The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Pakistan did it!
What more proof does the world need?

It was suspected all along and India had been warning the world leaders repeatedly but it just did not register with them that the Pakistani government and military were behind nuclear proliferation. Now no less a person than its disgraced scientist A Q Khan has admitted that he exchanged and passed blueprints and equipment to China, Iran, North Korea and Libya at the behest of the government, and he was later forced to take the rap for it. The 74-year-old father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme who ran the world’s largest nuclear blackmarket reveals that “probably with the blessings of BB (Benazir Bhutto, who became Prime Minister in 1988), General Imtiaz (Benazir’s defence adviser, now dead) asked … me to give a set of drawings and some components to the Iranians … The names and addresses of the suppliers were also given to the Iranians”. These and many other equally damning revelations have been made in a four-page secret letter addressed to his Dutch wife Henny, which was written after his arrest in 2003 and has now been revealed by the Sunday Times.

He has taken out his frustrations against the scheming government officials and generals by saying that “the bastards first used us and are now playing dirty games with us”. He has even mentioned that “they might try to get rid of me to cover up all the things they got done by me”.

Khan sent a copy of the damning letter to his long-time journalistic contact Simon Henderson in 2007. Henderson says the US and other western powers shoved Islamabad’s rampant proliferation (while blaming it on Khan) under the carpet to get its cooperation in the war on terror. Basically, Washington was slumbering when Pakistan began its nuclear proliferation and winked at it when it was discovered. While Khan has nailed Pakistan’s lie about its nuclear wrong-doings, former President Musharraf has also admitted that the US aid ostensibly meant for fighting terrorism was diverted for use against India. It is strange that despite all this, the US has not declared Pakistan a rogue state. Its continued supping with the perpetrator of such heinous crimes presents America in a poor light.

Worthy directive
Time to hasten action on mercy petitions

The Supreme Court’s directive to the Union Government to expedite action on petitions filed by convicts sentenced to death for the President’s pardon is apt and timely. Unfortunately, of the 300 people on death row at present, 28 have been waiting for years for the President’s decision on their mercy petitions. A Bench comprising Justice Harjit Singh Bedi and Justice J.M. Panchal has not only pulled up the government for the inordinate delay in disposing of the mercy petitions but also maintained that if it does not intend to grant clemency to them, the convicts should exercise their right to seek commutation of their death sentence to life imprisonment. Otherwise, it will be violative of the citizens’ right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution, it said. The ruling is eminently sensible because commutation of a death sentence will end a convict’s period of uncertainty, agony and trauma between life and death once and for all.

Though the President exercises her discretionary power to grant pardon under Article 72 of the Constitution (or a state governor under Article 161), in the exercise of this important power, the President has to act on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers. It is in this context that the Bench has squarely put the onus on the Union Government for the long delay in disposing of the mercy petitions and said that it is not fulfilling its constitutional duties.

The Bench has rightly held that if the government sits on mercy petitions for a long time, it will obliterate the very underlying philosophy of according the death penalty — that it should be retributive as also act as a deterrent. While adjudicating on a condemned drug addict’s petition in Madhya Pradesh who killed his wife and five children four years ago, the Bench dismissed his plea for commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment but took note of the larger point that mercy petitions will have to be cleared expeditiously. The Centre would do well to appreciate the apex court’s concern over the issue from both humanitarian and constitutional angles and hasten action on mercy petitions.

Thought for the Day

Money can fetch you bread alone. Do not consider it as your sole end and aim.— Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa

ARTICLE

Tharoor’s twitter
Politicians should change their mindset
by S. Nihal Singh

We are witnessing a clash of cultures, rather than civilisations, as Mr Shashi Tharoor is discovering to his cost. In his incredible journey from a long-time United Nations functionary to becoming a political star, he has missed out on the country’s cultural and political mores. They require more than the flaunting of the dress of his home state Kerala.

India’s political world has not caught up with the new, predominantly Western, culture of communication well-heeled Indian teenagers have adopted as readily as duck takes to water. Mobiles might have become politicians’ inseparable companions, but their world does not extend to new networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Many of India’s parliamentarians have rural or small town background, in keeping with the complexion of the bulk of the country. And unlike the older generation of leaders, often schooled abroad or in elite institutions at home, most are uncomfortable in English.

