The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

A step forward
Police attitude to the people must change

Police reforms moved a small step forward on Wednesday with the announcement of the setting up of a state security commission at the central level and police establishment boards in Union Territories. The belated official announcement comes three years after the Supreme Court issued a slew of directions to the government, only a part of which is now sought to be implemented.

While the Union Home Ministry has been pleading helplessness in persuading the states to implement the apex court’s orders, on the somewhat specious plea that law and order is a state subject, it had little or no excuse for delaying the implementation in UTs administered directly by it. But despite this week’s belated development , though in the right direction, the prospect of an independent and professional police force serving people rather than the rulers and the rich remains a distant dream.

This is mainly because the entire culture which police across the country believes in requires a big transformation for which men in Khaki are not prepared for.

But on the face of it nothing appears to have changed in the states with the police force still subservient to the politicians and bureaucrats. A fixed tenure for the police chiefs, protecting them from political whims and greater transparency in postings and transfers are indeed important but more needs to be done to inspire confidence among the people who still do not approach the uniformed men and women for help with much hope and confidence.

The UPA government must show the same resoluteness for police reforms that it has shown for education reforms and food security. The rule of the law must prevail for the Aam Aadmi to believe that when in difficulty, he or she can freely approach the police for immediate help.

Scuttling justice
Ansals deserve exemplary punishment

The Delhi High Court has rightly allowed the criminal prosecution of Gopal Ansal and Sushil Ansal for allegedly tampering with crucial evidence in the Uphaar tragedy case in which 59 cine goers were killed and several others injured in New Delhi 12 years ago. As the offence is very serious, Justice S. Murlidhar has justifiably fined both brothers Rs 25,000 each and dismissed their plea challenging the trial court order which had summoned them to appear before it in the case.

In January 2003, Additional Sessions Judge Mamta Sehgal had ordered an inquiry after some important documents related to the case were found missing from the courtroom. According to the prosecution, the Ansals had entered into a conspiracy with some court officials for destroying vital evidence.

The Ansal brothers are well known for their clout and powerful connections. All these years, they have been playing every stratagem to hoodwink the court and scuttle justice. The Association of the Victims of the Uphaar Tragedy (AVUT) has been fighting for exemplary punishment for the brothers for their culpability in the fire tragedy.

However, it failed to secure stringent punishment for them when the Delhi High Court modified the trial court order and reduced their sentence from two years to one-year jail term in December last year. The ruling came under strong criticism from the media and the public for being lenient towards the Ansals.

Clearly, if culprits like the Ansal brothers can get away so easily with minor punishment, there will be no fear of the law which will also cease to be a deterrent. Now that the High Court has allowed their criminal prosecution for tampering with the evidence, there is a need to expedite the trial and bring the Ansal brothers and others to book.

Though the Supreme Court had given them bail in this case as they were convicted under Section 304A, a bailable offence, it maintained that “the allegation of tampering with evidence is worse than charges of theft and dacoity”. The rule of law can be upheld only if the Ansal brothers are given maximum punishment for their unpardonable offences. It should not look that the rich can get away.

Thought for the Day

God lives in the cave of our mind. Let the lamp of love illuminate the cave. — The Upanishads

ARTICLE

Jinnah supported Khilafat
Putting history in correct perspective
by Anil Nauriya

The Khilafat demand, which arose in and after World War I, pre-dated non-cooperation and was not, as such, initiated by Gandhi. The non-cooperation movement of the 1920s, led by the Congress, was based on three issues: The Punjab wrongs, that is the military violence in Punjab in 1919, the demand for Swaraj and support for the Muslim grievances related to Khilafat. The last involved not simply the question of the Caliphate but the impropriety of Indian troops being used against countries with which India had no animosity.

Although the RSS, in its current narratives, has been critical of the Khilafat cause, some leading Hindutva figures were part of or supported non-cooperation. These included Dr B.S. Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha, a signatory to the October 1921 manifesto calling for non-cooperation, Dr Hedgewar who was arrested in the 1920s for his participation in the movement and Bhai Parmanand.

Incidentally, Subhas Bose also approved of the Khilafat issue being raised as part of the movement. His only objection, by hindsight, was an organisational one. In the 1930s, while reiterating the validity of the Congress stand on the Khilafat issue, he wrote that the Khilafat committees should not have been allowed to function separately from the Congress organisation.

A former RSS chief, Mr Sudarshan, has now argued that the question of the Caliph of Turkey was of little import to the Indian people and that issue was unnecessarily raised by Gandhi in disregard of Jinnah’s wishes.

The fact, however, is that Jinnah supported the Khilafat cause. On August 27, 1919, Jinnah and three others sent to Lloyd George, the then British Prime Minister, a representation on behalf of the All-India Muslim League on the Khilafat question. The representation was concerned with the position of the Sultan of Turkey as the Khalifa. The penultimate paragraph of the representation is:

“We need not add that if Great Britain becomes a party in reducing H.I.M. the Sultan of Turkey and the Khalifa of the Muslim world to the status of a petty sovereign, the reaction in India will be colossal and abiding.”

The representation was signed by M.A. Jinnah, Hasan Imam, Bhurgari and Yaqub Hasan. (Sharifuddin Pirzada, (ed.) Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah’s Correspondence, pp 71-73)

In his presidential speech at the Muslim League’s Calcutta session in September 1920, Jinnah described the Khilafat demand as one “which we consider, from a purely Musalman point of view, a matter of life and death”. (italics added) (Sharifuddin Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan: All India Muslim League Documents: 1906-1947, Vol 1, p. 544)

What Jinnah, who originated essentially in the liberal school, was opposed to was not the Khilafat cause but mass action. It is the statements expressing that reluctance which are generally cited by some scholars under the mistaken belief that he was opposed to the Khilafat demand itself.

The Khilafat demands were fortified by promises made by the British government in the course of the war and many of those who supported the demands did so because they saw that the government was reneging on assurances given.

Seervai described the Khilafat movement as “the agitation led by two brothers, Mohammed Ali and Shaukat Ali, against the abolition of the Khalifate in Turkey after World War I for the Khalif (sic) was the spiritual head of Muslims”. (Seervai, Constitutional Law of India, Vol 1, 1991, p.6).

This description of the Khilafat issue, which is both inadequate and inaccurate, conforms to a pattern adopted by some writers, especially during the last 25 years. Mr Sudarshan has given vent to a similar idea which reduces the movement to the question of the Caliphate. But if the Indian uprising of 1857 were to be summed up merely as a move to reinstate Bahadur Shah Zafar as Emperor, this may tell us something about the symbolic expression of the uprising, but not necessarily much about its causes or objectives.

The origin of the Khilafat agitation in India has to be understood in the context of the utilisation of Indian, including Muslim, soldiers “for the purpose of crushing the national spirit of the Egyptians, the Turks, the Arabs and other nations”. (Congress Working Committee Statement, October 1921, quoted in M.R. Jayakar, The Story of My Life, Vol. 1, p. 448).

The use of Indian soldiers against countries towards which they had no feelings of hostility and in a fight in respect of which some of them had a legitimate conscientious objection lay at the core of the so-called Khilafat issue.

As Srinivas Sastri reminded the Imperial Conference in June 1921 in the Great War of 1914-1918, as many as 1,2,74,000 men or “over half the total overseas forces employed in the war” came from India. (Indian Annual Register, 1922-1923 Vol. II). And as Montagu admitted after resigning as Secretary of State in March 1922, “Turkey was beaten in the main by Indian soldiers”.

To secure such participation by Indians, the British administration had made definite promises throughout the land. Maulana Azad referred to these on February 28, 1920 at the Bengal Provincial Khilafat Conference. Azad noted that in November 1914 the government proclaimed that “no operations will be conducted against the sacred seat of the Muslim Khilafat”.

Azad observed that the proclamation was widely circulated: “So much so that in every division, every district, every seat of government and in every town, the Moslems were called to assemble and copies of this declaration were read to and distributed among them by local officers”. Azad added: “No Muslim home in British India was left in ignorance of this declaration.” (Khilafat address, pp. 287-288).

