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An airline in disarray Indirect support
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Powerless in
J&K Kishtwar gropes in the dark The district town of Kishtwar in Jammu and Kashmir has been without power for the past more than one week and is expected to remain powerless for another week as officials take their own time to repair the transmission tower which collapsed on May 17.
Dealing with rising
China
My inseparable
companion
Teaching school
kids The road not taken Bangalore
Diary
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Indirect support for Saeed
The
Pakistan Supreme Court’s order on Tuesday upholding the Lahore High Court decision to set free Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed from preventive detention is a major setback to efforts to normalise relations between India and Pakistan. The way Islamabad and the Punjab provincial government pleaded the case against Saeed, one of the key potters of the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attack, showed that there was no intention to get him convicted for his involvement in large-scale terrorist violence. He was detained in December 2008 with his JuD getting banned after the Mumbai massacre when the UN Security Council passed a resolution putting him and the JuD, a reincarnation of the Lashkar-e-Taiyaba (LeT), on the list of people and organisations supporting Al-Qaida. The Pakistan apex court verdict said that the prosecution failed to provide proof to establish his role in the Mumbai terrorist killings and his links with Al-Qaida. This is clearly a way to help Saeed to remain a free man. It is true that had Saeed lost the case in the Supreme Court, leading to his getting jailed, this would not have put an end to the activities of the terrorist outfits working against India from Pakistani soil. However, Saeed’s case has come to be regarded as the litmus test for the sincerity of Pakistan in fighting terrorism emanating from there. Islamabad’s failure to fight the case forcefully with all the evidence it has against the founder of the LeT shows that it has no will to take on the man who has become the most prominent symbol of terrorism in South Asia. The Government of Pakistan did not have to launch any major exercise to collect evidence to nail Saeed. “Enough evidence has been given by India to Pakistan on the role and activities of Hafiz Saeed”, as Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao has asserted. The evidence provided by India through the dossiers it had submitted to Islamabad after the Mumbai terrorist strikes could have easily convinced the Pakistani apex court that Saeed was a terrorist mastermind who must remain in jail in the interest of peace and stability in South Asia and elsewhere. |
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Powerless in J&K
The
district town of Kishtwar in Jammu and Kashmir has been without power for the past more than one week and is expected to remain powerless for another week as officials take their own time to repair the transmission tower which collapsed on May 17. The mountainous terrain poses a problem, no doubt, but why no alternative arrangement for power supply has been made defies logic. Parts of the troubled state are so backward that people have got used to living without sufficient basic amenities like power and water and they do not complain. It is the district police that is worried about darkness encouraging crime. The power situation in the rest of the state is far from adequate. Against the peak season demand of 2,000 MW, the various power projects, managed by the National Hydel Power Corporation, generate only 1,500 MW. The overstretched state exchequer does not permit sufficient power purchases. The state has a string of big and small hydroelectric projects. Since the rivers in the state are covered by the Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan blames power projects this side of the border for its water shortage. It sought US intervention to stop India from building megapower projects during the visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in November last year but without success. On its own, the militancy-hit state is not doing enough on the power front. Some 990 hydel projects have become defunct for want of maintenance. The Centre has come to the beleaguered state’s rescue and taken over the maintenance and renovation work of 1,000 micro hydel projects. The state government has to seriously take up power reforms started by the Centre, repair or replace, wherever necessary, the worn-out distribution network and check transmission losses, which at 70 per cent are enormous. Agreed, fighting militancy is a priority of the state leadership, but it cannot afford to neglect building infrastructure, which is crucial for development. |
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Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
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Dealing with rising China While
