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Abandoned by Pakistan
Revisit Constitution |
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Lost innocence
Intelligence slip-up?
Living in the Dog-Years
Recession clarifies choices
The flour of our youth
Climate: The missing links
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Abandoned by Pakistan
Ajmal Kasab
must be ruing the day he and many others agreed to become hitmen to further the Pakistan’s terror mischief. First, they were promised that all arrangements were in place to bring them back home once their inhuman mission was over. Second, after the rest of them died, Kasab has been reduced to the status of a no-state actor, whose very existence his country now denies.
Those on a suicide mission know that they are on their own, but it must be frustrating, now that he has been taken alive by the Indian security forces. Pakistan just won’t provide him even legal aid for fear of being exposed before the world. This is duplicity of the worst kind because his identity has been established beyond any iota of doubt.
His father has admitted as much in so many words, which were even reported by the influential Dawn newspaper and the Geo television channel. The Observer newspaper and the BBC too had earlier reported that Ajmal belonged to Faridkot village near Okara and had joined the Lashkar-e-Taiba some time ago. But the Pakistani establishment still continues to harp on the no-proof tune. As if any further proof was needed at all, it was provided by none other than former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who stated that he was indeed a Pakistani national and a resident of Faridkot which had been condoned off by the authorities. It is another matter that internal pressure made him backtrack but his candid admission is there in black and white. The best excuse that the Pakistani government has come forward with is that they have thoroughly checked the records of the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and the name of Ajmal Kasab does not figure in the database. What is being left unsaid is that the database covers only 60 million of the country’s population of nearly 160 million. The way his Faridkot village has been made out of bounds for every outsider is clinching evidence in itself. As if that was not enough, war hysteria is being created on the plea that India is likely to attack Pakistan. The gameplan of the Pakistan Army to grab the centrestage with the help of the Mumbai outrage is getting exposed day by day. While Pakistani authorities are disclaiming Kasab’s citizenship to fend off blame for sponsoring terrorism in India. The evidence is too strongly weighed against it to be brushed aside lightly. The best thing for Pakistan to do is to own Kasab as its citizen and at the same time take steps to root out terrorism from its soil. |
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Revisit Constitution
The Joint Parliamentary Committee headed by Mr Iqbal Ahmed Saradgi, in a comprehensive report tabled in Parliament, has rightly called for a review of the Office of Profit provision under the Constitution. It has called upon the government to revisit Article 102 (1) (9) (a) of the Constitution that regulates the matter. The committee has hailed the philosophy behind appointing senior politicians as advisers to important institutions. In its recommendations submitted to the Lok Sabha, it has kept advisory offices at the Centre and in the states, including the Leader of Opposition, outside the purview of office of profit to ensure the smooth functioning of parliamentary democracy.
The report says that while defining an office of profit, it is essential to identify the “generic criteria” of the offices/posts which would not constitute or be deemed as offices of profit. Two years ago, this clause had created a major controversy. The Samajwadi Party MP, Jaya Bachchan, was disqualified for holding an office of profit of the Uttar Pradesh government during the chief ministership of Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav. The UPA Chairperson, Ms Sonia Gandhi, resigned from the Lok Sabha, the National Advisory Council and several other bodies connected with the Nehru-Gandhi family. Of course, she was re-elected to the Lok Sabha from Rae Bareli. But a more important development was the passage of the Prevention of Disqualification (Amendment) Bill, 2006, by Parliament, despite the then President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s reservations, that exempted 55 posts from the Office of profit clause and gave reprieve for over 40 MPs, including Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee. Several state governments followed suit. Significantly, though the JPC has submitted its report, the controversy over office of profit continues. The constitutional validity of the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Amendment Act, 2006, has been questioned in the Supreme Court. In the hearings, while the Centre has argued that Parliament has the power to enact any law with retrospective effect, the petitioners maintained that it was patently unconstitutional because it was passed with retrospective effect mainly to protect 55 MPs. The apex court had reserved its judgement on March 5. It would be interesting to wait for its well-considered opinion on this vital issue. |
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Lost innocence In Jaipur, a 12-year-old girl was married off to a 35-year-old man for a few kilos of ration. Although the village panchayat chose to undo the marriage, the implementation of the law needs to be stepped up. The abominable practice of child marriage is widespread in Rajasthan and many parts of the country.
