The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Andhra still in crisis
Parties must pitch in together for peace

It is sad that Andhra Pradesh continues to be on the boil two weeks after the Centre’s in-principle decision to work towards statehood for Telangana. Politically, the division between the Telangana region and the rest of Andhra has sharpened to a level that must cause deep concern. That various political parties are playing to their own narrow perceived self-interest with scant regard for the interests of the people at large is worrying. The Centre’s efforts on Wednesday to find a solution acceptable to all contending parties by calling for wide-ranging consultations with all parties and groups on the issue of a separate Telangana carved out of Andhra Pradesh have been used by partisans to fan the flames further. The MPs and legislators from Telangana belonging to different parties are up in arms alleging a Central betrayal. While a large number of them have submitted their resignations to their party chiefs, it is significant that they are not pressing hard for acceptance, evidently because they are playing for time.

Actually, all the parties are divided sharply along regional lines and are unsure of what position to take so as not to precipitate a split in their ranks. Each of the major parties is speaking in two voices. With repeated bandhs and hartals crippling the state’s economy, work in offices virtually at a standstill, and university students on the rampage in Hyderabad, the first priority is to restore public order and re-energize developmental activity. Andhra Pradesh has been one of the country’s prime states with huge stakes in the New Economy and it would be a tragedy if investors start deserting it for greener pastures.

The situation in Andhra needs to be defused urgently. While setting up a second states reorganisation commission with a time-bound schedule may be a possible wayout as this newspaper had suggested soon after the crisis surfaced, it is vital that the leaders of all parties agree to usher in peace without working for partisan ends in the interests of the state and its people.

Credibility at stake
Ads can’t be packaged as news

Shocked by the widespread practice of newspapers and TV channels selling their news space and time during the last Lok Sabha elections, responsible journalists have taken up the issue head-on to stop the loathsome trend before it gets too late. First the Press Council of India and now the Editors Guild of India have set up committees to suggest ways to deal with the menace, which strikes at the very foundation of credibility of the Fourth Estate. This is a welcome development as the saner members of the media have come forward to check the blatant abuse of news.

The once-clear distinction between advertisements and news has started blurring of late. As the media, particularly newspapers in Indian languages, witnessed an unprecedented growth driven by the needs of a rising India, editors and journalists increasingly became subservient to marketing managers for whom news became less sacrosanct and advertisements the mainstay of their profession. The owners were all too happy encouraging them. In the recent elections marketeers turned even more aggressive as the media industry was hit by an economic downturn and came out with competitive election coverage packages for politicians, disregarding all ethics of journalism. Editors of language newspapers, especially in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh and some other states, either failed to put their foot down or joined the unethical drive for profit.

These short-sighted strategists do not seem to realise the damage they have done to the profession. The Fourth Estate is built on the foundations of public trust. If that trust were betrayed, it would shake the entire structure. The Editors Guild’s initiative to stem the rot, therefore, is welcome. Otherwise, the government or the Election Commission would be forced to step in. Self-regulation is a better option. The Press Council and the Editors Guild can only exercise moral pressure. Hopefully, the recalcitrant members of the media would pay heed to the guidelines that may be prescribed to maintain the dignity and values of the profession.

Thought for the Day

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don’t read the books. — A.S. Byatt

ARTICLE

Life of Indira Amma
Her footprints are all over India
by Inder Malhotra

HER 25th death anniversary only two months ago had turned out to be a celebration of Indira Gandhi the like of which is seldom seen. There was, of course, some criticism of her during the talkathon on TV channels and in the unending newspaper articles on her. But her image at this distance of time was unquestionably brighter and more positive than India’s educated middle class was prepared to concede at any time from the late 1960s to well after her assassination. Today, some even among those who had vowed never to forgive her for the “cardinal sin” of the Emergency have started admitting that this hammer-blow to democracy was “scripted jointly by her and JP”, the initials standing for the Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan.

However, no new book on her had appeared at this juncture, which seemed odd because since she first became prime minister in 1966 more books have been published on her than on any other Indian, with the solitary and conspicuous exception of the Mahatma. The clear reason for this is the high drama and searing tragedy in her life. Her phenomenal rise to power and glory was followed by a fantastic fall and then by an even more rapid and remarkable political resurrection barely a few months before the death of her favourite son and duly designated political heir Sanjay and less than five years before her own murder. Only the Bhuttos of Pakistan, father Zulfiqar and daughter Benazir, have had a similar fate.