It is vital to remember, therefore, that the first mobilisation stressingKhilafat and its sanctity was done by the Government of British India itself so as to secure troops for the war. A year after Lloyd George’s own assurances, offered in 1918 in the British Parliament, came the Rowlatt Bills in India and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The public feting of Gen. Dyer in England followed thereafter.

The Treaty of Sevres was signed in August 1920 though its terms had become known in May of that year. The treaty reduced Turkey virtually to a landlocked country; French, Italian, Greek and other states were to be established on mainland Turkey. An already prevailing sense of betrayal in India, and a sense of having been used, was understandable. The rest is history.

There had been widespread display of Hindu-Muslim unity in the course of the Khilafat movement. But the petering out of the movement had a less pleasant aftermath with a renewal of inter-communal tensions. In due course, these communal tensions began to be attributed to the movement itself. Some like the former RSS chief have gone so far as to relate Partition itself to these post-Khilafat communal tensions.

However, this narrative requires to be treated with some caution. First, attributing subsequent communal tensions to the Khilafat movement could be a classic case of the fallacy of “after this, therefore because of this”. Secondly, there is an aspect of this question that needs attention.

In post-Independence India, inter-communal tensions and even riots have invariably invited an enquiry into the role of the state. Why is the role of the colonial state not a subject of enquiry in the context of the riots that occurred in the wake of the Khilafat movement?

According to the late President Rajendra Prasad, the first indications at the time of the “seeds of disruption” in (north) India came from the incidents in Multan in 1922, about six months after Gandhi’s arrest. Prasad recorded that the British Deputy Commissioner in Multan at the time was believed to be at the “root of the trouble”. (Rajendra Prasad, At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi, 1961, pp. 135-136). Scholarship requires that such leads on the post-Khilafat scenario be followed up as well.

The writer is advocate, Supreme Court

MIDDLE

Twilight zone
by G G Dwivedi

It had been a long day,the six-periods ordeal followed by lunch break, familiarisation round and prep session. The long bell sounded the end of the day and beginning of a five and half years boarding school stint.

Attired in fresh whites, the mild pinch of new derby shoes, amidst fresh painted classrooms and linseed soaked furniture, I was totally out of place. The rosy picture I had painted withered away in few hours.

I was down with deep depression, cursing repeatedly at the crazy decision of traversing the whole length of the subcontinent, to choose a school some 3000 km away, nestled in the lap of Blue Mountains.

Instead of heading for the dining hall, discreetly I broke away from the marching squad. Using the tall hedge as a cover, I slowly made my way to the school guestroom, hoping against hope, that my dad might have stayed on for another day. Alas! Only if wishes were horses. The guestroom was locked. Still, I climbed up the window and peeped into the room which was empty.

In bewilderment, I began to hot-foot towards the mess and join the other housemates, hoping that my brief absence would go unnoticed. I had to halt in tracks as there was a “devil” ahead — Gurkha watchman Bahadur, with baton in hand and Khukri dangling from his side. His prime duty was to round up the lost freshers.

To avoid Bahadur, I bet a hasty retreat, walking backwards. Suddenly, I found someone’s hand on my shoulders. With a shriek I turned around. To my horror, it was our class teacher Ms Murphy. The earth seemed to slip beneath my feet. “What are you doing here, Govind!” enquired Ms Murphy. I had no answer and burst into tears, pleading “Mam, I want to go back home. I don’t want to stay on. Please help me.”

Fearing the worst, I was somewhat surprised when she walked me to a nearby culvert, with her tender hand still clutching my shoulder. Sitting beside me she empathised assuring that these moments of twilight will soon transform into a new dawn. The pang of separation will give way to moments of joy and elation.

She also shared her own childhood memories with me. It was getting dark and the sun had vanished behind the mountains. By the time we reached the dining hall, it was almost empty as everyone had left. She sat through the dinner and dropped me at the dorm.

Next morning when I got up, it was a bright day. As a 10-year-old, I felt a sudden transformation within me. I was fired with new energy and a sense of purpose. Each day as we took moved on taking small baby steps, Ms Murphy was always around to help discover ourselves. Five and half years flew by soon and many of us headed for the NDA, to start a career in the Armed Forces.

