The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Few options in Kashmir
It’s time for the government to get tough

While New Delhi gropes for a prescription to restore normalcy in the Kashmir Valley, it should be painfully evident that there are very few options before the government. In the event, the cabinet has rightly decided to convene an All-Party meeting on Wednesday to take stock of the situation and try to build a political consensus over the course it is likely to take. While the Prime Minister has repeatedly reiterated his readiness to talk to anyone on the legitimate aspirations of Kashmiris, and although he has been forthright in asserting that the grievances of Kashmiri youth need to be addressed, he has been badly let down by political leaders of the Valley. Rather than strengthen the PM’s position, their encouragement of senseless violence and provocative actions have, quite unnecessarily, closed the door to dialogue. Any kind of talk with separatists is no longer an option. Nor does the government have much choice but to continue with the Armed Forces Special Powers Act ( SPA). Dilution of the Act at this point would not only be counter-productive but would also be interpreted as New Delhi’s weakness, besides giving a fillip to a similar demand in North-eastern states.

It’s time for New Delhi to signal that its patience has worn thin and that it cannot be taken for granted. Separatist leaders need to give a commitment on maintaining normalcy as a pre-requisite for talks. Even the political and economic package for the state, that the Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has been pressing for, must wait till the situation simmers down. While New Delhi must address the governance-deficit and the trust-deficit in the state that the official statement on Monday alluded to, it would be a colossal mistake to dilute the authority of Abdullah junior. The young Chief Minister has reasons to feel frustrated and he rightly feels that he has been pushed to the ring with one of his arms tied behind his back. He needs to be given the support that he needs.

While the government must take a long-term view of the discontent, alienation and restlessness that one sees in the Valley, the opposition needs to resist the temptation of scoring political points over the sensitive issue. That is because the nation cannot afford to speak in different voices on how to deal with the challenges in the Valley.

Tackling corruption
Moily’s diatribe against babus unfair

Union Law Minister M. Veerappa Moily’s diatribe against the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India (CAG) and the then Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC) for their so-called “failure” in tackling corruption is unfair. Propriety demands that a Minister should refrain from criticising another constitutional functionary, that too in a forum like the Central Information Commission, yet another constitutional office. The Minister may be right in referring to the CAG’s delay in drawing attention to the innumerable scams. He has also said that timely intervention by the CAG and the CVC would have saved most of these scams. He was perhaps referring to the 2G spectrum scandal on which the Supreme Court has now issued a notice to Union Telecommunications Minister A. Raja to respond in 10 days. But who has prevented a speedy probe into these scams? Mr Moily’s Law Ministry itself.

It is common knowledge how the Law Ministry, in response to a query from the Telecommunications Ministry last month, said that the CAG and the CVC could probe cases of corruption but not the government’s policy decisions. Apparently, while the Law Ministry has gone by the letter and not the spirit of the law, policies have been tweaked to facilitate corruption. Clearly, it would be unfair to blame the CAG alone for the malaise. Corruption has permeated the system so much that the CAG and the CVC will find it difficult to eradicate the problem without the government’s wholehearted support to fight against it.

The Law Minister has lambasted the then CVC, Mr Pratyush Sinha, for having called “every third Indian corrupt”. Mr Moily may be right, but why single out Mr Sinha alone for the slow pace of investigation? He did his best in putting 123 IAS, IPS and IFS officers under the scanner during his tenure as the CVC, but the very system is such that it takes a long time to bring tainted civil servants to justice. Since certain forms of punishment cannot be awarded once the officer retires, a timely reference to the Union Public Service Commission (which is mandatory) at least six months in advance of his/her retirement is desirable to expedite action against the officer concerned. It is also time to revisit Article 311 of the Constitution that mandates prior permission from the government to prosecute a corrupt civil servant. Surely, the corrupt bureaucrats deserve no leniency or constitutional protection.

Thought for the Day

Emulate the learned and the pious in all your thoughts and deeds. — The Upanishads

ARTICLE

Crisis in Thailand
Reconciliation plan needed for healing the wounds
by Maj-Gen Ashok K. Mehta

Four months after the bloody military crackdown against the mainly rural-based Red Shirt barricades in the heart of town, centered around the busy Ratchaprasong intersection, Bangkok is not the same any more. Ninety-one persons were killed, 2,000 wounded and the Red Shirt protests cost $ 1 billion in business. Still business is slowly picking up.

The national broadcasting television channel where the youthful Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva goes for his weekly chat show has been attacked thrice with grenades, fortunately targeting more publicity than physical damage. In addition to these random acts of terrorism, a full-blown Islamist insurgency in the south of the country keeps the Army busy defusing IEDs, chasing insurgents and taking casualties.

The Centre for Resolution of Emergency Situation (CRES), the nodal security agency engaged in restoring normalcy and hunting down former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s Red Shirt supporters, has identified nearly 500 vulnerable places in Bangkok which are being kept under 24-hour watch. The national emergency has not been revoked from several provinces in the North which is the Red Shirt bastion. In Udan Thani province for example, the police is scouting for culprits who burnt down the Municipal Hall but left the King’s portrait intact.

The King in Thailand like the King in Nepal a few years ago is worshipped as God and his supporters, as also those of the ruling alliance are generally identified by yellow — the colour of their head and wrist bands and T shirts. The all-powerful monarch is sick and has maintained an unusual silence over the events of the past months.

Thailand has seen 27 Prime Ministers, 18 constitutions and 24 coups since constitutional monarchy was introduced in 1923. Like Nepal and Bhutan, it was never colonised though it became the main base for the US war in Vietnam. Politics like elsewhere in this part of the world is a murky business. The powerful Army and police are completely politicised, virtually a state within a state, though ostensibly under civilian political control.

On several occasions, the King has mediated between the civil and military to restore constitutional control but the seeds of militarisation and politicisation are sown early at the Armed Forces Academies Preparatory School — the grooming ground of the military. The current unrest is symptomatic of a deeper malaise — of a potential civil war between the North and South, the haves and the have-nots, boiling down to bright colours. The Red versus Yellow power struggle simmering since 2006 came to a head earlier this year when fugitive, former Prime Minister Shinawatra who is wanted on several counts of corruption, led through video, his Red Shirts into a confrontation. Under pressure, the government offered fresh elections in 10 months, an opportunity they spurned demanding immediate polls.

Without experienced negotiators, the Red Shirts missed an opportunity to test their popularity at the hustings. The earliest an election is expected now is April 2011, giving the government and its allies the time to reclaim political space lost to the opposition.

The ruling Democrats have won handsomely the recent district and council elections in Bangkok, reflecting a new-found voter confidence in the party and alliance. This mandate has to be tested in the rural heartland where Thais voted hugely for Mr Shinawatra during the last elections.

Virtually leaderless without Mr Shinawatra, the former People’s Alliance for Democracy and its new avatar, the New Politics Party (NPP) is unsure about its electoral and street strategies. Dispelling rumours of his ill-health, Bangkok newspapers last week released pictures of Mr Shinawatra shaking hands with Mr Nelson Mandela. Montenegro, one of the countries which have given billionaire Shinawatra citizenship, has assured Thailand that it will take action against him if Interpol puts Shinawatra on its wanted list.

Earlier, neighbour Cambodia with whom Thailand has a border dispute even over the renowned Preah Vihar temple, had the temerity to appoint Mr Shinawatra as the country’s economic advisor, a post he still holds. Over the last two months, Mr Shinawatra has kept a low profile, including not tweeting for one month, as part of a change of strategy to convince his detractors that Thai court verdicts against him for abuse of power and corruption were politically motivated. While the Maoists in Nepal emulated unsuccessfully the Shinawatra model of power grab from the streets, