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Don’t say No to FIRs
India, Japan ties to grow |
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Terrorist, or tourist?
Beyond statehood
An English-language salad
La affaire Rathore: Brutalisation of governance
Meeting Afghan needs
Web sales register big increase
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Don’t say No to FIRs
At
last it is the duty of the police to register an FIR when a complaint comes to it. Even the Supreme Court says so: register the case first and then consider the genuineness or otherwise of the information. Yet, there are a large number of policemen who think that by registering an FIR, they are doing a favour to the complainant. There are many others who believe that an FIR is an affront to the person in a position of authority against whom the compliant is lodged or even the police station concerned. That is why in the Ruchika molestation case, the FIR against top cop SPS Rathore could be filed only nine years after the incident. Stung by the criticism, the Home Ministry has now decided to issue a circular to all states asking them to ensure that all complaints received at the police stations are treated as FIRs. This is one move which should have come about immediately after the country gained Independence. That could have prevented many miscarriages of justice, including of the Ruchika kind. As things stand today, the influential people use their powers to nip at the beginning many a complaint made against them. Since registering an FIR also involves a bit of work – which in any case is the job of the policemen – they want to avoid it to the extent possible. The registering of the FIR is also discouraged because they want to show that there was very little crime in that area. A query under the Right to Information Act (RTI) Act revealed recently that there are police stations which have not registered a single FIR in the last year and a half, irrespective of the crime in the area. Such ugly situations would be avoided when the new rule comes into force, provided it is enforced in the right spirit and every complaint is followed up. That will go a long way towards making the police responsive to people’s grievances. To make sure that flippant complaints are not filed, there can be punishment for those who try to take the police for a ride. But simply avoiding registering an FIR is the surest way to disaster which we are, unfortunately, treading at the moment. Besides the change in the law, what is needed is also a change of attitude of the police force, which must be told that it is there to serve the people and not to lord over them.
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India, Japan ties to grow
Japanese
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, during his first visit to India after his party captured power in the August elections, gave enough indications that Tokyo was keen on upgrading its relations with New Delhi considerably. At present the China-Japan bilateral trade volume was much higher than that between India and Japan. Japanese investment in India was 1/20th of that in China. But the situation can change in favour of India in the coming years if both countries concentrate on areas where they can benefit immensely from each other. If Japanese investment in India could be more than that in China in 2008, as it actually happened, there is no reason why this cannot be a regular feature. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pointed out on Tuesday, the Indian economy provided huge opportunities to substantially increase bilateral trade and economic cooperation between the two countries. India and Japan signed two major agreements on Monday —- one for the ambitious Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) project and the other for the Delhi-Mumbai Dedicated Railway Freight Corridor. According to the estimate made at this stage, the DMIC project alone can result in an investment of Rs3,60,000 crore. Japanese investments in India will start flowing at a faster rate after the two countries conclude the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) for which negotiations have been continuing for some time. The Manmohan Singh-Hatoyama joint statement issued on Tuesday laid stress on “energetically working towards resolving the remaining issues” so that the mutually beneficially CEPA can be signed at the earliest. The two sides unveiled an “action plan” to enhance cooperation in security-related areas like global terrorism. The Japanese have reservations in entering into trade with India in civilian nuclear energy, but this is unlikely to come in the way of improving economic relations. In any case, India has made its position clear that there is no question of New Delhi signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as the situation exists today. But with its impeccable non-proliferation record, India remains committed to a “universal, voluntary and non-discriminatory” disarmament regime. India has been strictly observing voluntary moratorium on conducting nuclear tests. Japan should reconsider its stand on nuclear trade with India as New Delhi has been granted waiver by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group.
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Terrorist, or tourist?