However, the problem about the plethora of Indira’s biographies and books about her is that the bulk of them appeared in two big spurts at the highest and lowest points in her career, separated from each other by no more than six years. In the early 1970s, in the wake of her tremendous triumph in the 1971 general election and India’s brilliant victory in the war for the liberation of Bangladesh, there was an avalanche of her bagiographies. After her humiliating defeat in the 1977 poll, primarily because of the Emergency, there was a torrent of books practically depicting her as irredeemably evil. In some cases the authors of the books of both kinds were the same. After her spectacular return to power in January 1980 and especially after her assassination in 1984 there had been for several years a steady flow of books on Indira. Their content depended, more often than not, on the authors’ personal predilection rather than on facts.

It is this that makes the only book on the subject of how Indira Gandhi looks in the perspective of a quarter of a century to reach my desk, Pranay Gupte’s Mother India*, worthy of notice. Nearly 20 years ago he had written a book on Indira Gandhi’s life and times, under the same title. Gupte, an Indian-American and a veteran journalist, rightly claims that the new book is not an updated version of the old but an altogether new chronicle and assessment of her life and legacy. His rationale for the title is that the mother figure is highly venerated in India, as in other ancient civilisations, and thus Indira Gandhi was looked upon as Bharat Mata by “her supporters and detractors alike”.

“For her fans, Indira was a bountiful mother figure, who radiated strength — shakti … For her critics (she) was more a multi-limbed demon goddess Kali than Bharat Mata.” A simultaneous recognition of the good and the bad, the positive and the negative in Indira’s record runs like a thread in Gupte’s book that does try to be neither bagiography nor demonology and actually manages to balance the two. He is also candid enough to admit that though the conclusions are his own, he has relied on the research of several India specialists, both Indian and foreign.

“In my view,” says the author, “Indira Gandhi was the central character in India’s modern history. Her fingerprints and footprints are all over contemporary India, and will not be easily erased no matter which government is in power. While her record as a ‘national manager’ cannot be dismissed lightly, Indira exploited what sociologist Asish Nandi calls the ‘criminalisation and commecialisation of politics”.

Never unmindful of the yeoman services Indira Gandhi rendered her country, Gupte is sharp in his criticism of the wrongs she committed or allowed her cohorts to commit that have left a lasting imprint on India. Particularly scathing is this indictment: “Indira Gandhi was India’s biggest commercial brand name and her associates in the Congress Party merrily exploited that advantage so corruption spread through the system like a malignant metastasis … Today — notwithstanding the economic liberalisation — it is impossible to get anything done in India without bribery and commissions. The culture of corruption is Indira Gandhi’s lasting — even if unintended — gift to India, though her supporters argue that she could not have possibly foreseen how much political corruption would expand and extend into other areas of national life. A weak argument, at best.”

Understandably, a lot of space in the book is devoted to what continues to be called the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty though its founder was Indira, not her father. But he omits to mention that dynasty building is another major legacy of hers that has flourished in India, not just survived. Barring only a few honourable exceptions, almost all political parties have become family businesses. The Gandhi dynasty remains the only one with an all-India appeal; all others rule the roost, or hope to do so, in specific states. “Now the standard-bearers of (this) dynasty are Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, Sonia, and her son Rahul and daughter Priyanka, arguably the most powerful triumvirate in contemporary India”.

He goes on to say that the 2009 general election that returned the Congress-led coalition to power was a vindication of Indira’s legacy of secularlism, and adds: “Sonia may be a strong leader, even an obstinate one, but she isn’t a fearsome figure like her mother-in-law was. Indira Gandhi was sui generis, and we will never again see the like of her.”

Quite apart from the fact that Gupte’s book is a 597-page tome, he, like most other biographers of Indira, hasn’t written adequately about Indira’s unflinching dedication to safeguarding India’s sovereignty and security or the strategic virtuosity she displayed during the Bangladesh War in which both China and its new-found friend and ally, the United States, were backing the side that was morally in the wrong and militarily doomed to defeat.n

*Mother India by Pranay Gupte (Penguin-Viking, Rs 599)

MIDDLE

Hurry, potter
by Chetna Keer Banerjee

It’s been the year of the swine flu, which means that lesser maladies haven’t done too well for themselves. In terms of hogging headlines, that is. This makes life in the times of swine flu quite confusing for those falling prey to viruses that are less news worthy, though in no way less nose worthy.

Such was the predicament of my son when he came back from school sometime back, his nasal tract in a state of spate and his otherwise garrulous mouth jammed into inflamed inaction.