According to UNICEF, nearly one-third girls in India are married between 15 and 18 and 15 per cent of girls in the countryside by the age of 13. While a large majority of the girls are married off to older men, some even old enough to be their grandfathers, the practice of marrying prepubescent children is common as well. Child marriage not only means loss of education but also makes the girl child more susceptible to domestic violence. The 2001 census points out that approximately three lakh girls become mothers by 15 years of age every year. This puts them at a far greater risk during pregnancy. Plus the babies born to girls below 17 are more likely to die in the first year of their life. Also child marriage infringes upon their rights to education and full childhood, making a mockery of all the laws meant to protect the children. While the earlier laws could only prevent the marriage, the new legislation, the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, has provision for making child marriage null and void too. Sadly, the law has not proved effective. Still, child marriage is a grim social reality not only rooted in poverty and illiteracy but also firmly entrenched in gender inequities. The law-enforcing machinery in the states needs to take its responsibility more seriously. The village panchyats, as in the Jaipur case, can play a constructive role in preventing and nullifying child marriages. Advocacy campaigns can also dent outdated social perceptions that sanction child marriage. |
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It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. — Aeschylus |
Intelligence slip-up?
IF there is widespread, and legitimate concern, at the many inadequacies which led to the carnage in Mumbai, failure of intelligence heads the list. There was no warning, cried the many agencies charged with safeguarding our security and where there was some awareness, it was not translated into “actionable intelligence”.
Some degree of political responsibility has been signalled by the resignation of some key figures in the domain. This is understandable, even if it does not remove the anger or the pain one whit; what is not is why accountability is nowhere to be seen. On 16th November, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) reported that electronic intercepts had revealed the presence of a Pakistan vessel, Al Husseini, possibly with some terrorists embarked, and indicated the geographic location of the ship.
This report was sent off to a number of agencies according to procedure, including to the Coast Guard and Naval Headquarters, and, most important of all, to the Joint Intelligence Committee
(JIC). The Navy chief is perfectly justified in saying that this could hardly be treated as actionable information, especially when it was found that the position indicated in the RAW report lay not far from the Pak coast. Nevertheless, precautionary measures were taken by both maritime forces for a few days and then given up, nothing having been found. This brings us to the seminal question — what happened to this report when it landed up at the JIC, the premier intelligence coordination agency in the country. A quick assessment would have shown that this vessel, given the speeds at which similar vessels normally move, could have been off the Gujarat coast by the 18th and off the Maharashtra area by the 20th. It could also have been surmised that if the Al Husseini did not make the passage itself, that being too dangerous, but transferred its load to some smaller craft, possibly a fishing boat of Indian registry, that being far less risky, its passengers could be off the Gujarat area by the 18th/19th and in the waters off Mumbai by And if this movement was to be restricted to nights only, with the boat faking fishing activity by day, then these figures would be 21st/22nd and 25th/26th respectively. All this should have happened in the JIC once that report from RAW came in. In an intelligence agency, especially one coordinating inputs from several sources, analysis is critical along with linkage to previous inputs. Two months earlier, reports had indicated that high-profile targets in Mumbai such as major hotels could be targeted. Linkage to sea proximity was also expected. In Gujarat, the visible major targets are the ports, including the largest viz. Kandla and the oil terminals at Vadinar and the refinery at Jamnagar. These can be damaged by explosives placed suitably but the quantities required and the sites at which they would need to be put would require a very major operation quite unlike taking a loaded truck into a hotel building. The Somnath temple at Veraval, which attracts hundreds of devotees and could be suited for a Hindu-Muslim scenario, was a possibility but given the background information held, Gujarat did not seem targeted. This brings us to Mumbai. Logical analysis would show that the ingress would be best managed at one of the three fishing community points at
