the enormous amount of money to make them available? Aware of that capitalist conundrum, governments, the U.S. government chief among them, exercised the socialist lever of regulation. Car companies would have to improve fuel economy and emissions control by government mandate. But this is where things got dicey in the United States. In Europe and Asia, governments provided financial incentives to the car companies to move forward in the development of alternative fuels and propulsion systems. In the United States, we embraced socialism when it came to regulating the industry but demanded hard-knuckles capitalism in compliance with our regulatory demands. It is an approach designed for failure. What is needed now is a concerted application of common sense. Congress can do that by immediately releasing the $25 billion it has promised the industry in direct, low-interest loans to help it redesign cars and trucks for a more fuel-efficient future. It can do that by supporting independent companies, such as AFS Trinity of Washington state, in advanced propulsion research. It can do that by making consumers assume some responsibility for energy conservation — by placing a floor, such as $4 a gallon for regular unleaded, beneath pump prices for gasoline. There is nothing wrong with socialism as long as it actually produces something for the general good. Saving domestic car companies speaks to that good. Helping those companies become competitive in future technologies will ensure the continuation of an American economy attached to something real — product development and manufacturing. It's time for the government to stop fooling around and release the money it promised the industry in those direct, low-interest loans. — By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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Delhi Durbar The
other day when the CPM initiated a debate in the Lok Sabha on anti-Christian violence in Orissa, BJD MP Tathagat Satpati emerged as the most vocal defender of the Naveen Patnaik government, which was caught napping on the issue. With no logical ground to counter the Left’s scathing criticism of the Orissa government, Satpati decided to simply play a truant and challenge whatever was being stated against the Orissa government. In the process, he almost turned hysterical, making a mockery of the sensitive debate by creating a ruckus every now and then. At one point when senior communist leader Verkala Radhakrishnan urged the Chair that private members’ business be taken up, an elated Satpati, who was waiting for a chance to disturb the debate, jumped in his seat and shouted: “Sir, I agree with Radhakrishnan ji. He is the only one right in the Left.” Satpati repeated the remark four times, much to the amusement of other members. Slow on imports It is well known that the mild-mannered Defence Minister AK Antony is a strong votary of cutting down on imports of defence equipment. He has been forcefully supporting two projects: the light combat aircraft and Arjun Tank.
Last week after inspecting the LCA, Antony said: "People wanted me to stop the projects but I made it clear these have to go on and the LCA will roll out". Antony's stance on the two projects has been appreciated in most quarters even as the import-happy and agent-backed lobby bides its time. Religious comrade Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and his erstwhile party, the CPM, got into an open tiff last week when the Speaker suspended CPM member A.P. Abdullakutty from Cannanore, Kerala, for a day for his unruly behaviour. Next day, Chatterjee complained that he was being targeted by the CPM and the Left party, in turn, said the same of the Speaker. But there is a sub-text to this story. Abdullakutty, the Communist who goes for Namaz and Haj and wears his religion on his sleeve, has raised many an eyebrow by being in the anti-religion party. And action was being contemplated against him for his utterances against the party line. Simultaneously, the Bengal unit of the party was keen to take on the Speaker. But Kutty snatched the opportunity from his Bengal comrades and also managed to focus the limelight on himself as the most loyal soldier of the CPM. Now it may not be that easy for the party to deny him the ticket in the next general election. Contributed by Aditi Tandon, Ajay Banerjee and Faraz Ahmad
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