The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Selecting VCs
Collegium will check political interference

THE Centre’s decision to withdraw itself from the role of selecting vice-chancellors for Central Universities and assign this task to a collegium, which is to be created through an Act of Parliament, is timely. The decision announced by Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal at the Central Advisory Board of Education meeting was long overdue because political interference, especially during Mr Arjun Singh’s tenure, has marred the functioning of most Central universities. The malaise is particularly acute in state-run universities. Chief Ministers choose vice-chancellors at their whim as in Punjab, Haryana and other states and there are no criteria and transparency in the selection process. Governors, as chancellors, have failed to protect the autonomy of universities.

Mr Sibal has rightly urged the state governments to either follow the Centre’s collegium model or amend laws to allow the Centre to guarantee fair and independent selection of vice-chancellors. Today, universities have become hotbeds of politics. This has compromised the quality of teachers and education. As the vice-chancellors need to show the requisite leadership and acumen, any reform of the university will have to start from the top, by the selection of the right persons for the job.

Under the proposed mechanism, the collegium, in consultation with experts, will pick a set of nominees for posts of vice-chancellor and members of the proposed National Council for Higher Education and Research and send the list to the HRD Ministry. If the ministry is unhappy, it can return the list to the collegium for reconsideration. Two safeguards being provided in the Act are that the government cannot insist on the collegium to nominate a particular person and that no salaried government official shall be its member. This is important because the state governments are prone to appoint IAS babus as vice-chancellors. The collegium system merits a fair trial to make the vice-chancellors’ selection meaningful and transparent to insulate these posts from political interference.

Tainted blood
Culprits deserve harsh punishment

SHOCKING is too mild a word to describe the hair-raising incident at Sriganganagar, Rajasthan, where four children were given blood at a private nursing home that could be HIV-infected. The fact that the laboratory that supplied blood was unlicensed puts a big question mark on blood safety regulations in the country. During a medical emergency the availability of safe blood can make the most crucial difference between life and death.

However, India’s blood banking system suffers from several lacunae, including blood shortage. According to the 2008 figures, India has nearly 2400 blood banks and most do not maintain buffer stocks. As against the requirement of 9 million units, it was able to collect only 7 million units. The gap between demand and supply leads to malpractices in blood supply. Rajasthan was in the eye of a storm for forcing school students to donate blood. Only recently, a blood racket was unearthed in UP in which culprits were supplying adulterated blood — even mixing animal blood in some cases — and changing blood groups as per the demand. The seized samples sent to the Sanjay Gandhi Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences for testing have been found unfit for humans — the blood could prove to be fatal.

The consequences of infected blood are too serious to be ignored. While the UP Chief Minister, Ms Mayawati, has promised stern action, the Rajasthan government has ordered an inquiry into the Sriganganagar incident. However, mere promises and probes will not do. The merchants of death, whether it is the laboratory owner who has already been arrested or those involved in the blood scam in UP, should not be allowed to go scot-free. While the government must come down heavily on unauthorised blood collection centres, there is a need to ensure that blood banks, especially private laboratories, follow foolproof safety norms. Blood transfusion, meant to save precious lives cannot be allowed to kill patients.

Thought for the Day

We boil at different degrees.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

ARTICLE

Jinnah to Hafiz Saeed
Similarities in their anti-India agenda
by G. Parthasarathy

Addressing a gathering of tens of thousands of zealots at the headquarters of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (earlier calling itself the Lashkar-e-Toiba), on November 3, 2000, the Amir of the Lashkar, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, thundered: “Jihad is not about Kashmir only. About 15 years ago people might have found it ridiculous if someone had told them about the disintegration of the Soviet Union (Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics). Today, I announce the breakup of India, Inshallah. We will not rest till the whole of India is dissolved into Pakistan.”