Mahim, at Cuffe Parade or at the Sassoon Docks. The first requires a long road movement to the high profile downtown areas; the other two are in close proximity. From Cuffe Parade, taxis can be taken by just crossing a road, at Sassoon Docks one has to traverse through very densely located buildings and narrow roads before emerging onto the very busy Colaba Causeway. It is also adjacent to a naval heliport. A direct landing at the Gateway of India looks easy but one has to run the risk of boat patrols and possible presence of warships. If a move against high-profile hotels by people coming from the sea was even remotely possible, then clearly, Macchimaar Nagar, off Cuffe Parade, stood out like a Christmas Tree. If all this sounds like being wise after the event, and this may well be justified, something on these lines should have taken place in the JIC, even if with different results. But not to have tried to link the pieces and do an analysis, or appreciation as the military calls it, is inexcusable. Unfortunately, the failure of intelligence, or rather in its processing, is matched by several failures in responding to the crisis after it had developed. By about 10 pm, it had become known that there was a major incident ongoing at the Taj. Soon thereafter, Delhi was informed and the NSG asked to be rushed to
Mumbai. In Mumbai itself, the only forces capable of responding quickly and adequately, were the Marine Commandos (MARCOS), based across the harbour. They, a full 100 of them, could have been on the scene within the hour, two at the most. The call for them took long in coming and they reached much later than they could have. Meanwhile, in Delhi, 200 NSG Commandos took two hours to reach the airport from Manesar and they waited another two for an IAF aircraft to come from Chandigarh. Yet, as they waited, there were at least one dozen Boeing aircraft belonging to our own airlines on the tarmac, any one of which could have been requisitioned immediately; surely, the Cabinet Secretary has the power and clout to do so. Considering that so many commandos were being sent, it was known that the situation was grave and required warlike responses. This inability to take hard decisions by people who have both authority and accountability has been allowed to go on without them being called to question. A third issue concerns actual operations. It is essential that in such cases requiring involvement and interface of many agencies, all business should be controlled through an Operations Centre which would have access to the developing scenarios, have knowledge of resources and allot them to places where they are needed most with appropriate directions. It would also interface with the media. This mechanism was totaling lacking. Someone called in the Army, as in “aid to civil power” and the GOC went about claiming that everything would be over in two hours when, in actual fact, none of his people had even entered any of the affected sites. He was followed by the GOC-in-C from Pune, who offered the same words of solace. The media, which should have been stopped at the Regal Cinema, lay sprawled around off Gateway, with great bravery and devotion to their duty it must be granted, but not commensurate with the needs of the operation. Frequent briefings by a well-informed person, every one hour or so, would have been more appropriate. All these inadequacies and failures are not those of politicians but of people at the delivering end. It will be distressing if, in the aftermath of the Mumbai carnage, accountability of decision makers is not recognised and dealt with. We may, and should, learn lessons and put missing capabilities in place but these can never help if the people who operate the system cannot stand up to the stresses. And, if they do not, they must be held accountable. No organisation, military included, has ever suffered or got demoralised if its superior authorities have been called to question for their inability to deliver. Generals and Admirals have been summarily dismissed for much
less. The writer is a former member of the National Security Advisory Board |
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Living in the Dog-Years
God, in the beginning, had given 30 years to the Man. The Man thought that it was too short a spell to enjoy the pleasures of the world and begged God to add about 70 years more to his lifespan. God had nothing left in his stock as he had distributed the “lifetimes” to the entire animal kingdom. The Man requested, entreated, pleaded, and beseeched God for more; the habit that he has since adopted and whenever goes to the abode of the Almighty asks for more and more and more. God, at last, slashed 30 years from the life of the bull, 25 from the life of the dog and 15 from that of the owl and gave these to the Man. The Man returned to the world happy but soon discovered that the first 30y years that God had initially given to him were really his own and the most pleasant and enjoyable. The next 30 years he lived more the life of a bull than a Man. Yoked by kith and kin and burdened with the affairs of the family, he pulls the household-cart never-resting, puffing and snorting. After 60, his life resembles that of a dog. ‘Bow-Wow’, he does. Nobody listens to him. Even his children pay little heed to what Papa Mia says but living on the borrowed age of the dog, he keeps on barking on this or that occasion. Quite a few wobble their tails even