on a visit to Beijing, the Minister for Environment and Forests, Mr Jairam Ramesh, launched a broadside against his senior colleagues in the Home and Defence Ministries, on the sensitive issue of giving the Chinese company HUAWEI access to the telecommunication sector in India, he had asserted: “If we continue to be paranoid about Chinese investment in India, we are not going to be able to derive the full benefits of the Copenhagen spirit.” He was referring to the cooperation between India and China at the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen when an isolated China made common cause with India, Brazil and South Africa to thwart Western pressures that would have adversely affected the developmental efforts of emerging and developing countries. Did Mr Ramesh go through the detailed studies that have been made about Chinese efforts to undermine communications and cyber security in India before making his intemperate comments on foreign soil? Do we not live today in a world where countries, especially emerging powers, compete, cooperate and sometimes even confront each other? The Prime Minister reportedly admonished Mr Ramesh for his comments. One, however, doubts whether his ministerial colleagues are going to become more disciplined in this era of coalition politics. The Prime Minister’s former Special Envoy Shyam Saran, who along with two other eminent experts on climate change, quit over Mr Ramesh’s frequent flip-flops on climate-related issues, recently remarked that in an era when the centre of gravity of economic power was shifting from the Western world to Asia, India appeared to be successfully moving globally towards a “hedging” strategy of “engaging with all major powers, but aligning with none”. Thus, while we naturally engage and cooperate with China in forums like the G-20 and BRICS and on issues like climate change and world trade negotiations, we should be under no illusions about Chinese determination to become the dominant power in the world, where little strategic space is to be accorded to others in Asia like India and Japan. When an economically backward China decided to take the road of economic liberalisation and rapid economic growth in 1979, its supreme leader Deng advised his compatriots to follow a policy of ”lie low, bide your time” in international affairs. In effect, Deng wisely advised that China should not bite off more than it could chew and that it should bide its time till it could flex its economic and military muscles. The only instance when China thereafter used raw military power across its land borders was its disastrous effort in 1979 to teach Vietnam a “lesson” after it secured American backing to deal in this manner with an ally of the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1980s, the Chinese acted in close concert with the Americans in undermining Soviet interests. The Americans, in turn, lavished praise on China, and American companies went gaga in investing and building Chinese capabilities. In course of time, a resurgent China has emerged as a global economic power whose foreign exchange reserves are double India’s entire GDP. But the Chinese dream of dominating Asia as a prelude to its emergence as a global power number one has remained constant. The detente with the US was used by China to lay claims on its maritime borders with virtually every neighbour and up the ante on its land border claims on India. “Containment” of India was sought by the transfer of conventional and nuclear weapons capabilities to Pakistan and by quiet use of Chinese diplomatic, economic and military muscle across India’s neighbourhood. Throughout this period, the Chinese displayed a healthy respect for American diplomatic and military power. But the American economic meltdown and President Obama’s statements and actions suggesting that he favoured a world order dominated by a Sino-American diarchy, prematurely led to discarding Deng’s wise advice of “lie low and bide your time”. The advent of the Obama Administration has seen growing Chinese assertiveness across Asia. In July 2009 the Chief of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Timothy Keating, told his Indian interlocutors that his Chinese naval counterpart had remarked to him: “You (the US) take Hawaii East and we China will take Hawaii west. Then you need not come into the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean and we need not go to the Eastern Pacific. If anything happens there, then you can let us know and if something happens here we will let you know”. On May 6, 2009, China officially banned summer fishing in the South China Sea rejecting a Vietnamese protest on this unilateral ban in disputed waters. Earlier this year, China announced that it had discovered a new deep water gas-field in the South China Sea and despatched patrol ships to assert its fishing rights in the waters around Nansha Islands. The Chinese have acted similarly in the East China Sea, with the conduct of a military exercise and the commencement of oil and gas exploration in disputed waters, provoking protests from Japan. Chinese assertiveness is also now being manifested on issues pertaining to the utilisation of river waters. China has refused to join Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam as a member of the Mekong River Commission. Cambodia’s Minister for Water Resources noted in February this year that there had been concerns over the lowering of water levels in the Mekong, resulting from the construction of dams across the river in China. There are, similarly, serious concerns about the reported plans by China to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra. It was only after India provided it with satellite photographs that China belatedly acknowledged that it was building a hydroelectric project across the Brahmaputra at Zhagmu and thereafter agreed to exchange data on lean season water flows with lower riparian states ---- India and Bangladesh. It is true that after vicious propaganda barrages against India over the past two years, the Chinese media has toned down hostile reporting about India after the Copenhagen Summit. But it would be naive for India to assume that this presages any Chinese climbdown on its territorial claims in Arunachal Pradesh or any dilution of its overall strategies in South Asia and in the entire Indian Ocean region to contain India by enhanced military and nuclear ties with Pakistan, and by undermining Indian influence in its neighbourhood. HUAWEI, the Chinese company so ardently supported by Mr Ramesh, faces charges of bribery, data theft, close ties with China’s military and conspiracy to disrupt a national telecommunications network in countries ranging from the US, the UK and Australia to Argentina and
Indonesia.
