The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Generals in land scam
Bodes ill for the image of Army

As if liquor, fuel and ration scandals were not enough, some of the top army officers of the country have now been found to be involved in a land scam. A Court of Inquiry has recommended disciplinary action against four General-rank officers and several others for alleged bending of rules to favour a private company near Siliguri. The inquiry was ordered after it was found that 33 Corps Headquarters had allowed commercial use of land adjacent to the base and even signed an MoU. The name and picture of one of the Generals figures on the admission brochure of the educational trust. What is particularly galling is that among those against whom the Army inquiry has recommended action is Lt-Gen Avadhesh Prakash, Military Secretary at Army Headquarters and one of the seniormost Generals. It has also recommended court martial proceedings against Lt-Gen P K Rath, whose appointment as Deputy Chief of Army Staff was later cancelled by the Ministry of Defence.

And even that is not the end of it. It has also come to light that the same institution was allegedly in negotiations to purchase another chunk of land belonging to the Ranikhet-based Kumaon Regimental Centre in Uttarakhand. A separate officer has also been recommended to investigate some similar lapses pertaining to military land in the area near Gangtok in Sikkim, which too comes under the territorial jurisdiction of 33 Corps. All that shows that the rot has gone very deep.

It is ironical that while the Army as a whole is doing a good job, some black sheep are out to besmirch its fair name. Two Major-Generals of the AOC faced charges of financial irregularities earlier this year. In 2007, two Lt-Gen ranked officers of the ASC were indicted in two separate cases involving irregularities in procurement of frozen meat for troops posted in Ladakh and discrepancies in procurement of dry rations. Systematic weeding out of all such elements with exemplary punishment will not only help in nipping the evil, but would also establish the fact that the Army men are still gentlemen, a few aberrations notwithstanding.

A wrong signal
Denial of permission to sue Speaker

By denying the CBI permission to prosecute the Speaker, the Punjab Cabinet has committed a blunder. It has done no favour to Mr Nirmal Singh Kahlon either. In fact, it has harmed his reputation. If he had faced the court proceedings, he would have got a chance to prove himself innocent. Now he would always remain a suspect. Nor has the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal covered itself with glory. It will be seen as patronising corruption. Along with Mr Kahlon, two IAS officers, who too were the suspects in the “cash-for-jobs” scam, have also got away with the alleged acts of corruption.

The arguments put forward by a government spokesman for the denial of the sanction are hardly tenable. The Cabinet decision, it is said, was based on the advice tendered by the Advocate-General and the Chief Secretary. Since Mr Parkash Singh Badal had already defended the Speaker when the Opposition raised the issue in the Assembly, these appointees of the government are not expected to give an opinion that goes contrary to the known position of the Chief Minister. Mr Badal had backed the Speaker saying that “everyone is innocent until held guilty by a court”. Now his government has not given the court any chance to pronounce its verdict either exonerating or convicting Mr Kahlon. The Akali Dal’s coalition partner, the BJP, has made its stand very clear. No minister from this party attended the Cabinet meeting. Perhaps, it did not want to be a party to the unseemly exercise of bailing out a corruption suspect.

The Punjab government’s decision sends a strong and clearly wrong signal to the public that Mr Kahlon has something to hide. Otherwise, where is the harm in allowing the CBI to proceed with the prosecution in an appropriate court and let the law take its own course? The government has violated the established rules of providing a clean administration, which emphasise transparency, justice and clean governance.

Thought for the Day

Make all men equal today, and God has so created them that they shall all be unequal tomorrow. — Anthony Trollope

ARTICLE

Pak plea on composite dialogue
A tactic to divert attention
by G. Parthasarathy

The Defence Minister, Mr A.K. Anthony, announced on December 18 that India was pulling out two divisions comprising 30,000 troops from Jammu and Kashmir. The announcement came in the wake of a reduction in the infiltration of ISI-backed jihadis across the Line of Control and a determined effort by the Omar Abdullah government in the state to expand, train and equip the J&K police to deal with terrorist violence, especially in urban areas. This is an eminently practicable arrangement, as there now appears to have been a change in instructions from across the LoC to the separatist leadership on how the fight for “Azadi” has to be carried forward.