Over the past two decades, Saeed has been publicly pronouncing a war that would encompass the whole of India. Till the terrorist outrage of 26/11 no one took him seriously. Shortly after his November 2000 speech, Saeed sent his “mujahideen” into the very heart of India’s national capital, New Delhi, to attack the historic Red Fort on December 22, 2000. Addressing a gathering of political leaders from Islamic parties shortly thereafter, Saeed proudly proclaimed that he had unfurled the green flag of Islam in the historic Red Fort.

Hafiz Saeed was and is no ordinary person. He enjoyed the patronage of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had sent Punjab Governor Shahid Hamid and his Information Minister Mushahid Hussein Syed to personally call on and pay their respects to Saeed in 1998. The Wahabi/Salafi school of Islam propagated by Saeed was patronised by Nawaz Sharif’s father, Mian Mohammed Sharif, through the Tablighi Jamaat. Moreover, at the grassroots level, the Lashkar is closely linked to the Pakistan Army and the ISI, which provide weapons, training and logistical support to the extremist group. But is Saeed’s talk of “disintegration” of India merely rhetoric of a demented mind, or does it reflect a wider strategic vision within Pakistan and particularly in its armed forces?

While the “idea” of Pakistan was first enunciated by Chaudhuri Rehmat Ali in 1933 and given shape in the Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League in 1940, the hope in Pakistan, ever since it was born, was that India would be a loose confederation, with units like the Nizam’s domain in Hyderabad and even a “Dravidistan” going their own separate ways. Jinnah often spoke contemptuously of upper caste Hindus while fostering separatism by emphasising on a separate linguistic and ethnic Dravidian identity, characterising the social ethos in South India.

While Mahatma Gandhi tried to address centuries of exploitation and alienation of Dalits in India together with leaders like Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Jinnah endeavoured to foment Dalit alienation. He also encouraged elements in princely states like Jodhpur and Travancore-Cochin to declare independence. His aim was to Balkanise India and ensure domination of the sub-continent by a minority of its population. Jinnah’s approach to the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 was motivated by the belief that after 10 years, a united Punjab and Sind in the west, together with Bengal and Assam in the east, would break away from a fragile and fragmented India.

Jinnah shared a common interest with the British in ensuring that there was a weak central government in India, incapable of firmly holding the country together. Jinnah’s aims regarding India were thus not very different from those of Hafiz Saeed, though he was a virtually agnostic Ismaili Muslim who, according to his biographer Stanley Wolpert, loved Scotch whisky and ham sandwiches! Saeed, however, espouses rabid Wahabi causes.

Saeed makes no secret of his contempt for parliamentary democracy based on the principle of “one man, one vote”. But was Jinnah’s demand for a disproportionate share of parliamentary seats for his community on the basis of their having been the “rulers” of India before the British arrived, also not a negation of the concept of “one man one vote,” which is the fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy? It was Jinnah’s quest for “parity” for a minority that forms the basis of Pakistan’s unrealistic yearning for parity with India — a yearning that has led Pakistan to disaster.

Jinnah’s successors, from Liaquat Ali Khan to Gen Pervez Musharraf, have all conducted relations with India in the belief that India’s unity is fragile. Ayub Khan launched the 1965 conflict with India believing that Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri was a weak leader facing serious separatist problems, because of the Punjabi Suba movement in Punjab and anti-Hindu riots combined with the rise of Dravidian parties in the South, apart from continuing insurgencies in the Northeast.

Gen Zia-ul-Haq set up an elaborate network to encourage separatism within India and laid special stress on creating a Hindu-Sikh communal divide in Punjab, in much the same manner as Jinnah had sought to sow doubts in the mind of Master Tara Singh. Such efforts failed the primarily because Hindus and Sikhs alike saw through Pakistan’s game-plans. The ISI effort to “bleed” India in Jammu and Kashmir is a continuation of policies that Pakistan has followed since its birth. It is shocking when Indians, who should know better, extol Jinnah’s “virtues”. His culpability in the communal holocaust he unleashed by his call for “Direct Action” cannot be condoned.