But more than the composition and language prowess of our politicians, there are no-go areas a Minister of the Central Government enters at his peril. He does not tweet and he does not perform the somewhat comical task of explaining what the idiomatic expression “holy cow” means. Nor can he use, even in affirmation, the expression “cattle class” to denote economy class passengers, quite apart from the charade the economy measures announced by the Government are fast becoming.

It is, of course, not entirely Mr Tharoor’s fault. His rise in the political firmament has been so swift that he has hardly had time to catch his breath since he lost his foolish bid to seek the top United Nations job. Apart from brief family visits, he returned home after some three decades, obtained a Congress ticket to contest elections, won, and was crowned Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs.

To begin with, he was rapped on the knuckles for ensconcing himself in a five-star hotel in the capital, but then he was in the company of his superior, Mr S.M. Krishna. It was not a question of paying for luxury out of one’s pocket, but one of his and the party’s image. It did not quite gel that just when India’s Finance Minister was sounding the bugle of austerity, two of the Central ministers were patronising different five-star hotels for extended stay.

Although the rubric “Congress culture” has come to acquire pejorative connotations, the sense of outrage in the party over Mr Tharoor’s tweeting is indicative of its feelings. It is perhaps unprecedented that a Congress chief minister and a member of the Central Cabinet should publicly demand his resignation. Admittedly, to Congressmen, the term cattle to describe aam aadmi is impermissible, nor did they take kindly to the supposedly unflattering reference to the holy cow, read literally.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party’s condemnation of Mr Tharoor’s clever turn of phrase was par for course. At a time of unprecedented churning in the party the BJP had been looking for any opportunity it could for slamming the Congress, and Mr Tharoor provided a tasty morsel.

Protecting the cow is among the cherished tasks of the Hindutva brigade.

Mr Tharoor’s predicament holds other lessons. If he belongs to the tweetering classes, so do armies of Indian teenagers who have gallantly sprung to his defence. Traditionally, many domestic and foreign observers have railed against the two Indias: the modern and not-so modern or the well fed and the poor. But now a rift is opening up between the tweeterers and the political class distinctly in the non-tweetering category. How will politicians communicate with many of the young in future?

One solution would be to train politicians in tweetering. They do not even have to acquire proficiency in English because the web is linguistically versatile and caters to many language streams. The difficulty would be in changing the mindset. It is not a mere mechanical question of tweetering but one of a disinclination to converse with friends and supporters through tweets.

And there is the warning of the L.K. Advani election campaign in which he employed all the guiles of the web, to no avail. Many will recall the friendly greeting of Mr A.B. Vajpayee over their mobile telephones in the 2004 general election campaign. It did not yield political dividend.

Is there then something inimical about twittering in the Indian political ethos? Perhaps with the introduction of 3 G, mobile telephones, which are becoming an extension of the Indian self, might one day be employed as an effective tool of political communication. The politician’s interest is in communicating with his supporters and potential voters and there is no way Indian masses will respond to tweeting as far as the eye can see.

Mr Tharoor forgot another rule of Indian politics and life, propriety. Much of Indian society is basically conservative and believes there is something undignified about an honourable Minister of the Central Government employing his time, even outside office hours, to tweeting for one and all. Their verdict thus far: a precocious boy who has not grown up.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has understandably made light of his junior Minister’s frolics, but many in the Congress party are asking the question: Will he survive his indiscretion? Political folly can have a high price if the majority of party men and women feel that their amour propre has been hurt. Whatever the idiomatic uses of the expression holy cow, the symbolism hurts, if only because the Opposition is employing it to blacken the Congress image.

Has Mr Tharoor then come to the Indian political scene before it is ready for him? Or is it more a personal inability to adjust to the mores of the party and the country after living abroad for long in the capacity of an international civil service? Or does he delight in being contrary?

The jury is still out, but Mr Tharoor will perhaps find consolation in the thought that his political career, however short-lived, will provide him much material for his next book — to add to his already prodigious output.

MIDDLE

Tweet, Tweet
by Roopinder Singh

Cathryn Donaldson is now following your tweets on Twitter,” said an e-mail recently. I racked my brains, but while the first name did ring a bell, the second did not. Cathryn is not an uncommon name in the US, and during my years there I had known a Cathryn or two ... maybe the Donaldson was acquired after marriage....

For the uninitiated, tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. They are displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

Even as the brain was abuzz, the eyes were sending sensory data that broke through my reverie: “A little information about Cathryn Donaldson: 0 followers, 1 tweet, following four people. Ah! This was not a blind follower, just another newbie who had clicked blindly.

My exposure to tweets started long before Twitter.com came on the scene. I was a fan of Tweety Bird, a Yellow Canary cartoon character. Like many others, I thought that “tweet” was a typical onomatopoeia for the sounds of birds, but that was before the Internet began changing words and their context.

I must confess that I do not twit. My first and only tweet was on April 17 this year, an embarrassingly inane one-liner, and till date I have just discovered that it netted me 18 followers! Now, I thought that political and religious figures had followers, so it was a pretty heady experience, till I realised that these were my friends who were far from being followers, mine or anyone else’s.

I have steadfastly refused to include people I don’t know into my online orbit, and this works well on Facebook, where people mutually agree to let one another into their electronic lives. Twitter, on the other hand, by default, lets people share updates and links with anyone who wants to read them. Thankfully, it has an option: “You may follow Cathryn Donaldson as well by clicking on the “follow” button on their profile. You may also block Cathryn Donaldson if you don’t want them to follow you.” Since I don’t know her, I would rather not have Cathryn will follow my tweet, or two (another has been added now).

Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide and is used by all — right from the White House to Shashi Tharoor, formerly of the UN and recently of the bovine fame. While some, like Veer Sanghvi, have thousands of followers and interesting tweets like the following: “We like hosting the Games because it gives us a national high for two weeks. Investing in sportsmen would give us a high for decades.” Most of the tweets are, well, just that, chirping notes, exactly what the word has meant since 1768.

Most of the tweets are not even cheerful or lively. Do they even have a meaning? Sometimes, I really wonder, ‘Will I tweet?’ Not unless I have something to say, something of some import. Meaningless words, even those well strung together, are just that — meaningless.

OPED

Inter-linking of rivers
The project requires faster implementation
by Arabinda Ghose

Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s recent statement in Tamil Nadu opposing the inter-linking of rivers on the ground of environment has drawn criticism from Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, who has reminded Rahul that the programme was finalised by his grandmother, Mrs Indira Gandhi, and that Tamil Nadu has undertaken the interlinking of the rivers in the state, pending finalisation of the projects at the national level.

Close on the heels of this statement has come one from Mr Ashok Singhal, the international president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad opposing the scheme.

A number of eminent engineers too have opposed the scheme. Among them was the late Mr Debesh Mukherjee, Chief Engineer of both the Kosi and Gandak projects in Bihar during the early 1960s and who later built the massive Farakka Barrage across the Ganga in Murshidabad district of West Bengal.

During the day-long meeting of the Bihar-Jharkhand Development Council last year in New Delhi in the wake of the Kosi floods in Bihar eminent engineers Kamta Prasad and T. Prasad had expressed reservations about the inter-linking project. “Environmentalists”, of course, oppose all such projects.

However, the inter-linking and long-distance transfer of river waters have taken place in India (and elsewhere too) since the 19th century. In 1886 the Secretary of State for India and the Maharaja of Travancore had signed a 999-year-long agreement for the transfer of some volume of water from the Mulla Periyar river in the mountainous area of Travancore to the Vaigai river in the Madras province for providing irrigation waters to Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) and Madura (Madurai) districts for irrigation.

This had transformed the people of these two districts, some of whom were being accused of being cattle-lifters, into rich landlords. In gratitude, the Tamil people wrote and sang ballads in praise of the man who built that dam, engineer Pennycot.

Just before the river Tungabhadra, flowing through today’s Karnataka state joins the Krishna river in Andhra Pradesh near Kurnool-Alampur, a canal takes off to join about 6,135 kilometres to the south, the river Pennar near Cudappa (Kadapa) in the drought-prone Rayalseema region, in the 1930s. This canal was built by Sir Arthur Cotton. He had also built the Dowlaiswaram Barrage across the Godavari near Rajahmundry, which provides irrigation to the east and west Godavari districts, converting them into granaries. The people of Andhra Pradesh have built a statue to honour Engineer Cotton.