in front of those who give them the chew. A few in the age-group have shown their existing but invisible collars and leashes to me. The dog years fall so heavy on the Man that a microscopic number touches the owl-age. Like a wise owl, an octogenarian silently watches all that is happening around him and more than often dozes off during days and is wakeful during nights keeping “tu-whit” choked to his throat afraid of disturbing his nears and dears. I am happy in my dog-years. I write and when “middle” gets published, I feel contented that I have been able to acquaint others with my ‘Bow-Wow’. I live in a secluded corner of Shimla and there is only my wife with me who enjoys total liberty to give or not to give ears to my yap. I was real brain during the man-years of my life and did not choose philosophy as my subject; otherwise, who knows, at this age I could have behaved like Diogenes. Who Diogenes? He was a Greek philosopher in 350 B.C. and disdaining social niceties lived like a dog — naked and scratching — so earned the nickname ‘the Dog’. The citizens of Athens, during banquets, threw bones at him. He showed his gratitude by urinating on their
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Recession clarifies choices
Not a lot of cheer this year: For roughly half the British workforce, this was the first Christmas during a recession, the first when the economy people directly caught up in it all, truly frightening.
There are some gainers, for example, people who are able to take advantage of the vicious cuts in prices so evident in the stores. But for most of us, and for our society as a whole, it is period of worry and loss. Economic success is better than economic failure. Maybe the wrong people sometimes benefit from the former but a lot of good people are, through no fault of their own, savaged by the latter. So it takes a particularly developed sense of schadenfreude (or maybe just smugness) to welcome recession. But just as a downturn has an economic function in forcing efficiency on companies and eventually governments, so it has a social function in making us recalibrate our priorities. What do we as human beings really, really want? Religious leaders have had their say on this and some environmentalists have been able to welcome the slowdown as in the first instance at least it reduces demand for energy and will, for a while, hold back our demands on the planet. But what can economists say that might be helpful assuming that is that anyone still trusts them? Well, there is some theory around. There is, for example, the notion of revealed preference. This is simply that people reveal what they want by what they do. You don’t need to assume that if they spend money on a new car instead of a holiday, or even setting it aside for a pension, that this makes them happier. If people choose to do something what they want to do and if a government tries to stop them, for example, by increasing road tax, then, at the very least the government should recognise that they are going against people’s wishes. There is another which is even more important, opportunity cost. It is an awkward expression but it means that whenever you choose to do something, you are passing by the opportunity of doing something else, the next preferred option. So if the government spends X amount on subsidising the railways, it cannot spend that on, say, improving the roads. So the opportunity cost of better railways is worse roads. Just like the government, we make such choices all the time in our day-to-day lives, choosing between the car and the holiday, or more fundamentally between saving and spending. But during the boom years we are not really forced to confront the consequences of our actions because we can always assume that, at some time in the future, we can row back on our action and correct what might have been an unwise decision. Growth puts a bandage over the wound of a wrong choice: wait a bit and it will get better. There is not now going to be much growth for a year or so. The latest figures show that growth did continue until the middle of this year but that since then things have slipped back. Of course, it is conceivable things may move outside all post-war experience, in which case all sorts of really alarming possibilities might occur. But even if it is a normal recession in its depth, that is still enough to make people, companies and governments much more explicit about their choices. This Christmas you can see this already starting to happen. Until the last couple of days sales have been very flat, hence the discounting. So people are deciding that money is better saved or spent on necessities rather than buying additional stuff. The shift is small individually but massive collectively. There is another even more obvious switch. People are not buying big-ticket items, hence the slump in car sales. That is something that can easily be put off for a year, just as buyers did in previous downturns. That is rough on the manufacturers but inevitable. Food sales, on the other hand, have held up well. One broader consequence will probably be that consumption as a proportion of GDP declines. We will save more and invest more, and spend rather less.