In his book, “The Shadow of the Great Game — The Untold Story of Partition”, former diplomat Narendra Singh Sarila has revealed that well before the Cabinet Mission arrived in India in 1946 two successive British Viceroys, Lord Linlithgow and Lord Wavell, had decided to partition India by creating a Muslim-majority state in its northwest, bordering Iran, Afghanistan and Sinkiang, in order to protect British interests in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Mohammad Ali Jinnah was coopted to further this British objective around 1939.

Jinnah’s efforts to impose Urdu as Pakistan’s sole national language sowed the seeds of Bangladeshi separatism and of Pakistan’s disintegration in 1971. His assumption of office as an unelected Executive Head of State, who presided over the Cabinet, led to his successors arbitrarily dismissing Prime Ministers and staging a takeover of Pakistan by a military-dominated feudal elite — a malady the country suffers from even today.

The statesmanlike visit of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to the “Minar-e-Pakistan” in Lahore signalled that India had no intention of reversing Partition and that it wishes the people of Pakistan well. The challenges that Pakistan’s establishment poses will be overcome when the values of secularism, pluralism and inclusive democratic development are established as being more enduring than the fantasies of nationhood based exclusively on religion, which Jinnah propounded, or the hate and bigotry of Hafiz Mohammed Saeed. Banning books whose contents many may find objectionable is not the way to deal with such challenges.

MIDDLE

Cops of a different kind
by Megha Mann

Corrupt, rapists, murderers, pot bellied. If this is all you think about the Punjab Police, here is something that will make you re-think. A few Punjab Police cops have a side that is lesser known to the world and they prefer to keep it under wraps.

After travelling 150 km, as I unloaded bags off my shoulder with a thud, a girl came rushing to me. I was one of many boarders, who had come to seek accommodation in the new city, where I was transferred much to my chagrin. Later, the owner of that palatial house went on to become a mother-figure and we shared nuances of life.

I asked her about the girl and she told me that she lived in the neighbourhood. At the age of two she was found crying near a shop; someone had abandoned her there, and a kind-hearted cop brought her up as her own daughter. This cop lived in the vicinity of my lodge.

When I joined office later in the day, the boss asked me where I had rented the accommodation.

“It’s a small non-descript area. Somewhere on the outskirts of the city,” I said.

“But still. You might have some landmark.”

“Yes. A senior police official stays opposite my landlord’s place.”

And he asked me his name. When I answered, he shifted back in his chair. He told me something that only a handful of people knew. A fact that changed my perception of cops. A fact about the girl that even she did not know.

My kind-hearted neighbourhood cop had found her bleeding profusely in the interiors of the walled city. The two-year-old infant was brutally raped and left to die near a garbage dump.

He took the child to city hospital, paid her bills and did not have the heart to leave her to her fate. Doctors operating on her told him that the child’s urinary tract had to be reconstructed surgically.

When the infant recovered, he brought her to his home and told his wife that he had found the child abandoned at a shop during patrol duty.

The girl is appearing for her board exams this year. She has not picked the name of the cop as her father, but that of his gardener’s. But she would always remain his child.

OPED

The Pokhran-2 controversy
India’s leadership and armed forces are satisfied with nuclear deterrent
by K Subrahmanyam

Top Indian nuclear scientists are fighting among themselves on the effectiveness of India’s nuclear tests in 1998. Dr K Santhanam, Dr P K Iyenger and Mr H N Sethna have claimed that the tests were not a full success. Reacting sharply, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam has rubbished the claims of the sceptics.
K Subrahmanyam, who has closely watched the growth of India’s nuclear programme from the beginning, has joined issue with the doubting scientists, pointing out that even a critical world has accepted India as a nuclear weapon power and the worth of its arsenal.
— Editor-in-Chief

THE present controversy over the yield of Pokhran-2 nuclear tests is not the first such development in this country of argumentative Indians. Pokhran-1 also had its share of controversy on its explosive yield. Since it was not claimed to be a weapon test at that time and there was no talk of nuclear deterrence, that controversy was less fierce than the present one. Then, too, there were people who termed it a dud.

I have heard personally Prime Minister Morarji Desai saying that there was no nuclear test and the scientists set off an explosion of a large quantity of buried conventional explosives. Others contested the claimed yield of 12 kilotons and asserted that it was only 8 kilotons. The result of the Pokhran-1 controversy survives till today and contributes to the present one. Many foreign scientists concede that they arrive at a lower yield of the Pokhran-2 test by extrapolating the lower yield of Pokhran-1 as advanced by some Indian scientists.

Controversies and personality clashes among scientists are not unknown. In the West, one has heard of the Oppenheimer-Teller clash or the one between Oppenheimer and E.O.Lawrence. In India, too, we had Bhabha-Saha clash and the deep divide between Dr Raja Ramanna and H. N. Sethna. When Vikram Sarabhai was the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission the relations between him and the Trombay establishment were quite cold. Scientists by the very nature of their vocation are highly individualistic people and they prefer to be convinced about a fact personally on the basis of evidence.

Nuclear physics is an arcane subject and in that weapon designing is even more esoteric. There are, therefore, limits to transparency on it. Moreover, this is India’s second fission test and first thermonuclear test. With the exception of two — Dr P. K. Iyengar and the late Dr Ramanna — all other weapon designing talent was involved in the Pokhran-2 test. Of the two outside, Dr Iyengar is a sceptic while Dr Ramanna, when he was alive, accepted the claimed yield.

All nuclear scientists are not necessarily familiar with the intricacies of weapon design. There is a popular tendency in the country to accept that all people associated with the Department of Atomic Energy are knowledgeable in the intricacies of nuclear weapons. This is not the case.

It has been widely propagated that many foreign scientists have questioned the yield of Pokhran-2. Usually when seismic stations monitored a nuclear test they used to announce the magnitude of the explosion in terms of ranges of yields as, for instance, a low- yield explosion of 5-15 kilotons or a medium-yield explosion of 15-60 kilotons. Very rarely was a precise yield reported. The ease with which many foreign assessments were made about precise yields made them suspect, especially when they were not familiar with geological structures and soil conditions at the test site.

The very first report from the West termed the test an earthquake. There could also be some resonance between the domestic scepticism and foreign assessments.

Dr Chidambaram, former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and head of the weapon designing team in 1998, writing in “Atoms for Peace” (Vol. 2 No. 1, 2008), cites an article in New Scientist (Mackenzie 1998) where it said, “Roger Clark, a seismologist of the Leeds University found that when data from 125 stations — closer to the number required by the treaty (CTBT) monitoring network — are taken into account the estimate is nearer 60(kilotons)”. He also refers to the finding of a world-renowned seismologist, Jack Evernden, being consistent with the official claim.

The issue was examined in a review by then National Security Adviser, Brajesh Mishra. If the weapon designers had doubts about the yield they could have conducted one more test within the first few days after the May 11 test since one more shaft was available, before any commitment was made on voluntary moratorium.

Apparently, the weapon design team did not have any doubts on the result. But on the very first day the sceptics had doubts. There was a popular view that the thermonuclear test should be of 100 kilotons and above and, therefore, this could not be a thermonuclear explosion. In any case, the shaft could not have withstood any explosion higher than 60 kilotons.

Do we conduct some more tests to satisfy the sceptics? This cannot be publicly debated just as conducting the nuclear tests was not debated. The nuclear tests of 1998 were not to pre-empt any Pakistani move but were a response to the provocative Pakistani Ghauri missile test and also to declare India a nuclear weapon state in the early days of the new BJP-led NDA government before the Americans started applying pressure on India. At that time it was expected that the CTBT would come into force in 1999.

The late P. V. Narasimha Rao had urged Mr Vajpayee to conduct the test early in 1996. It could not be done in the 13 days the BJP was in office and was carried out in May 1998. Pakistan’s tests were in response to the Indian tests and the interaction between Pakistan and the US on the issue is a matter of public record. But Pakistan had its nuclear weapon tested by China at the Lop Nor test site on May 26, 1990, according to the disclosure in the book “The Nuclear Express” by two US scientists, Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman. India lived in a state of unfavourable deterrent asymmetry in the nineties till the Shakti tests were carried out.