The pause in his delivery of the spoken word was not so much a cause for concern, but the symptomatic similarities to that dreaded Malady of the Moment were. This pressed my panic button pronto. Those scary reports of even the student community getting afflicted by swine flu, schools shutting down and all that had my nervous system already programmed to constrict in a manner as if it were an attack of the aliens.

But I was certainly not alien to the weapon of warfare to be employed against this new hottie in the (IPL) Influenza Premier League. Tamiflu, the name of this remedy, was pounding in my brain when I rushed my son to the doctor.

His diagnosis laid my worst fears to rest, but put my ability to combat less limelight-stricken members of the flu fraternity to test. As it turned out to be a mumps-like condition, Tamiflu was not to be our remedy. What we needed was just some other allopathic ammunition. Or so I thought...

Since alternate theories of treatment had also been activated by then, thanks to certain faithfuls of the old school of thought, I found myself being prodded to look for a rather unusual remedy: a potter.

Desi belief goes that a potter shakes off this glandular swelling, called “kumharan chadna,” by scraping a piece of earthen pottery on it.

Ah, but thanks to the relocationary instincts of the authorities, who had some seasons ago shifted the entire kumhar colony out of the city to the peripheral Maloya village, this line of treatment anyways seemed out of reach...

Till a link route presented itself unwittingly. A colleague had visited a kumhar in this colony for a write-up on his skills at the potter’s wheel. She offered to contact him.

Then, some time passed and I still didn’t hear from her on this. There seemed to be no hurry about the potter. But it turned out that there was a solid hitch. This colleague hadn’t got the potter’s number.

So, the cure looked too far to fetch. And may be it was far-fetched too.

OPED

Rape of the law
State machinery has failed to act
by Kuldip Nayar

India is not a banana republic. But certain incidents indicate that the country is rapidly forfeiting the right to be counted among the civilized nations. Take the rape of a Russian girl in Goa. Shanta Ram Naik, a member of the Rajya Sabha, the House which sets tone to public debates, wants a different treatment of the rape cases in which women move around with strangers after midnight. The member expressed no regret for the rape because the Russian girl was outside her place past 12 at night.

I thought Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat would have taken Naik to task. But nothing like that happened. Instead, the Chief Minister said that a girl who went out with a man at night was asking for something like rape. He did not care for the impression he was creating through his statement inside India and in foreign countries.

Asked about the action his government would take against the member, the Chief Minister said: “Let the Russian government write to me.” Yet his police has been trying to bribe the girl repeatedly. The last offer made to her was Rs. 15 lakh.

Congress Foreign Minister S.M.Krishna had no word of condemnation either. He merely said: “Foreigners should be more careful.” I do not know whether the Minister for Tourism would agree with the Foreign Minister. But how does Goa expect foreigners or, for that matter, Indians to visit the place where one of the ministers of the state says that Goa is the “rape capital of the world.”

The incident prompted Moscow’s Consul General in Mumbai, Alexander Mantytsky, to write to the Indian authorities about the concern he felt on behalf of his nation.

According to one estimate, the Russians make up about 40,000 of the 400,000 international tourists who visit Goa every year.

Sabina Martins, who runs the NGO, Bailancho Saad, has let the cat out of the bag when she says: “No longer does tourism advertisements talk about the natural beauty or the hospitable nature of the state. It is now promoted along the ‘wine, women and song’ line, which is different from the local culture.”

What has shocked me the most is the silence of Sonia Gandhi, the Congress president. She is probably busy calculating what political repercussion the action against the accused, John Fernandes, a heavyweight in the state, would have on the Congress government in Goa.

True, the party rule hangs in balance because the revolt of a few members can make the government fall or bring the opposition to power. But is this what counts ultimately? No morality, only politics!

A television network has asked for three days in a row why no action has been taken against the rapist. Some Parliament members have also posed the same question to the government. But it has preferred to remain silent.

The question is whether the state machinery has any responsibility to pursue the case where a rape has been committed. The accused may be let off or there may be nothing proved against him. But how can the police, looking after the law and order machinery, sit silent? It is apparent that political pressure can let off
the rapists.

This is confirmed by a case in Haryana. After 19 years, a special court of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has sentenced former state Director General of Police SPS Rathore to six months’ imprisonment and fined Rs 1,000. He was accused of molesting a 14-year-old girl. I

t is a travesty of justice that the police Director General gets only six months in prison. The court is not to blame for a light sentence because the CBI, for obvious reasons, refused to charge the DGP for the real crime. The FIR was filed nine years after the molestation and that too was changed to a memorandum. The pressure used can well be imagined. Still the state government found Rathore so useful, then IG, that he was promoted after four years of his committing the crime.