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My inseparable companion More
than half a century
ago, I learnt letter-writing at Sir JJ College of Architecture, Bombay.
I honed my skills after reading Sufia Akhtar’s incomparable anthology
of letters Zer-i-Labb. Each piece was an epistle of piercing
pathos rarely expressed by a lovelorn soul in the annals of human
craving for two-way communication. When I joined the Chandigarh College
of Architecture my students presented me a collection of John Keats’
letters. I read the book several times over—and developed my
letter-writing to palpable effectiveness, inspired by the romantic poet’s
emotive style. As a result, I wrote over 4,000 letters to people,
including those I had never met, from wide-ranging disciplines and
backgrounds. The ones I am lucky to have met confide that they have
preserved my letters with loving care despite the fact that they had
never bothered to acknowledge their receipt in the first place! This
unresponsive romance has sadly changed with the times, and Personal
Computer along with the Internet is the culprit for this mutational
quantum leap into the realm of couldn’t-care-less ‘human’
relationships. Persuaded doggedly by my life-partner to learn e-mailing
to maintain my prestigious position as a retired principal, I have taken
to computer typing with boyish enthusiasm. Not only do I cling to the
body-electronic like a bug to the dog’s skin but also find it
brusquely replacing my daily paath-pooja rituals. But, sadly, the
joy of writing letters in long hand has been taken over, on the sly, by
computer typing like the East India Company once succeeded in capturing
Bharat by dubious means. To end the impasse, however, I have
unwittingly compromised with my irremediable situation: the speed of my
one-finger look-typing is no better than writing in long hand. In each
case, it takes me 30 minutes to complete one page. Now in two years I
have typed as many e-mails as it took me a lifetime to write letters in
long hand. But this achievement, far from being enviable, is disgusting.
People have stopped sending me letters, and those whom I e-mail highly
emotive messages a la John Keats either do not respond or, more
sagaciously, prefer to change their e-mail IDs. Their studied be-rukhi
makes me feel that I have died a premature death — with nobody feeling
bereaved at the "irreparable loss" and distressed over how
that "great void" created by my social demise would ever be
filled. In this hour of lonely lunacy, rather than mourn my own death, I
turn to my inseparable companion: the computer — to retrieve my
incorrigible optimism that, though dead before my foreordained time, I
have not lived in vain. I breathed my last in computer literacy, leaving
behind a much contented better-half!