As Prime Ministers V.P. Singh and I.K. Gujral explained after the tests, the file to test was always on their table. Narasimha Rao came close to conducting the test. But only Vajpayee could do it by taking the world by surprise. During all that time there were no TV debates or newspaper editorials or strategists screaming about India’s vulnerability.

India became a nuclear weapon power and in the next eight years its strategic arsenal has been accepted by the international community. India has also the NSG waiver. All that happened in spite of opposition from sections of our people who preferred a confrontationist strategy with the international community.

The government leadership is satisfied with the state of our deterrent posture and so also the armed forces. In the US and Russia, too, there are people dissatisfied with the readiness of their arsenals and would like to resume testing. But the majority public opinion in those countries is opposed to it. Fission weapons of 60-80 kilotons have been successfully fabricated and standard thermonuclear warheads of today are neither in megatons nor in hundreds of kilotons. Our fission weapon capabilities are not under question. So long as the adversary believes that the nuclear explosions in his cities will cause him unacceptable damage he will be deterred.

Whether it is the CTBT, the FMCT or conducting nuclear tests, it is counter-productive to look at these issues in a narcissistic manner. We should try to exploit the opportunities as they arise. This country is just learning to do it and we have a long way to go. The need of the moment is to avoid chauvinism and steadily improve the capacity of the country to grow and deliver without demagoguery.

Single law needed for NRIs
by Anil Malhotra

AS many NRIs have settled abroad, there is need for composite legislation to deal with their legal problems. Parliament should enact a law for NRIs on family matters.

Till this is done, foreign court rulings in domestic matters will crop up and Indian courts will continue to interpret them in harmony with the Indian laws.

Solutions partly exist in the proper implementation of the existing laws, framing of regulations, the creation of family courts and fast-track courts. The following suggestions are imperative for solving the NRIs’ existing family law problems:

Registration of marriages must be made compulsory to provide proof of marriage and check bigamy. The NRI spouse must inform his registration of marriage to the embassy/High Commission concerned.

Divorce due to an irretrievable breakdown of marriage should be introduced as an additional ground when at least one of the spouses is an NRI. This would require an amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and the Special Marriage Act, 1954.

This would give the NRI spouses a judicial forum in India to seek a remedy on Indian soil rather than depend on alien courts. States must impress upon the Centre the need for this amendment.

The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 and the Special Marriage Act, 1954, must provide for maintenance and alimony, child custody and support as also settlement of matrimonial property. This will ensure maintenance of the spouse/children on Indian soil in accordance with the income of the NRI spouse abroad. Family courts should be set up in all states.

In matters of succession, transfer of property, implementation of wills and repatriation of NRI funds, the state governments must simplify and streamline procedures. Ideally, fast-track courts must be set up to deal with property cases.

The Punjab government has made amendments to the East Punjab Rent Restrictions Act and the Punjab Security of Land Tenures Act for the summary trial of disputes regarding agricultural, commercial and residential property. However, no special fast-track courts exist in most states with a high NRI population to settle these matters on priority. A fresh proposal should be mooted to set up such courts soon.

India must become a signatory to the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, 1980. Till such a treaty is signed, the states should permit liaison with foreign missions/ embassies in New Delhi through which courts should be assisted to ensure children’s return to the country of their foreign residence if they are removed in violation of foreign court orders. The administrative and police authorities in India should give uniform guidelines to assist such parents in distress.

The inter-country child adoption procedures must be simplified and single uniform legislation introduced for the adoption of Indian children by NRIs. A unified and single agency procedure is the need of the hour. The present system is too complicated and time-consuming.

These changes can be made either by providing new composite legislation for NRIs or through suitable changes in the existing legislation. A core committee of specialists in private international law should be constituted for preparing a comprehensive draft to suggest the changes in legislation.