The predominant emphasis on jihad has been set aside. The aim now is to seek opportunities to mobilise people by hurling baseless allegations of atrocities, excesses and even rape against the armed forces. The incident at Shopian involving the mysterious deaths of two young women appears a classical example of mobilisation through hysteria and disinformation.

The announcement of troop reductions also addresses the growingly aggressive anti-Indian propaganda unleashed by even normally restrained Pakistani political leaders like President Zardari and influential academics like Ahmed Rashid, claiming that the Pakistan Army cannot deploy more troops on its borders with Afghanistan to fight the Taliban because of an Indian “threat” on its borders. Pakistan asserts that unless the United States, the European Union and China join hands to force India to the negotiating table and mediate and guarantee a resolution to the Kashmir issue, the level of India-Pakistan tensions would be so high that the West cannot expect the Pakistan Army to confront the Taliban.

These developments are taking place at a time when the Pakistan Army establishment has successfully cornered President Zardari and his close associates by manipulating developments, to lead the Supreme Court to declare the “National Reconciliation Ordinance”, under which the present political dispensation was elected, as unconstitutional. A shaken President Zardari is now finding his close associates like Interior (Home) Minister Rehman Malik, Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar, his PPP and MQM supporters in Sindh and even his own Principal Secretary Salman Farooqui coming under pressure with threats of arrest.

Even prior to these developments, the army had made it clear that it will not yield ground on its control of issues of national security and relations with the US, India and Afghanistan. Sensing that Mr Zardari was attempting to clip its wings, by using American aid legislation to curb its powers, the army hit back by mobilising right wing opinion to claim that Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity was being eroded by American meddling. A rattled Obama Administration responded with Senator Kerry and others paying obeisance to General Kayani. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not bother to shake hands with Pakistan’s Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar while spending nearly three hours in talks with General Kayani and ISI Chief Shuja Pasha.

While President Obama proclaimed: “We cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear,” Pakistan’s Army establishment led by General Kayani has steadfastly refused to act against the Quetta-based political leadership of the Taliban led by Mullah Omar, or the Taliban military leadership of Sirajuddin Haqqani, now operating against American forces in Afghanistan from safe havens in North Waziristan. The Pakistan military is thus prepared to even defy the Americans, to protect its Taliban “assets”. Is it, therefore, at all realistic for anyone in India to believe that a weak and fragmented political leadership in Pakistan can act against the army’s hottest favourite, the Hafiz Mohammed Saeed-led Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT)?

There seems to be a total lack of understanding in India, even in high levels of the government, about why Pakistan is frantically pushing for a resumption of the “Composite Dialogue Process”. Pakistan is now becoming more and more uncomfortable about the growing and almost daily revelations of the links of its military establishment with terrorist and extremist groups on its borders with both India and Afghanistan.

The influential Pentagon-related “Stratfor” website recently noted that operatives of terrorist groups like the LeT and the Harkat-ul-Jihad Al-Islami (HUJI), which operate against India, are “able to travel, raise funds, communicate, train and plan operations with seemingly little interference. This is a stark contrast to Al-Qaeda, which is hunted, is on the run and experiencing a great deal of difficulty moving operatives, communicating, raising funds and conducting operations. The links between David Headley and his associates to current and former Pakistani military officers and government officials are likely what is affording LeT and HUJI their operational freedom”.

The almost hysterical calls for the resumption of the “Composite Dialogue” by Prime Minister Gilani, who is a protégé of the military establishment and Foreign Minister Qureishi, are meant to divert attention from the issue which is tearing Pakistan apart, which is ISI-sponsored jihadi terrorism, by claims that the lack of progress in resolving the “core issue” of Jammu and Kashmir is the root cause of the terrorism, which the Pakistan Army has unleashed on Afghanistan, India and within Pakistan itself. This is so after the present military establishment led by General Kayani has returned to old and hackneyed rhetoric of resolving Jammu and Kashmir and disowned all that was achieved in moving forward on this issue, in “back channel” talks with the Musharraf dispensation between 2005 and 2007.

The withdrawal of 30,000 troops from J and K effectively counters the Pakistan propaganda that tensions over Jammu and Kashmir could trigger a conflict. India has to emphasise that it is ISI-sponsored terrorism, not Jammu and Kashmir, which is the root cause of regional tensions.

Given the dynamics of developments within Pakistan and on its borders with Afghanistan, which have arisen primarily because of misguided resort to backing radical Islamic groups, both by the military establishment and even mainstream political parties, there is very little India can do to influence the course of events within Pakistan. It seems unlikely that General Kayani and his cohorts will be able to quell unrest and violence in Pakistan’s Pashtun heartland, even as they remain determined to back Taliban elements, which “bleed” the Americans in Afghanistan. Stability in Pakistan is not going to be promoted by getting carried away by appeals for Indian “magnanimity”. What India has to ensure is the preparedness to deal with the next terrorist strike, whether it is against a nuclear plant or IT establishment, or it involves hostage taking of schoolchildren as Chechens terrorists did in Beslan.

MIDDLE

Legacy of crime
by Justice S.D. Anand

As chance would have it, I was Illaqa Magistrate of three police stations which went over to Kurukshetra district, when it was carved out of the district of Karnal. Having had a complete tenure at Karnal, I had become compulsively familiar with the habitual criminals of the area, on account of their frequent appearance in the court.

One Bahadur Singh was a regular visitor to the courts. His “sins” had been duly “inherited” by his son Mohinder Singh (during the lifetime of the former) who had further passed on the mantle to his son Gurcharan Singh. There were dates when the trio (grandson, his father and grandfather) would all be facing trial before the court presided over by me on one particular day.

To cut it short, I was familiar with the three generations of that “criminal” family which specialised in the distillation of illicit liquor. After having had a complete tenure at Karnal, we (me and my elder sister who was senior to me) got shifted to Kurukshetra where, too, I happened to be the Illaqa Magistrate of the police station concerned within the “ jurisdictional” area in which the trio was residing and “functioning” for a living. As a result, the trio made fairly frequent appearance to face trial in one case or the other.

Six years (three at Karnal and an equal period at Kurukshetra) was not a small period. I got transferred from Kurukshetra in the year 1978. A complete tenure at Gurgaon followed. Thereafter, I had my stint as a Special Railway Magistrate, Haryana, at Ambala Cantt.

In the course of arguments, in an excise case against the “son” out of the trio, the defence counsel harped on the family “antecedents” of that particular accused. When he repeated the family antecedents and the “rich lineage” of the accused, counsel got a toe-cum-elbow signal from that accused to confine the arguments to the merits.

Counsel was found unrelenting and he kept on harping upon the family background of the accused. On conclusion, a verdict of acquittal followed. The merits warranted it. The independent witnesses had turned hostile to the prosecution and the Investigating Officer could not be examined at the trial.

The accused gone, I called upon counsel to give me an idea about what the toe-cum-elbow signal was about. He quoted the accused having told him:

“Vakil sahib, tu meri family te jyada zor na dey. Sahib mainu 1974 da jaanda hai. Sarey khandan nu jaanda. Tu khandan te zor na dey” (Mr counsel, Please do not emphasise credentials of my family. The Presiding Officer knows me since 1974. He knows the credentials of the whole family. Please do not lay stress upon the credentials of family).

A riot of laughter followed and the din could drown only after quite some time.

OPED

India pays a heavy price for indiscipline
by Chandra Mohan

Satyagraha was for a special purpose; never a free for all. It was led by responsible leaders. Whenever it went out of control, leaders like Mahatma Gandhi re-railed it through his marches and fasts; his humble simplicity finally won

It is unfortunate that in our sixty years of independence, we have turned this silent weapon of protest into a tool for imposing individual whims and wishes on society.

An MLA was attacked in the Maharashtra Assembly because some others legislators did not like his oath-taking in Hindi.

Lawyers force the CJI of the Karnataka High Court to abandon the hearing of a case and lock another courtroom where hearing was in progress.

A group of MPs force the adjournment of Parliament on the issue of sugarcane pricing. Pandemonium prevails in the Parliament on the Liberhan report. Exchanges of blows in state legislatures is frequent.

Farmers block the GT Road for the whole day to force the FCI to relax quality standards for a paddy variety.

Laxity in the registration of a theft complaint leads to total mayhem in and around Ludhiana for a week.

While causes become flimsier, the tally of costs is spiraling into the stratosphere.

About Rs 300 crore is lost by the IOC in the Jaipur depot blaze. The loss in the adjacent industrial estate and Jaipur town is higher. All because of careless coupling of pipes by a tanker driver

Insurance companies go broke in paying compensation. As many as 1,14,000 deaths in road accidents in 2008. Imagine the trauma to families. All due to lack of discipline in driving and maintenance duties. .

Six train accidents in the last five months, two of them major. The excellent track record of the Metro for safety also bursts— three accidents during construction and three derailments.

A failure in meeting the delivery the commitments by auto-ancillaries in Gurgaon results in plant shutdowns in the USA. Customers look for suppliers elsewhere. Indian reliability is under threat. The root cause: protracted indiscipline.

Indiscipline, like swine-flu, is contagious. It spirals exponentially and impacts every sphere of activity. Mounting piles of dirt and garbage everywhere; poor quality; high cost; erratic deliveries; shoddy maintenance; indifferent service are reflections of how deep indiscipline has crept.

It is high time we realised that the 21st century is a radically different era. Globalisation; instant-anywhere communication; Successful adoption of Japan's quality culture by many countries; Turbulent pace of technological advancement, and cut-throat competition have transformed the world.

Customers have become true kings for the first time in history. Choice is endless, prices are competitive, quality is perfect, delivery prompt and service courteous.

"Where do we stand in this new world? is the question which we must ask ourselves. And, in answering that question, let our judgement not get swayed by our mounting forex reserves, FII inflows, high GDP growth rates and global acclaim for our fiscal policies and democracy.

The real reason behind that global acclaim and serenade is the needs and aspirations of our fast-expanding 300 million middle-class market. It is a God-sent opportunity for a developed country. Producers saddled with massive over-capacities in stagnant markets. Their Indian product portfolios are made up of imported models; local manufacture or investment is at minimal levels.

The basic reason is to maintain profitability of parent units and maintain parent country employment. All their effort is focussed on marketing. A rapid increase in share of the service Industry in our GDP reflects this focus. Benefits of the resultant economic boom naturally remain confined to the educated middle class and bypass the 600 million of our weakest segment living in villages and slums.

Social programmes like direct subsidies, loan write-offs, NREGA and JNURM alone reached this lowest segment and helped them look upwards. Political pressure for widening such programmes reflects the importance of equity to a democracy.

But where are funds for them? Funding them through deficit financing stokes inflation. Consequences of the social thrust of last year's budget are already being felt and the price rise has begun to hurt already. Fiscal steps to curb inflation are already being mooted by the RBI

Both the national objectives of growth and equity can only be achieved if productivity of every human and financial asset is raised continually. Economic measures which we have relied on all along by themselves will never be enough. They will only result in periodic cycles of boom and bust. We have been seeing such cycles time and again ever since we became independent.

A globally-proven method for channeling human creativity to raise productivity and efficiency continually is fortunately available today. In the course of development of this now-renowned process, Japanese managements propelled a war-ravaged country to become the global icon of price and quality in three decades. Korea has been able to adopt it with a similar success. Our own auto-ancillary industry has even done it to outstanding results. Can we not take it up as a national mission?

Discipline is the first rung of this long ladder. The journey will also not be easy. But unless and until we begin, we will continue to struggle and live on the bounty of others. Rome was not built in a day.

Cutting through din of dotcom
by Susan Salter Reynolds

During the last decade, more than ever before, writers faced the challenge of cutting through the noise. The new millennium began with the enduring influence of W.G. Sebald: his marriage of word and image somewhere deep in the reader's subconscious; his ingenious blending of fact and fiction, dream and reality.

Criticism of the American way of life, particularly the inhumanity of corporate America, has been a consistent theme. Second- and third-generation immigrant fiction expanded the literary globe. Novels overshadowed short stories, the way they often do. Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike and Ian McEwan cemented their immortality. Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Peter Carey, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Dyer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace wrote unforgettable books.

And a strange thing happened in this last decade. Some of our best fiction, literary fiction, was made into movies; there seemed an increase in mutual respect, a better blending of word and image: "The Secret Life of Bees" by Sue Monk Kidd, "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini, "There Will Be Blood," based on Upton Sinclair's "Oil!", to name a few. Nonfiction pushed forward the idea that we inhabited, if not the margins, something other than the center of the universe -- Richard Dawkins, Bill McKibben and Malcolm Gladwell. Meanwhile, Tracy Kidder, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser showed us the importance of thinking about others as extensions of ourselves.

Still, the truth is that literature has a big head start when it comes to helping us live our lives. On the world map literature would be Europe and the Internet, America. Escaping is one thing -- science fiction, romance novels and nonfiction make excellent magic carpets -- but for turning and facing, there's nothing like good old literary fiction. If I spend money to make myself happy, I could end up like Emma Bovary. If I abandon my children for my lover, I might become Anna Karenina.

"It's not about you," someone else I knew used to say whenever I cried in movies or got too emotional about paintings or accused him of linking certain musical pieces with ex-girlfriends. He's right, I thought, full of self-loathing for my own self-centeredness; art is not about me.

But it is. In order to be truly useful, fiction has to have a certain psychological density and depth. And as much as authors like to deny it, much of that depth comes from the autobiographical component of all fiction. "I live my life 11 days ahead of my fiction," the author Pam Houston used to say. An author's life experience is the glue that holds the characters to the metaphors: the tall pine that gives them courage, the rock or hurdle they have to walk around or the small, shell-shaped cake that brings childhood memories flooding back. A reader brings his or her own experience to the equation.

So authors have to be particularly conscious. And so do readers. The act of reading is not all that relaxing, as every child first starting out seems to know. Virginia Woolf distinguished between moments of being and unconsciousness -- her work depended on being for its spark and heat. If we become too depleted by, say, the pace of life, the bombarding of information or our disconnection from the natural world; too emptied out, too dependent on external stimuli, we run the risk of being lousy writers and lousy readers.

It takes effort to make art out of emptiness; the more emptiness, the more effort (hence all that phony, amplified emotion in bad writing). You can hear the gears grinding. So the best writing feels light and musical but also plain, honest and clear. And there will be an element of surprise throughout. Characters will not act or react in received ways; the thing we expect to happen will not always happen (never say never). The writer must resist cultural gravity. This is how literature helps not just the reader but the entire species evolve.

This generation's literary grandparents (I'm speaking of America) placed a high value on plain honest fiction. It was the generation with the first almost-clear view of sky through the rubble of World War II. The most successful writers relied heavily on magazines like The New Yorker, Harper's and The Atlantic. In these cozy havens, they could work with one editor for decades, polishing, refining and simplifying their styles and voices. The result was a kind of calm cultural overview that often seemed elitist and sometimes was. The audience took a back seat to the writing life; "Let them eat cake!" If they don't like it, there's always, well, television.

The next generation -- Tobias Wolff, Joy Williams, Raymond Carver and so many others -- had their mentors and their writers groups, but the audience mattered more. It had to. This generation relied heavily on the academy and on grants. Today, young writers do not have the luxury of ignoring their audience. Book deals depend heavily on the audience the author brings with them. There is less money, and the money buys less.

Writers write what they write, a path up and out of one generation's burden, one strangulating set of cultural norms into the future, regardless. But fiction, generally speaking, has been affected by this shrinking market, this smaller pie, largely in the last decade. It is more interactive, in very subtle ways. It tries to do more with less. Plot twists can be interpreted in many ways. Reality is layered, archaeological. Perspective shifts. The narrator is hardly ever reliable.

I could end the decade that began for so many of us with Sebald (who, of course, had been writing for years but hadn't truly percolated through book culture) happily with Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist," a novel that has the honest clarity of his literary forebears and the sense of cutting a path through the noise, not to mention a return to the lifeboat of language, the fifth beat in the four-beat line, the one we need to be fully conscious to truly hear; awake, alert and ready to read.n

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Health
Man regains sight after stem cell treatment
by Rod Minchin

A have-a-go hero blinded in one eye in a chemical attack 15 years ago has got his sight back after pioneering stem cell treatment. Russell Turnbull is one of eight patients with impaired vision who have been treated successfully with their own stem cells, in a technique developed by scientists and eye surgeons at the North East England Stem Cell Institute.

Mr Turnbull, who is now 38, was attacked on his way home following a night out in Newcastle in 1994. On the bus home he overheard a heated argument between two men, which spilled into a fight.

When he intervened to break up the scuffle, one of the men began squirting ammonia around the bus. Mr Turnbull was hit in his right eye, causing massive damage to the cornea stem cells, leaving him with severely impaired vision, a condition known as Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency (LSCD).

LSCD is a painful, blinding disease that requires long-term, costly treatment with frequent clinic visits and intensive hospital admissions.

The vision loss due to LSCD makes this disease not only costly, but often requires social support due to the enormous impact on the patient's quality of life. This is further magnified by the fact that LSCD mostly affects young patients. Mr Turnbull, who lives in Consett, County Durham, spoke about the attack and the impact it had on his life.

"I was in agony instantly, my eye was clamped shut," he said.

"I went home and my mum tried to wash out the chemical and then I went to hospital.

"I was in hospital for two weeks and eventually I was able to open the eye again.

"It was like looking through scratched Perspex. My eye was sensitive to light, it was constantly watering. I was unable to drive as any bright light would cause me pain. "The man who attacked me was caught and sentenced to six months in jail. But I later learned that he had served only two months of that sentence."

After 12 years of living in constant pain and with poor vision, and undergoing various treatments with creams and washes, Mr Turnbull became part of trials of a new treatment for the condition.

The team at North East England Stem Cell Institute took a tiny amount of stem cells from the good eye and grew them in a lab. They were then implanted in the damaged eye, where they then began to function as normal, restoring sight.

The technique avoids the need for drugs to suppress immunity and means there is no chance of the implanted cells being rejected. It is also the first in the world that does not use animal products to help grow the stem cells in the lab.

"I had a lot of anger inside me for a long time after the attack. I lost my job because of it and I had always been a keen jet-skier, which I wasn't able to do," Mr Turnbull said.

"It ruined my life and I went through a really difficult time.

"But then this treatment came along, I can't thank the staff at the RVI (Royal Victoria Infirmary) enough.

"This has transformed my life, my eye is almost as good as it was before the accident.

"I'm working, I can go jet-skiing again and I also ride horses. I have my life back thanks to the operation."

The technique can also be used to treat patients whose eyes have been damaged by contact lenses, in industrial accidents involving thermal or chemical injuries, among other diseases.

Dr Francisco Figueiredo, a consultant eye surgeon, led the project with Professor Majlinda Lako and their work has just been published in the American Journal, Stem Cells.n

— By arrangement with The Independent