How powerful was Rathore can be judged from the fact that goons were placed outside the victim’s house to accost and harass her whenever she stepped out. Her house was pelted with stones, smattering the windows.

Three years later she consumed insecticide and died a day later. Her father sold the house in Panchkula, near Chandigarh, and went to Kolkata. Two brothers of the victim faced 11 cooked-up cases which went on for years before they were acquitted.

The mother says in a statement: “We were threatened when we filed a memorandum against Rathore for exemplary punishment.” But Rathore was given a bail even for the light imprisonment. The entire police system in Haryana and the CBI, which played with the investigation have to be cleaned up.

Punjab and Haryana High Court Chief Justice Mukul Mudgal can appoint a special team to reinvestigate the case. The Supreme Court did so in the case of Gujarat where it found the judgment was not correct.

It is time that the government introduces the much-awaited police reforms and overhauls the judicial system. How can a case of molestation against a former DGP go on for 19 years? All those ministers, bureaucrats and police officials who are responsible for the cover-up should be brought to justice.

Let this be a test case to punish even the highest in the country. After knowing the details, the nation feels abhorred and inaction would look like a compromise with pressure and power.

Yet another affront comes from an American Ice cream company, Haagen-Dazs. While opening its branch at Delhi, it puts outside a board to say that only international passport holders can buy ice cream, thereby meaning that no Indian could enter.

This was an outrage for a sovereign country. The company removed the board but it did not tender an apology. The company merely said that the advertisement idea did not work the way it imagined it would. A simple question that the company should answer is: Would it have dared to put up such a board in America, the country which owns the company?

The developed countries consider the Third World a playground to test their arrogant and bizarre ideas. But then the Third World has become prone to humiliation.

Climate naysayers are failing
By Ben Chu

Copenhagen has come and gone, but the climate change naysayers are still very much with us. And they are indisputably right about one thing: the scientific consensus can be wrong.

Scientists and their predecessors, the natural philosophers, have been in error in the past on many things, from planetary orbits to the origins of humankind. Scholars with impressive-sounding qualifications argued that the Sun revolved around the Earth and that God created the natural world in all its variety in one astonishing burst of creativity. They were wrong then. So couldn't those massed ranks of doctorate-laden climate scientists, oceanographers and physicists be wrong now about mankind's role in warming the climate?

Yet just because the consensus has, on occasion, been wrong it doesn't follow that the settled view of the scientific community is always in error. This is where the critics of the majority scientific view on global warming run into trouble.

The minority of scientists who argue that the theory of anthropogenic climate change is a fiction, whatever other achievements they might have to their name, have failed to undermine the consensus view.

If these oppositionist scientists were right, they should surely be sweeping all before them, just as Darwin exploded conventional wisdom about the origin of species, and Copernicus and Galileo revolutionised established views about the nature of the cosmos.

But that inexorable victory for the position of the climate oppositionists isn't what we're seeing. The scientific consensus that global warming is the result of human activity has, in fact, significantly hardened in recent years, despite the efforts of dissenting scientists such as Ian Plimer and Patrick Michaels.

Rather than admit that the traditional process by which scientific truth is revealed has failed to vindicate them, these scientists and their often eloquent lay supporters fall back on the allegation that there is a conspiracy in the scientific establishment to silence them, a plot to marginalise those who will not conform to the orthodoxy. Climate science, we are told, has become like a religion, where heretics are ruthlessly suppressed, just as the Catholic Church suppressed Galileo.

Does this sound plausible to you? No heretics have been put under house arrest lately. Indeed, the theories of the oppositionists have been addressed in great detail. The arguments and counter-arguments are available to anyone who cares to look. Is it not more likely that the case of those who do not agree with the consensus has been weighed and simply found wanting?

Aha, say the diehards, what about those leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia? Do they not show intent from some prominent climate change scientists to suppress contrary research? The emails certainly don't paint the unit in a flattering light.

And in so far as they show attempts to frustrate Freedom of Information requests, they are shameful. But the naysayers need to show that these scientists – and thousands of others – have falsified their data before they can claim victory. So far they've been unable to do that.

Ad hominem attacks are no substitute. The naysayers say that scientists have an incentive to scare policymakers because that's what delivers the research grants. But there's another powerful incentive in the world of science: the prestige to be had from overturning an orthodoxy. Or are we to believe that only the oppositionists possess such sceptical instincts?