Some 16 years later, when I was attending Staff Course, I got an opportunity to visit the school with my wife and our two-month-old son. Ms Murphy by then had married our Physics teacher and was now Mrs Cherian. She at once declared herself a lucky grandmother holding our son in her lap. An elaborate English dinner was laid in our honour, specially the assorted cutlets and cheese macrony, which were my favourite.

Next morning Mr Cherian had turned up in his NCC uniform. As “First Officer” he was sporting three stars to bid us farewell. He smartly saluted me and in a heavy voice said “This is the most defining moment of my life when I am saluting a Major — my ex-student.”

It was two years back that Mr Cherian passed away due to liver disorder, leaving Ms Murphy alone, as they had no issue. When I called up to share my sentiments, Ms Murphy’s voice had not lost its old composure and a tone of assurance, even after four and a half decades. While she relieved so many of us of our loneliness and pain, she stands by herself to continue the last lap, choosing to settle down in the vicinity of the school.

Every day when the sun descends behind the Nilgiris, an elderly figure walks the desolate road, pausing at the culverts, ever-ready to lend a frail hand, to transcend the Twilight zone.

OPED

Pangs of hunger
It’s policies that make food prices rise
by Kuldip Nayar

No doubt, India’s drought is nature-made. It is due to the failure of monsoon in more than half of India that has made the country fall short by 10 million tonnes in rice and an equal quantity of sugar. But the nation could have avoided the man-made misery, the food crisis, which is because of globalisation. Massive land grabbing, displacing farmers and abnormal growth of the landless have led to a situation where those who depend on the land have been further marginalised.

Our growth rate has been hitting nearly 10 per cent for the past two decades. Even this year it is 6.1 per cent. Yet the number of the poor, roughly 70 per cent of the population, has not shown any appreciable dent. There is no paradox except that the extra earned money has gone to the pockets of the rich. The growing luxury crops for exports have told upon the cultivation of rice and wheat.

Rice has also been exported on a large scale when India needs every grain of it. The globalisation had put India under an obligation to export. But this could have been avoided if some ministers and top bureaucrats had not fallen prey to the temptation of making money under the table. The Centre has shown a lot of concern, but there is no word about an inquiry into the scandal.

India has not yet realised that the growth rate does not reduce poverty and hunger. It aggravates both. The Manmohan Singh government has not yet woken up to the fact that the model of industrial agriculture and globalised trade on food are responsible for the creation of hunger. Farmers have inevitably depended on debt for help, not realising that a debt trap is also a hunger trap. Many suicides have taken place and many more would.

The poor in India are in dire straits because the avenue of their livelihood has been destroyed, thanks to globalisation. The middle classes are even worse because they are eating inferior, not better food. Junk and processed food is forced on them through globalisation. The country is now the epicentre of the malnutrition of the poor who do not get enough. The malnutrition of the rich is because their diets have been degraded with the Americanised food culture.

President Bush made a fallacious argument when he was in office. He said the food crisis in India was because the Indian middle class has expanded more than America’s total population and is consuming more food grains. But what he does not know is that India on the whole still eats less.

A report on the Causes and Cures for Food Security which has come out in the last few days says: “President Bush’s bio-fuel policies and his protection of the grain cartel are the real reason for the price rise.” Food has been transformed into a commodity controlled by joint corporations.

The uncontrollable rise in food prices is clearly an outcome of the economic policies which have been framed to fit into the neo-liberal paradigm enunciated by the West. The government has intervened at every step to create corporate monopolies in the food system—from steel to domestic production, trade to food process, to liberalised imports to export oriented agriculture. Though the government intervention has unleashed a forced driving up food prices, it is now throwing up its hand and saying it can do nothing to control prices.

At the Global Agro-Industrial Forum meeting on April 11 last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said a steep rise in food prices would make inflation control more difficult and might hurt macro-economic stability. He, however, ruled out the return to an era of blind control to check prices. “We cannot react to such a situation by returning to an era of blind controls and by depressing agriculture terms of trade,” said the Prime Minister.

After having shaped an economy which is leading to high cost food for the poor, he has said he believes in running a “hands off economy.” This is putting the economy on autopilot for corporate control of food systems.

Imports are no longer affordable, and a model based on import dependency might be in the interest of the US government which has always used food as a weapon. It is definitely not in the interest of India’s food sovereignty, nor in the interest of the 70 per cent of India’s population, already denied access to adequate food.

A decade and more of corporate globalisation has devastated agriculture worldwide with the promise of cheap food. Yet the very forces and processes that have launched the globalisation are taking food beyond people’s reach. Prices of food are rising worldwide.

More than 33 countries have witnessed riots. India has had very high increase in prices of essential commodities. All kinds of reasons are being thrown around, including population growth. These are outrages explanations because prices have doubled over the past year, but not the population.

When India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru found that after pumping in thousands of crores in the economy through the First Five Year Plan, there was no improvement, he immediately appointed a top economic expert to find out where the money had gone.

The report showed that the extra money was pocketed by the rich. Nehru was not surprised but felt hurt that Mahatma Gandhi’s advice to the industrialists and businessmen to act as trustees had made no difference. In fact, whatever Mahatma Gandhi preached on village economy and self-reliance has not been followed at all. He is not to blame but those who run the government are.

The main reason why more hunger is increasing when India is growing financially is because the globalisation which the trio—Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia—has pushed is detrimental to the country. Economically competent, they have got lost in the theories they have themselves adumbrated for development.

What surprises me is that the Prime Minister has not set up a committee—he appoints one at the drop of a hat—to find out where the income generated through nearly the trebling of the GDP has vanished. The rich and middle classes have no doubt lined up their pockets. Still this is only a partial answer. The nation needs to know the full story.

Kennedy memoirs reveals remorse
by Rupert Cornwell

In a posthumous memoir to be published this month, Edward Kennedy frankly acknowledges the personal failings that probably kept him from the presidency – above all his “inexcusable” behaviour over the July 1969 accident at Chappaquiddick which, he says, may have hastened the death of his father, Joe Senior, the patriarch of the family dynasty, later that year.

For the first time, the long-time senator and youngest of Joseph’s four sons recounts how he made “terrible decisions” in the hours after Mary Jo Kopechne, a young worker on his brother Robert’s 1968 presidential campaign, was trapped and drowned when the car he was driving went off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts.

Frightened and confused, Mr Kennedy made the fateful decision not to go to the police until Ms Kopechne’s body was found the next day. Ultimately, he received a suspended sentence for failing to report an accident. Most important, however, the affair added to the doubts about his character, making it impossible for him to seek the White House in either 1972 or 1976.

It also helped doom his candidacy when he finally did run for the Democratic nomination – against the sitting president Jimmy Carter, who would go on to lose heavily to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

True Compass had originally been intended to appear in 2010, to mark the 50th anniversary of his brother Jack’s election to the White House, but was moved up to this autumn after Mr Kennedy was stricken with fatal brain cancer in early 2008. A copy was obtained by The New York Times, which published the first extracts
yesterday.

More perhaps than its discussion of the senator’s drinking and carousing, the 532-page book is striking for its insights into the complicated personal relationships within a fiercely competitive family: how he was tormented by a feeling of inadequacy when compared to his three brothers, all of them dead by the time Ted Kennedy reached his late thirties. “As I think back about what they had accomplished before I was even out of my childhood,” he writes, “it sometimes has occurred to me that my entire life has been a constant state of catching up.”

The brothers, he says, were close, but at the same time curiously distant. Ted, for instance, “had no idea how serious Jack’s health problems were,” for the simple reason that “it would never have occurred to us to discuss such private things with each other”.

If anything, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 was even more traumatic for the youngest Kennedy than that of the 35th president five years before. The loss led to more “self-destructive” drinking, and made it impossible for Ted to return to the Senate. Instead, he went for long sailing trips, brooding about what had happened.

He admits his conduct drove his wife, Joan, who would have drinking problems of her own, “deeper into her anguish”. The couple divorced in 1982. Mr Kennedy himself “tried to stay ahead of the darkness” by driving himself and his senate staff especially hard. But the assassinations left their mark on his daily life. He writes of how he would flinch at sudden sharp noises, and even fling himself to the ground when a car backfired.

True Compass, written with a collaborator, Ron Powers, is largely based on contemporaneous notes taken by Mr Kennedy over five decades, and recordings for an oral history project. Alongside his failings, it also displays his resilience, even when confronted by cancer when doctors gave him mere months to live. In the event, he survived a year and a half. “Approaching adversity with a positive attitude at least gives you a chance for success,” Mr Kennedy writes. “A defeatist’s attitude is just not in my DNA.”

— By arrangement with The Independent

Inside Pakistan
‘Save Musharraf mission’
by Syed Nooruzzaman

Like errant schoolboys who need the wise counsel of an elder to settle their disputes, our (Pakistani) politicians seem unable to resolve domestic disagreements without the help of foreign interlocutors.” This is how a Dawn editorial lamented at the spectacle presented by squabbling PPP and PML (N) leaders over how to deal with the situation arising out of the Pakistan Supreme Court’s recent verdict declaring the November 2007 emergency imposed by the then President, Gen Pervez Musharraf, as an unconstitutional measure.

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif wants the retired General to be tried for treason by the Pakistan National Assembly, as the apex court order says. His supporters are of the view that the former military dictator must be punished for tampering with the country’s constitution, as this may work as a deterrent for any future Army adventurer.

PPP leaders, including President Asif Zardari, however, have been in favour of forgetting about the Musharraf issue as it may ultimately derail the nascent democracy in Pakistan. Even Pakistan Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, who headed the apex court bench that delivered the verdict against Musharraf’s emergency rule, avoided pronouncing any punishment for the former President. He left it to parliament, perhaps with the belief that the PPP government might bail him out.

The PPP is doing exactly that, but it is not alone. The Saudis have emerged as the major players in the “save Musharraf mission”. Musharraf is nowadays in Saudi Arabia as a guest of the King and will remain there for a few months. Pakistan’s Interior Minister visited Riyadh this week to discuss the Musharraf issue with the Saudis. Nawaz Sharif may fly to Saudi Arabia any time now.

Saudi intervention

The Saudis are talking of an agreement reached with Musharraf before he stepped out of power. The Saudi intermediaries want the Pakistani politicians to respect the accord and spare the former military ruler.

Daily Times, however, says, “No one knows for sure if there was an ‘agreement’ not to prosecute General Musharraf. If there was, who were the parties involved? Yet no one in Pakistan will doubt that the Saudis have stepped in again to prevent Pakistan’s politicians from committing hara-kiri. The King is supposed to have even said that ‘if a party or an individual backed out of the agreement reached, Pak-Saudi relations would be affected’.”

As Musharraf enjoys very close relationship with King Abdullah, most Pakistani commentators are of the view that Sharif will ultimately fall in line and stop insisting on the former President’s trial for treason.

Public opinion

As Daily Times says, “A special relationship has always existed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but more recently Saudi ‘intervention’ has taken place to prevent Pakistani politics from breaking rational barriers and descending into violence. The Saudis rescued Sharif from rotting in jail because of their leverage with General Musharraf. They tried to bind Sharif to the ‘agreement’ on restrictive movement, with mixed success. They finally weighed in on his side when General Musharraf made a deal with the Americans to let the PPP leader, Ms Benazir Bhutto, make a comeback.” The paper also comments: “It is known to the world that wisdom has fled Pakistan. The country seeks revenge when it should be bothered about the Taliban threat which has hardly disappeared.”

In the opinion of Business Recorder, “Things have drastically changed over the last two years or so.... Since peace can be brought about among the three—the PPP, the PML (N) and Musharraf—only by compromising some important legal and constitutional mandated obligations, the Saudi efforts may not receive the kind of public approval and acceptability they have had in the past.”

In the process of all that has been happening over the Musharraf issue, Pakistani politicians have exposed their immaturity to run the affairs of their country. The failure to settle their disputes internally must have belittled the position of the entire political class in the eyes of the public.