This is showing through in the savings statistics. We have since the middle 1990s been gradually cutting down on saving as a proportion of income, because during the good years people always reckoned they could save more at some stage in the future, or thanks to the rising value of their house, did not need to save at all. So savings almost disappeared. Now they are creeping up again. People who save are explicitly making a choice between consumption now and consumption at some stage in the future and vice versa, so they have been making a decision to let the future take care of itself, whereas now they will be setting aside more for a rainy day. Ask more people whether they would rather have a more expensive car now and a worse pension later and most would, I think, go for the pension. There will be some tough choices made on our behalf by the government too. For several years now, the government has been spending significantly more than it took in by way of taxation, a decision that transfers the burden of current spending to future generations of taxpayers. During the boom years the scale of this transfer was not clear; now with the soaring deficit it has become much more evident, though to some extent obscured by the cut in VAT. As the deficit has widened a real debate has begun over the morality of loading a larger burden on to our children and children’s children so that we can live better now. The opportunity cost of spending now is less spending or more taxation in the future. That debate should have taken place during the fat years; it took recession to force us to confront the issue. No one should welcome recession. But if it forces us to be more thoughtful about our choices well, that is surely a silver lining to a rather dark cloud. — By arrangement with
The Independent |
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The flour of our youth
I’m in the kitchen. Phelan, my 4-year-old daughter, is in the dining room. I’m mixing dough. Phelan has opened a bag of flour the size of a ham. I don’t know this. I should.
I hear her yell, “Snow, snow, snow!” I hear, “It’s winter!” I hear, “Snowball!” I’ve been looking out the kitchen window as the mixer whirs away. Whenever I bake, I think about my mother. The day is sunny, snowflake-free. There’s a space between the time I hear something and the moment I figure out what it means.
“Slippy,” my daughter, fluent in Pittsburghese, says. “Cold.” Flour is everywhere — in her hair, in the stereo, in her shoes. Later I’ll find flour in her underwear and flour in her socks. But right now, she smiles up at me, flour stuck like snowflakes in her eyelashes, smudged on her pink cheeks, caught in the blonde pigtails that stick out like antennae. “Look at me,” she says. “I’m baking.” Every year around the holidays, my husband, who hates chaos, flees, and the kids and I make a lovely mess. For my daughter, it’s flour. My son, Locklin, 7, has moved on to dough. Dough makes great quicksand for his toy soldiers. Dough makes a good mustache. Dough sticks to his sister’s butt. The kids have their own rolling pins. They help measure sugar and cinnamon. Phelan gets distracted and gets a bowl, pours herself a nice cinnamon-sugar mix and eats it with a spoon. When I was growing up, I didn’t get to bake with my mother much. It made her nervous. “I don’t like people in my kitchen,” she’d say as she anchored a childproof gate between the kitchen and dining room. She said the gate was “to keep the dog out.” The dog — a sensitive poodle named Tina II — and I would sit outside the gate and watch my mother break eggs with one hand and toss the shells into the trash in one fluid motion, like a magic trick. She’d turn on the easy-listening station and hum and glide from refrigerator to counter and back. My sad mother the magician. My lonely mother the dancer. How had this happened? The dog and I sulked and waited until my mother passed a peace offering — batter-covered beaters, one for me, one for the dog — over the gate. I know now that my mother loved the solitary time baking gave her. It offered an excuse to detach from the world, from the dog and my father and me, and make something her own. It’s what I do when I write, when I close my office door and leave my children and husband on the other side. “A room of one’s own,” Virginia Woolf called it. Space to make something beautiful. When I did get to bake with my mother, we made handprint sugar cookies. My job was to put my hands onto the rolled-out dough and hold still. Real baking — the breads, nut rolls, all the family traditions — my mother did alone. It wasn’t until after my son was born, a few years before she died, that my mother finally gave in and decided to teach me. I’d like to say I was a natural, that all those years of watching paid off, but it’s not true. Our first lesson, bread, was a disaster. My mother told me to be at her house at 5 a.m. Mornings make me want to weep. I was late, 5:15, and I looked a mess. My mother wasn’t happy. Her gray hair was curled. She had on her favorite track suit, purple velour with gold piping at the cuffs, and was wearing tennis shoes. She looked like she’d been waiting for hours. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “You have to start bread early.”