In the end, this is not an argument about science, but logic. Those of us who are not scientific specialists are no more able to talk authoritatively about the physics of climate change than we are able to explain how vaccination works, or how the HIV virus results in Aids. But we (generally) take our jabs and practise safe sex. Scientific consensus matters. Not because the consensus is always right, but because it is the only guide to rational action and policymaking.

Climate change naysayers might yet come up with evidence that disproves the theory of man-made climate change. That would be a revolutionary moment. And the world would surely thank them for their efforts. But it hasn't happened yet. In the meantime it falls to the open-minded layperson and the responsible politician to check that the debate has been free, to ensure that no inconvenient research has been suppressed, and to act in response to the consensus view.

The climate naysayers would have us treat science like an a la carte menu, where we pick out what suits us and dismiss what doesn't. Sorry, but speaking as a non-scientist, that doesn't sound very appetising.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Health
Treatment for physical pain may help emotional pain too
by By Melissa Healy

Do you anticipate being snubbed at your in-laws’ holiday dinner? Are you pretty sure your spouse will pick up a gift for you at the drugstore on Christmas Eve? Are you starting to take your unsuccessful job hunt personally?

New research may prescribe just the thing for your hurt feelings: the same all-purpose pain reliever people take for headaches, muscle pain and fever.

A study to be published in the journal Psychological Science set out to explore the link between the way we experience physical pain and how we process the pain of social rejection — a novel line of research that has been picking up steam in the past year or so.

The researchers, a far-flung group led by University of Kentucky psychologist C. Nathan DeWall, noted that recent studies have shown lots of overlap in the brain circuits that process physical and social pain. But no study has looked at whether medication that blunts physical pain might do the same for the heartache that comes from the perception that one has been spurned or slighted.

In a pair of experiments using acetaminophen (the active ingredient in over-the-counter pain reliever Tylenol), they found considerable evidence that it does. The first experiment put 62 healthy undergraduates into two groups.

One group was put one on a daily dose of two Tylenol, one each morning and one shortly before going to bed; the other group took a daily dose of placebo. Each evening, participants filled out a quick psychological survey gauging their level of positive emotion and of “hurt feelings.”

Subjects in the two groups did not differ measurably in their positive emotions. But starting on Day 9 and continuing for the next 12 days, the group taking Tylenol reported significantly lower daily levels of hurt feelings than did the group taking placebo.

A second experiment had 25 healthy undergraduates play a virtual “ball-tossing” game designed to induce feelings of social rejection while their brains were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Ten of the subjects took two acetaminophen tablets each morning and two at night for three weeks before the ball-tossing fMRI session; 15 subjects took placebo pills for the same period.

The brain images showed that compared with the subjects who had taken the dummy pills, the acetaminophen group responded to the virtual exclusion with far less activity in the brain regions linked to the processing of physical and emotional pain, and in other areas in which mood and emotions are processed. Curiously, when individuals in each group were asked to rate their feelings in response to the exclusion episode, the two groups reported equal levels of social distress.

“Our findings do not call for widespread use of acetaminophen to cope with all types of personal problems,” the group writes in the article outlining the research. But they do provide some “novel insight into the close relationship between social and physical pain.”

Social pain such as chronic loneliness can be as bad for health as smoking and obesity.

And since chronic loneliness is almost as widespread, “we hope our findings can pave the way for interventions designed to reduce the pain of social rejection,” DeWall said in a news release.

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Corrections and clarifications

In the report “Ministers can air travel with innumerable companions” (Page 1, Dec.19), there is a reference in the first para that ministers can take along on air journeys even “illegitimate” or step children. This is wrong. It should have been “legitimate” or step children

In the report “It was a gruelling battle: Ruchika’s dad” (Page 1, December 22, Chandigarh Tribune) Mr Anand Prakash and his wife Mrs Madhu Prakash have been wrongly identified as the parents of Ruchika. In fact, they are not the parents of the girl but good samaritans who waged the legal battle against the former Haryana DGP, SPS Rathore.

The headline “Prachanda spews venom against India” (Page 18, December 23) should instead have been “Prachanda spews venom on India”.

Despite our earnest endeavour to keep The Tribune error-free, some errors do creep in at times. We are always eager to correct them.

This column appears twice a week — every Tuesday and Friday. We request our readers to write or e-mail to us whenever they find any error.

Readers in such cases can write to Mr Kamlendra Kanwar, Senior Associate Editor, The Tribune, Chandigarh, with the word “Corrections” on the envelope. His e-mail ID is kanwar@tribunemail.com.

H.K. Dua
Editor-in-Chief