Mr
Shashi Tharoor apparently finds it impossible to stay away from twitting. But then ministers hold public offices and are not allowed to sing like birds. The Minister of State for External Affairs, therefore, ventured a little too far when he questioned the wisdom of new visa restrictions imposed on tourists by the government he is a part of. The Union Council of Ministers, after all, functions on the basis of collective responsibility and whatever doubts the junior minister may have had about the new visa regime, he could have raised them within the government. But Mr Tharoor, who is a compulsive twitter, could not resist the temptation of questioning whether we are being wise “ 2 allow terrorists 2 make us less welcoming 2 tourists”. Those who launched the terror attack on Mumbai, the minister wisecracked, did not have a visa, after all. The “twit” was stinging and indicated that there was no one view in the government. Or Mr Tharoor may have twitted deliberately to signal that he was out of the loop, that his opinion did not count for much in the Cabinet. Or was he trying to make his colleagues aware that the ultimate goal of a world led by the UN was to create a world without borders that could check terrorists and tourists. Twitter Tharoor invited a rebuff, though when a mild-mannered Union Minister for External Affairs, Mr S M Krishna, chose to declare that the business of government was “far too serious” for a retreat into Internet triviality. The junior minister had parked himself in a five star hotel and when he was finally forced to pay up and move out, like his seniors, in response to his party’s call for austerity, he twitted that he would henceforth travel in “cattle class” in deference to the “holy cows”. Politically incorrect and insensitive, the comment drew a lot of flak even from his own partymen. The comment mercifully was not related to his ministerial responsibilities, but to his tendency to indulge in avoidable wordplay. The real issue is not, perhaps, the denial of visas to those who want to see the Incredible India, but the inability of his government to pull him out of his twitting habit and his inability to distinguish between his e-mail which could be personal in nature and the Twitter which speaks volumes of people around the globe in just under 140 words with all their attendant sweetness and dangers. In any case, India’s most well-known twitter has evoked a chuckle, or two, of both terrorists and tourists.
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Written laws are like the spider’s webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful. — Anacharsis
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Beyond statehood Our
city is strange —- it whispers in the nights when you walk on roads,/ Calls you to show its wounds/ As if the secrets of its heart./ Its windows shut, alleys quiet, walls tired, doors locked,/ Only the corpses stayed/ In rented houses for years.” That was Makhdoom Mohiuddin, bard of the armed Telangana struggle of the forties singing of the history of more than Hyderabad. The lines, translated from Urdu, are about the larger meaning of the struggle that has reached a new stage today. The Centre’s concession of the demand for a separate state of Telangana on December 9 led to celebrations and scuffles in the streets of the same city —- and to more. It also promised to give a fresh impetus to several other sub-regional movements, and a flurry of demands for separate states has followed. The series of reports and speculation on this score can make the Telangana story appear one of many such tales. The multi-phase Telangana movement does have similarities with other campaigns for the cause of statehood. Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, before they became separate states, resented the fact that their rich natural resources did not mean better lives for their tribal and other populations but only benefited interests based in the rest of the bigger Bihar and Madhya Pradesh Telangana, with tribal tracts in three of its 11 districts, too, has been aggrieved about the Krishna and the Godavari flowing through it to the coastal districts but without benefiting its own agriculture and about its coal not helping to create industries for the region. Telangana constitutes 42 per cent of the area and 40 per cent of Andhra Pradesh’s population, as textbooks record, but never received anything like a commensurate share in budgetary allocations or educational and employment opportunities. Added to this injustice has been the injury inflicted on the identity-conscious Telangana people by the cultural scorn poured upon them by the elite of the coastal districts, especially by their caricature in commercial Telugu cinema. Compounded with indignation at the series of “betrayals” or breaches of pacts and promises (including the latest Central flip-flop), this does yield an explosive separate-state cocktail. All this, however, forms only part of the story. The longer history of the Telangana struggle includes an important internal dimension as well. This is a dimension that may keep the struggle going despite the seemingly inevitable, successful end to the separate-state movement. The origin of the struggle can be traced back, after all, to an entirely internal revolt of the region’s extremely impoverished and exploited peasantry. The revolt of the forties represented, fundamentally, a challenge to a feudal order propped up by the Nizam regime of the then sovereign state of Hyderabad. In both the ryotwari and jagirdari areas (where the state’s land revenue was collected directly from the cultivators and from the jagirdars or zamindars respectively), the peasants suffered oppression by decadent landlords and deshmukhs (officials) loyal to a Nizam busy setting new records in wealth accumulation. The revolt, which was to acquire a revolutionary fervour and continue for over six decades in different forms, started as a protest against the exploitation of all brutal manner, including bonded labour. The peasants also demanded a waiver of all debts imposed on them by the feudal lords with the assistance of intriguing officials. It was this bread-and-butter struggle that was to culminate in the Telangana armed struggle (1946-51) under the banner of the then Communist Party of India and with the broad participation of other forces. By 1944, the movement was demanding back the land of the poor and middle peasants occupied by the landlords. In 1946, the peasants occupied about 3,000 acres of land, provoking and resisting an offensive by the Nizam’s armed forces. The more disadvantaged of Telangana’s peasants, the tribal people, too, joined the movement. Village officers deprived them of their land by the simple device, in many cases, of false records in Marathi. The tribal tillers also lost land to reserve forests. All this in addition to land alienation by non-tribal settlers. Much later, the tribal distress and discontent were to give the Maoists a strong constituency in the region. In the course of the Telangana revolt, the peasants were proclaimed to have actually carried out redistribution of land of four categories —- land occupied by landlords in return for unreturned loans and unredeemed mortgages, grazing land, waste land of the government in the landlords’ possession, and forest land. This significant shift in land relations was, of course, to be short-lived. But the Telangana movement as it has evolved through subsequent years has, by most accounts, retained more than a modicum of the radicalism of its initial phase. It has not done so, merely or even mainly because a section of the Maoists has entered or “infiltrated” the separate-state movement. The more important reason lies in the continuation in the region of conditions for a peasant-tribal revolt —- besides, of course, the proud tradition of Telangana. The songs of the original struggle are still sung and preserve its spirit. It is not exactly the vision of a united, separate Telangana that are evoked, for example, by the lines: “Oh peasant, do you think of a compromise?/ Between a cat and a mouse, there can be none.” Nor is multi-class unity in such a state the message, despite the Nizam’s departure from the scene, of the lines: “The jagirdars, zamindars came to your aid, oh, they came to your aid, sonny Nizam! ... Your military ran away, oh, your military ran away for good, sonny Nizam.” Will Telangana’s rural masses be ready to compromise with their long-time, callous oppressors in a separate State? Will they see the separate Telangana’s leaders and luminaries, identified with rich-landlord castes, as their liberators? The prospect appears far from likely to political observers familiar with the region. Says one of them, agricultural economist C. H. Hanumantha Rao: “Radical land reforms were the prime agenda for the peasant movement in the 1940s. However, not enough time was available for this process of agrarian reforms and radical social transformation to run its course. In fact, it was interrupted with the integration of Telangana with the Andhra region, so that it still remains an unfinished revolution or an unfinished task.” He adds; “In a larger and heterogeneous state like AP, there is no adequate perception of this problem by the dominant political leadership which hails basically from the developed parts of the state. Thus, the weaker sections constituting a large majority of population in Telangana would be better able to articulate their problems and politically assert themselves in a separate state.” In other words, separate statehood will only mark a step forward, even if a major one, for the people of Telangana and their struggle of
over six decades for equitable development.
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An English-language salad ENGLISH is a sure way to communicate, what you infer is really your word-ache. Our annual pilgrimage to Goa gives me enough opportunity to make that sufficiently evident. Lying on the beach, getting a tan, gloating to be away from the cold, year after year I hear the familiar voice of “Mama” calling out: “hello fruit”. Sure, I’ve been called a basket case but fruit, no! What would I be if I were one? Mama stays annoyed with me as I buy my fruit from Suzanne. On one occasion she called out to me and said: “Hello watermelon” and a thought flashed through my mind that I inadvertently voiced: “I could be a tamarind stick but a watermelon, sweet carrot stick no!” I almost got watermeloned. On another instance, again on the beach, solving a crossword with our friend Eric, I felt this steely grip on my shoulder and then Mama’s melodiously irate voice asking: “Oiy drinking coconut kya?’ That was it. My firm resolves of “no laughter” policy frothed out like fresh banana lassi. Of course, we all knew that this was Mama’s way of communicating to sell fruit but the incredible hilarity of the situation is worthy of being penned down. The fish market has its own clawy humour that usually sounds like, “Madam, only touch fresh lobster, no bite”. Yes exactly, am I biting the lobster or is the lobster biting me? Staccato selling indeed with no punctuation required. Try this for a starter: “Madam, take gentle prawn just like pet”. I ask you all: What does that mean? I love my forays into the fish market because unless you’re there, the startlingly funny import of these words is fished away. There is no room for any crabbiness as the fishermen and I, now, are like succulent calamari in our understanding of each other, waiting to be batter fried and served with a colour-coordinated garnish. There is a board on the wall outside a shop close to where we live in Goa, which has a priceless sentence on it. My daughter and I have often stood, stared, scratched our heads and retreated hastily into our room before laughing out loud. The board reads: “Made to Order Tailor”. Please infer what you must. Ladies and gentlemen, fashion one according to your specifications indeed! Amongst the sun and the sand this is what we look forward to. The “Oiy coconut” did make me feel like toddy for a while though. Reminds me of, “When you’re good to mama, mama’s good to you”. January, 2010, Goa here we come and I am ready to learn newer ways to communicate. God bless us all and till next time, byebye
peanuts.
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La affaire Rathore:Brutalisation of governance
Skeletons
are tumbling down in quick succession DGPs and Home Secretaries of Haryana; Home Ministers and Chief Ministers of the State; high-ups of CBI; High Court Judge; elite Sacred Heart Convent. There is more to come. Senior officials who conspired in the torture and humiliation of Ruchika and her family, district officials who executed it and those who failed to prevent this blatant injustice. And the Union Home Ministry, the cadre controlling authority of IPS, who are now busy applying some cosmetics! The list could go on and on because this episode is the standing testimony of the brutalisation of governance at every level, from top to bottom. Some years ego I wrote in these columns thus about the ‘decadence of governance’: “The country is slowly moving away from democracy towards ‘kleptocracy’ with politicians, for whom democracy is nothing but a tool to capture power and the license to loot, at the centre of the orbit. Around them in the orbit are the civil servants, the police and even judges each feathering their own nest”. Put in plain words ‘kleptocracy’ meant ‘government of the thieves, by the thieves, for the thieves’, bereft of the basic element of governance called justice. Nobody read the writing on the wall. Instead some of my erstwhile colleagues felt these remarks were rather harsh and ‘governance’ was not that bad after all. I was hoping so and had been looking for encouraging signals to believe that ‘governance was not bad after all’. Now it looks as if ‘governance’ is not merely bad, it has become brutal. Total absence of justice for 19 long years is brutalisation of governance, which is the central message coming out of the sordid ‘Rathore’ episode. It is as if ‘institutions of governance and the instruments of public administration’ lay buried fathoms-deep. Media, particularly electronic, is ruthlessly targeting the ‘politicians at the top’, more specifically the Chief Ministers of Haryana for not taking adequate action on the ‘molestation’ complaint against a senior police officer. Former DGPs and Home Secretaries are being questioned and old records dug out. Nothing wrong in holding the political bosses and their principal advisors accountable and answerable. But this time around the oft-used decoy of ‘political interference’ should not be available for the real perpetrators of the crimes that are tumbling out. It is because for long ‘political interference’ is the crude brush with which serious lapses of basic governance is being painted white. Politicians come and go, but it is the higher echelons of Civil Service, Police and Judiciary who are creatures of the Constitution charged with the responsibility of providing fearless, honest and just governance at the basic levels where people live. For this purpose Constitution gives these services special privileges and protection. Such protection is not available to the politicians. Neither did the Founding Fathers repose much faith in the political system to give fair governance. Yet today’s civil servants and policemen abandon all their responsibilities and cringe before politicians and do their bidding without demur. This is a standing shame on India’s once ‘Iron Frame’! Civil servants and the police have near totally succumbed to political thuggery, with some even facilitating it. Higher Judiciary is busy acquitting corrupt and criminal bigwigs by stretching law to absurd limits. Corrupt and the venal are striding this land like colossus, dominating its political, administrative, police, judicial and business spectrum. In the event, over the years while the good and the honest have shrunk and faded away, the corrupt and the venal loom larger than life mocking at the institutions and systems of democratic governance. Despite the noble cliché of ‘We the People’, Constitution of India concentrated political and economic powers with the central government, devolving some to the states to maintain a federal facade. None was given to the grass-root entities of district and villages. The 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution in 1992 for establishing and empowering institutions for ‘people to govern themselves’ still remain only on paper. The system of governance continues to be top-down and sickeningly arrogant and colonial. Administrators and policemen are nothing but satraps! Nevertheless, for want of any alternative, the critical task of delivering de-centralised administration and just governance continues to be on the shoulders of India’s civil services led by the members of the IAS and IPS. Through a new talisman, Gandhiji summed up the essence of such governance: “Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test: Recall the face of the ordinary human being whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.” This was humane governance that was practiced by the civil services during the early decades of Independence. Though the colonial administrative structure, with IAS and IPS at the core continued unaltered, most of the civil service incumbents took their job seriously and involved themselves deeply in administrative work at the grassroots and district levels. For the IAS, increasingly becoming technical and managerial, this commitment soon faded because of absence of glamour in grass-root governance. Instead, the attractions of the new jobs in the burgeoning state industrial and commercial sectors seduced upwardly mobile IAS officials, especially as they were seen as stepping-stones to coveted jobs in the economic ministries in Delhi, with all its allurements and post-retirement bonanza! Ever since the dawn of the Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation era in early nineties, IAS has been rapidly drifting away from the task of ‘basic governance’ to that of ‘corporate facilitation’ catering to the upper crust of society, leaving the aam aadmi in the lurch! And IPS has been cozying up with the new breed of ‘rich and the famous’. Good Governance was the inevitable casualty and brutalisation followed. Responding to public outrage, incumbent Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda has said that his government would ‘revisit’ the entire “Rathore’ case. This is no favour. What he should really do is to revisit the ‘brutalisation of governance’ in the last two decades that has brought things to such a pass! Only then the soul of Ruchika will get ‘Justice’ and others of her ilk would feel safe and secure. The writer is a former Army and IAS Officer of the Haryana cadre.
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Meeting Afghan needs The
Obama administration has outlined a three-pronged strategy in Afghanistan, focusing on security, governance and economic development. But the implementation of those elements has been woefully lopsided. Since 2002, 93 percent of the $170 billion the United States has committed to Afghanistan has gone to military operations. As the country prepares to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, we also need to focus on providing a surge in the quality of life for the Afghan people. U.S. Agency for International Development workers are tremendously dedicated, but there are not nearly enough of them, which means the agency is heavily dependent on private contractors. There have been some commendable achievements, such as helping reduce Afghanistan’s infant mortality rate and rehabilitating nearly 1,000 miles of roads. Still, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lamented in March, the lack of results for the Afghan people is “heartbreaking.” The Obama administration has pledged a new, improved approach to development aid. Yet USAID has been without an administrator for 10 months, and the president’s nominee, Rajiv Shah, has yet to be confirmed. It’s now time, with the president’s commitment in his West Point speech to “focus our assistance in areas, such as agriculture, that can make an immediate impact in the lives of the Afghan people,” to heed the experience of successful social entrepreneurs who, with far fewer resources at their disposal, have achieved impressive progress on the ground. Take Greg Mortenson, president of the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, or CAI, who over the last 16 years has built or supported 130 schools in remote Pakistani and Afghan villages. These secular schools provide education to more than 30,000 children, the vast majority of them girls. CAI’s revenue in fiscal year 2007 were a fraction of what we will spend every day in Afghanistan over the next 18 months. Or take Sakena Yacoobi, a US-educated public health professional, who returned to her homeland in the 1990s to found the Afghan Institute of Learning, or AIL, now a network of 45 centers in seven provinces that provide comprehensive health and education services. Seventy percent of AIL’s staff of more than 400 is female. With an annual budget of $1 million, AIL reaches more than 350,000 Afghan women and children. Or Connie Duckworth, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, who was so moved by the hardships of the women she met on a visit to Afghanistan in 2002 that she created Arzu—which means “hope” in Dari—a rug-making enterprise focused on female weavers that is one of Afghanistan’s largest private-sector employers, with 90 percent of its jobs in underserved, rural areas. What are some key lessons from these social entrepreneurs’ success? First, ask, don’t tell: U.S. assistance programs must be tailored to meet local needs, not our own. Over the last eight years, too many well-intentioned U.S. programs have been driven by what America thinks is best, which is how we wasted millions trying to launch a 25,000-acre plantation on soil that was too salty for crops, and initiating cash-for-work construction of cobblestone roads that Afghans rejected because they hurt their camels’ hooves. The Afghan people know what they need. Second, invest capital outside the capital—and devise and direct those projects from the field. Mortenson is successful in part because he spends months every year living with the villagers in the communities his organization serves. That model has not yet penetrated the thinking of U.S. government programs. Third, ensure that U.S. assistance reaches the Afghan people. This sounds obvious. Yet last year, the nongovernmental Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief reported that 40 percent of official aid to Afghanistan goes back to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries. Fourth, make women the focus, not the footnote, of aid programs. It’s no accident Mortenson, Yacoobi and Duckworth all target their limited resources toward women and girls: In Afghanistan, as elsewhere, investing in women pays dividends many times over. Women are more likely to prioritize the education, nutrition and health of their families, creating a multiplier effect that lifts entire communities. Finally, approach development as an evolution, not a revolution. As Afghan expert Rory Stewart recently argued in a PBS interview, “Afghanistan is very poor, very fragile, very traumatized. To rebuild a country like that would take 30 or 40 years of patient, tolerant investment.” We should invest in programs that will be sustainable, long-term—and be prepared to commit for the long haul. Mortenson called his book “Three Cups of Tea” in reference to a rural village leader’s advice that slowing down and building relationships over tea in the traditional way is as important as building projects. As 30,000 more U.S. troops prepare to depart for Afghanistan, let’s hope we also have the stomach for 30,000 cups of tea.n — By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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Web sales register big increase Consumers
spent a little more than anticipated during the holiday season, according to a report Monday, and a significant e-tail threshold may have been crossed on Christmas Day at Amazon, the online bookseller. For the first time ever, online sales of e-books on Christmas Day exceeded sales of physical books at Amazon, the company said Monday. Over all, retail spending from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24 rose 3.6 percent compared with the corresponding period last year, according to MasterCard’s SpendingPulse survey, which tracks all retail spending, including cash transactions. The increase was partly attributable to one extra shopping day in 2009. Even removing that day, retail spending still beat last year’s performance, when recession-dampened sales slumped 2.3 percent compared with the 2007 period. This year’s results also bested expectations, which forecast a 1 percent slump in holiday spending compared with last year’s historically bad results. “While up is good, it wasn’t going to take much” to beat 2008 holiday spending, said Miller Tabak equity strategist Peter Boockvar. “Things are better but still sluggish, and consumers are still fervently looking for sales.” Boockvar pointed to reports Monday of people returning gifts in exchange for cash to buy necessities as “a sign that the labour market and people’s pocketbooks are still very uncertain.” According to government data, consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of U.S. GDP. The biggest jump in 2009 holiday retail spending happened online, where purchases rose 15.5 percent compared with last year. Contributing to the online surge were electronic book purchases from Amazon, meant for use on the company’s Kindle reading device. Amazon, however, does not release sales figures on Kindle sales, nor on e-books sold on Christmas Day. Using built-in wireless technology and an electronic display, the Kindle lets users download digitised books, blogs, magazines and newspapers in almost any location and read them on the device’s six-inch screen immediately. Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007. The peak in e-book purchases on Christmas Day indicates that a number of Kindles were given as Christmas presents and were used to buy books that day. In a release, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos called the Kindle, which sells for $259, the “most-gifted item ever in our history.” On a wider scale, the uptick in holiday spending came from electronics, jewellery and footwear, which combined to make up more than 16 percent of all sales, MasterCard said. Online sales hit a one-day high of $913 million on Dec. 15, comScore reported, the first time they have topped the $900 million mark. —
By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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