I didn’t know what that meant. I also didn’t know what she meant when she said, “Bread is serious business. Bread is no joke.” I laughed during my lesson, my forearms buried in a swamp of sticky dough. My mother whacked me on the arm with her wooden spoon.
“Look,” she said. “Do you want to learn or not?” She picked up her bowl of dough and pulled it to her belly like a child. She dipped one arm in and lifted the dough up and over, whipping more than kneading, the muscles in her arm flexed and solid and nowhere near 70 years old.
“This is how you do it,” she said. “You have to work it. You have to mean it.” My mother talked about yeast and bread as living things — things to conquer, things you could kill if you weren’t careful. She didn’t use measuring cups and spoons. “You just know,” she said, her hands measuring flour and sugar by weight, by how it moved through her fingers. “You can feel it.” She’s been dead five years now. I still feel the weight of that.
“You need to learn how to do this,” she’d said. “Because when I die, then what?” In the dining room, my daughter helps me spread more flour on the table. We laugh and smooth out the mounds until there’s just a dusting. I separate the dough into bowls, one for each of us. My son rolls his into tiny balls. He launches them like cannonballs with his thumb. My mother wouldn’t appreciate our approach, but within a few hours the house will fill with smells I remember from childhood, and I’ll lay the golden loaves onto racks to cool. — By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
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Climate: The missing links
The recent UN climate convention at Poznan, Poland, has failed to make any significant contribution to resolving the complex issues related to climate change and thereby checking the relentless march towards environmental disaster. This failure reflects some deep-rooted limitations of western thinking on this issue which limit the scope for wider change that is badly needed. In a statement before the Poznan Convention, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said that a strong case for tackling climate change can be made purely in terms of pragmatic economics. Indeed, the prevailing wisdom on the international scene appears to be that as long as energy-use pattern can be shifted fast enough from greenhouse gas emitting sources to other sources, climate change can be tackled. This view, however, ignores the fact that the existing serious crisis has been created by just one-fourth of the people achieving a desirable pattern of life. As more people aspire for this, the energy levels required may be simply too huge to be met by “zero-greenhouse” sources despite their rapid rates of growth. Secondly, while climate change is surely the most urgent issue, we should not exclude other aspects of environmental ruin and resources depletion which will intensify as the demands on earth’s resources increase rapidly. Thirdly, while the renewable sources have certainly proved environment-friendly at the small-scale levels at which these have been mostly tapped so far, the same cannot be said when these are scaled up to gigantic levels. Al Gore has been in the forefront of bringing climate change to the center-stage in the US. In the New York Times, he proposed a 5-point programme for the US: Offer large-scale investment in incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants and wind farms; plan and construct a unified national grid for the transport of renewables electricity from rural areas to cities; help automobile industry to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on renewable electricity; retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy-efficient windows and lighting; and put a price on carbon at home and lead the world’s efforts at Copenhagen next year. All this may be eminently sensible for the US, but again there is no word here on the need to check or curb consumerist lifestyles which place such a heavy burden on environment. At a time when facilitating technology transfer is emphasised so much, it is also useful to note that Al Gore has emphasised construction of a unified national grid to transfer renewable electricity from rural to urban areas. From India’s point of view, a more attractive option may be to make villages (or clusters of smaller villages) self-reliant in terms of meeting their energy needs of a more viable and diversified economy (much along Gandhian lines). This merely serves to remind us that the priorities of developed countries may not be our priorities, and it is best to build our own R and D base so that solution most appropriate to our own conditions can be found. |
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