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Teaching school kids
ONE of the main reasons for the failure in providing quality education to children in government schools in Haryana is the poor performance of a majority of teachers, which goes unchecked in the absence of any monitoring mechanism. All is not, in fact, well with the school system and there is an imperative need to improve the classroom performance of both the teachers and the taught. While there are a number of reasons for the deterioration in academic standards at the school stage, one of these is substandard poor quality of teacher education imparted to prospective teachers in colleges of education. It is unfortunate that the National Council for Teacher Education, which was constituted under an Act of Parliament to achieve planned and coordinated development of teacher education with performance appraisal systems, norms and mechanisms, has not been able to accomplish its objective of brining about a qualitative improvement in teacher preparation. Its working seems limited only to granting recognition to institutions seeking permission for running teacher training courses with the main aim of profit, barring exceptions, which ultimately leads to commercialisation. There is no evidence of planned development, which was to be achieved by the NCTE. Its liberal attitude has rather resulted in the unbridled mushrooming of institutions for various courses of teacher education. Take, for instance, Haryana. There are at present 461 institutions with a total intake of over 61,000 students in the B.Ed course. An entrance test conducted with a view to allowing admission only to better qualified candidates has proved to be an exercise in futility. The number of seats is much more than the number of candidates. Even those with 40 per cent marks in BA/B.Sc are admitted. Some of these colleges have managed to have the M.Ed course, to which even those getting only 32 marks out of 100 in the entrance tests have been allowed admission. Strangely enough, the state governments has no role or say in it. Even the earlier condition of obtaining a no-objection certificate from the government is now not required for getting recognition to any teacher training courses from the NCTE. Despite the government’s opposition to such unplanned proliferation of colleges in the state without keeping in view the principle of demand and supply, the NCTE continues granting recognition, ignoring the fact that its action has not only created unemployment among B.Ed teachers, but also adversely affected the quality of education. Out of a total of 461 B.Ed colleges, 442 are self-financed private institutions. Punjab and Himachal Pradesh are also grappling with a similar problem. The NCTE does not have any mechanism to oversee the functioning of colleges after granting recognition. The state governments have little control over the self-financed private B.Ed. colleges set up with an eye on earning money. Under such conditions, one cannot expect quality education. Teachers’ education is a continuous process and its pre-service and in-service components are inseparable. There has to be a linkage between theory and practice. It would, therefore, be in the interest of teacher education if pre-service teacher preparation institutions also have arrangements for imparting in-service education. The present B.Ed. syllabus needs revision and updating so as to meet the requirements of the changed courses of study. An interaction with a group of secondary school teachers revealed that a majority of teachers are not fully equipped with the knowledge of their subjects. They need content enrichment courses, followed by intensive training in the latest techniques of teaching. There should be a regular system of planning and organising pre-induction and in-service education programmes to keep the teaching personnel abreast of the latest developments in their curricular areas. Government and non-government-aided B.Ed colleges could also have in-service education wings to help conduct such programmes for working B.Ed and D.Ed teachers drawn from schools located within their districts. The Education Board, which has so far been functioning only as an examining body, should come forward to fund this programme, realising its role in the qualitative improvement of school education. The Haryana government’s decision to change the eligibility condition of educational qualification from +2 to BA/BSc with English for admission to the two-year diploma in education course is a welcome step. The enhanced qualification is bound to help improve the academic standards at the elementary level. The state universities, instead of the Education Board, will be responsible for the conduct of the D.Ed exam, which, too, is a step in the right direction. The present D.Ed syllabus needs restructuring, upgrading and updating to meet the requirements of both primary as well as upper primary classes. A committee of experts from the NCERT, SCERT, DIET and supervisory staff should go into this exercise to design the need-based syllabus and courses of study. In-service JBT teachers with plus two academic qualification may continue teaching primary classes, while those D.Ed with BA/BSc degree should be made eligible to teach up to the upper primary level. There should be a state-level coordination-cum-advisory committee with the Education Secretary as its chairperson to coordinate and oversee the pre-service and in-service education programmes with the main purpose of bringing about a qualitative improvement in teacher education, which is the need of the hour. Any programme of teacher education, if devoid of quality, becomes not only a financial waste but also a source of overall deterioration in educational standards. The writer is a former Director of
Primary Education, Haryana
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The road not taken
Newspapers
across the country flashed around the same time early this month the news of two individuals incidentally bearing the same name. The contrast of the reasons for making news could not have been starker or more telling. While Dr. Shah Faesal, the doughty young Kashmiri Muslim, was in the news for breaking what many call the green glass ceiling, by topping in arguably the toughest examination in the country, the civil services examinations. Faisal Shahzad, the US-based Pakistani, on the other hand was in the news for all the wrong reasons for trying to blow up the Times Square in New York. The trajectories of the lives of the two could not have been more different. One was brought up amidst the most trying circumstances in an insurgency-infested, troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir. The other was brought up in a chic upmarket neighbourhood of Pakistan and had a top educational pedigree and an enviable filial lineage. However, how they made their lives out to be, is completely different from what one might have expected from their different experiences in their different environments. The story of how their respective lives seemed to have evolved, in a sense, eptomises the story of the evolution of the two sub-continental nations. With all her failings and misgivings, India can be proud of having strong institutions which are at least systematically and institutionally impervious to the atavistic and parochial identities of its citizens. The success of the young Kashmiri in an examination which would catapult him onto the levers of decision-making at the highest level in the government shows that the country has been able to keep alive the dream of the forefathers of the nation who envisioned a modern and secular state. The success of Dr. Shah Faesal is a revalidation of the fact that there are no limits to the success of an individual in the country so long as there is ability and drive to achieve a goal. The symbolic value of the success in the examination has sent out more positive vibes across the nation than any amount of state propaganda could have done. The role of community leaders of the minority community becomes paramount at this stage. If at all there was a real or imagined reason for disaffection of the Muslim community against the “system”, the example of the sterling success in the elite examination should be taken as a symbol that they are very much the stakeholders for the great Indian dream. Not only should the success be seen by the native Kashmiris as a symbol of the inclusivist Indian state but also the rest of the nation should view this as a fact that the average Kashmiri harbours the same aspirations as the rest of the countrymen and is not just waiting to break away from the rest of the country. Pakistan, on the other hand, has been a story of constitutional breakdown and slow withering away of all institutions of the state. The only robust institution in that country has been the army which has, in fact, been responsible for the slow but steady radical Islamisation all the other institutions of Pakistan. It is no secret that the strategic support to the religious extremists in the country during the Afgan adventure of the 80s is now getting back at the Pakistani state with a vengeance. More than any material support to the rogue elements, what has been damaging to the state of Pakistan is the radicalisation of the public discourse in that country. The case of Faisal Shahzad is not that of a truant child gone wrong but that of a flawed system that gave birth to the dangerous ideology of religious fanaticism and an exclusivist vision of an Islamic state. What should be seen as a matter of grave concern in Pakistan is that the country is now being seen internationally as an assembly line of terrorists who have been brought up on a diet of war mongering and imagined oppression by the entire outside world. Giving up one’s life for a cause takes years of indoctrination and given the huge scale of similar bigoted case emerging from Pakistan, it can easily be fathomed, how well entrenched and all encompassing the jehadist ideology has become in that country. Unless some serious introspection and course correction is undertaken by the ruling establishment in that country, there is a very real danger of isolation of the country in the international fora and a further push into the abyss. The need of the hour is a concerted effort to de-radicalise all institutions of the state. The writer is a serving IRS officer based in Mumbai. The views expressed are personal |
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Like
the rest of India, Bangalore was also swept by a pall of gloom when India made an unceremonious exit from the T20 World Cup in West Indies. However, the final victory of the English team in the tournament has brought smiles back to some of the faces here.
After all, Kevin Pietersen, the South African-born English batsman who played a key role in England’s victory march in the championship, is a member of the Bangalore Royal Challengers team. The cricketer also acknowledged his debt to his stint in the IPL for his good form in the World Cup.
E A S Prasanna, a former Indian off spinner from Bangalore, is particularly happy with the performance of English spinner Graeme Swann in the Caribbean. “Do you know I have trained Swann”, an elated Prasanna said. Relaxation for pubs Tipplers in India’s cyber capital are saying cheers to the news that the BJP government in the state is considering allowing pubs to stay open till 2 in the morning. At present the deadline for closing eating and drinking places in Bangalore and major cities in Karnataka is 11.30 pm. The state government is organising a global investors’ meet here next month and this event has apparently woken up the government to the “necessity” of extending the opening hours for bars and pubs in Bangalore so that it match the cities of the West. Pakistani horror Pakistani horror”, these words in the Indian context, inevitably brings to mind the events of 26/11 and many other outrages carried out by terrorists in India allegedly with Pakistani backing. However, horror from Pakistan, instead of bloodbath, gave a creepy satisfaction to the people of this city. Three great horror films from Pakistan, Zinda Lash, Aurat Raj and Zibahkhana, were screened in the city on May 22 and 23. All the screenings were preceded by a short introduction and followed by a discussion. |
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