Delhi receives its drinking water supply from not only the western Yamuna canal, work on which had begun during Feroze Shah Tughlak’s time, but also from both the Bhakra and Tehri dams.

Chennai has been provided with drinking water from the Sri Sailam dam in Andhra Pradesh, 460 kilometres to the north, through what is now known as the Telugu Ganga canal. Bengaluru receives part of its drinking water supply from the Cauvery, a couple of hundred kilometres to the north. Mumbai will also replenish its drinking water supply by transferring waters from the proposed Damangana-Munjal link in Gujarat-Maharashtra.

The Grand Anicut across the Cauvery in Tamil Nadu was built about 1,500 years ago by the Chola kings. It is a water transfer project and still operates.

River water disputes are not new. The Shakya and Kolia clans in ancient India, from whom came Lord Buddha and his mother Queen Maya respectively, had nearly gone to war over the sharing of the waters of the river Rohini, on the border of the two republics, according to ancient historical records.

India’s river-linking project was envisaged by eminent engineer K. L. Rao, Indira Gandhi’s Irrigation Minister from 1962 to 1971.

The project was later modified during 1979-80 as the National Perspective for Water Resources Development in May 1980. This is called the Inter-linking of rivers project.

Work had begun in 1982 but had got a boost during 2002 in view of the severe drought that year when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister. His proposal to set up a task force was supported, among others, by the then Leader of the Opposition, Mrs Sonia Gandhi. It is, therefore, a national project, not a Congress or BJP project.

Thirty river links are proposed under this scheme, 16 of the Peninsular and 14 of the Himalayan components .Widespread consultations were held during the five years of UPA rule from 2004 to 2009 and it is likely there is a consensus on its implementation.

The National Commission on Applied Economic Research (NCAER) too has gone into the pros and cons of this scheme and has expressed opinion in its favour. One hopes this scheme will be implemented in the coming years.

The writer is a former Special Correspondent of The Hindustan Times and a former member, Communications Core Group, Inter-linking of Rivers

US rethinking Afghan strategy
by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung

From his headquarters in Kabul, Gen. Stanley McChrystal sees one clear path to achieve President Obama's core goal of preventing al-Qaida from reestablishing havens in Afghanistan: "Success," he writes in his assessment, "demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign."

Inside the White House, the way forward in Afghanistan is no longer so clear.

Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for "executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy," there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then.

A disputed presidential election, an erosion in support for the war effort among Democrats in Congress and the American public, and a sharp increase in U.S. casualties have prompted the president and his top advisers to re-examine their assumptions about the U.S. role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.

Instead of debating whether to give McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, more troops, the discussion in the White House is now focused on whether, after eight years of war, the United States should vastly expand counterinsurgency efforts along the lines he has proposed — which involve an intensive program to improve security and governance in key population centers — or whether it should begin shifting its approach away from such initiatives and simply target leaders of terrorist groups who try to return to Afghanistan.

McChrystal's assessment, in the view of two senior administration officials, is just "one input" in the White House's decision-making process. The president, another senior administration official said, "has embarked on a very, very serious review of all options." The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

Obama, appearing on several Sunday-morning television news shows, left little doubt that key assumptions in the earlier White House strategy are now on the table. "The first question is: Are we doing the right thing?" the president said on CNN. "Are we pursuing the right strategy?"

"Until I'm satisfied that we've got the right strategy, I'm not going to be sending some young man or woman over there — beyond what we already have," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press." If an expanded counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan contributes to the goal of defeating al-Qaida, "then we'll move forward," he said. "But, if it doesn't, then I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or ... sending a message that America is here for the duration."

National security adviser James Jones said Sunday that McChrystal's assessment "will be analyzed as to whether it is in sync with the strategy that the president announced in March."

The assessment "could be accepted in its entirety," Jones said. Alternatively, he added, the White House could seek additional analysis from McChrystal, or Defense Secretary Robert Gates could issue new guidance to him about his mission and strategy.

In his 66-page assessment, McChrystal does not address other approaches to combating the Taliban. A senior U.S. military official in Kabul said the general was operating under the assumption that the earlier White House endorsement of a counterinsurgency approach "was a settled issue."

McChrystal said he thinks the way to meet the president's relatively narrow objective of denying al-Qaida's return to Afghanistan involves a wide-ranging U.S. and NATO effort to protect civilians from insurgents by improving the Afghan government's effectiveness.

That means not only more troops, but also a far more aggressive program to train Afghan security forces, promote good local governance, root out corruption, reform the justice sector, pursue narcotics traffickers, increase reconstruction activities and change the way U.S. troops interact with the Afghan population.

The implicit recommendation is that the United States and its NATO partners need to do more nation-building, and they need to do it quickly.

Improving the Afghan government, McChrystal says — particularly the effectiveness of its security forces and its ability to deliver basic services to the population — is as critical as offensive actions against insurgents. He defines the defeat of the Taliban not as the moment when the insurgents are vanquished, but when the international community has built a strong enough Afghan government so that "the insurgency no longer threatens the viability of the state."

Although McChrystal does not make a request for a specific number of troops in the assessment — he has prepared, but not yet submitted to the Pentagon, another document that outlines his resource requests — senior military officials said they expect him to call for a significant increase in forces to implement the strategy.

But senior U.S. officials in Washington contend that much about Afghanistan has changed since March, when Obama stood before a row of flags, flanked by his secretaries of state and defense, and announced the new strategy. The dynamics have even shifted since McChrystal arrived in mid-June and began his assessment.

The principal game-changer, in the view of White House officials, was Afghanistan's presidential election last month, which was compromised by fraud, much of it in support of President Hamid Karzai. Although the results have not been certified, he almost certainly will remain in office, but under a cloud of illegitimacy that could complicate U.S. efforts to promote good governance.

Congressional Democrats have also expressed new doubts about sending more forces to Afghanistan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said last week that she does not "think there's a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or the Congress." Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., an influential voice on military matters, said the administration should not send additional forces until more Afghan soldiers have been trained.

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Delhi Durbar
Mamata begins austerity drive

Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee’s instructions for austerity drive in her ministry have had officials worried. Following the UPA government’s move for austerity, which Mamata herself has followed by even refusing ministerial accommodation, she sounded out her officials to follow her instructions.

She has taken several cost-cutting measures to reduce additional expenditure. As a first step the Railway Ministry has stopped providing lodging facilities to its officials at five-star hotels. Instructions have also been given to cut other unwanted expenses. With the minister herself following the drive judiciously, there is no option for the officials also but to follow suit.

Thieves target scribes covering SC

The Supreme Court was one of the places where security was revamped and tightened in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai blasts.

Metal detector gates, microchip readable automated entries, closed circuit (CCTV) surveillance, x-ray machines to scan bulk material and thorough frisking were among the measures introduced since then.

Strangely, nothing seems to have deterred petty thieves who go about their business stealthily in crowded places, the Supreme Court being one of these. Media persons had been their targets in the past fortnight.

A fax machine installed at the main press lounge went missing two weeks ago following which the officials lodged a police complaint. Even before the baffled security could fathom what had hit them, a laptop bag containing a cell phone and valuable bank and other documents, except the mini-computer the thief was perhaps looking for, vanished, again from the same lounge.

The affected scribe sought to take the help of the CCTV department in a bid to trace his bag. But this move turned out to be futile as the cameras near the lounge were facing everywhere except the low-roofed room allotted to the scribes.

DGPs not happy with PC’s remarks

The meeting of DGPs of all states last week was an event at which the Union Home Minister lambasted the DGPs. Some of the DGPs were surely not happy and wanted a reality-check on matters before the police chiefs are blamed for all ills plaguing the police.

The Home Minister had remarked that the “police forces had been reduced to a football to be kicked here and there, from one post to another”. A senior officer remarked that the pitfalls of democracy had to be understood.

The political parties have to be sensitised and they have to stop their MLAs from interfering in daily policing and refrain from misusing the police to settle political scores.

The Home Minister even asked the DGPs: “Why do you remain silent when arbitrary postings and transfers are made by the state government?” Another officer commented in private that the CM’s office now routinely wants constables “of choice” in certain areas. For how long will the DGPs be put under pressure and blamed when a portion of the blame lies elsewhere?

Contributed by Girja S Kaura, R Sedhuraman and Ajay Banerjee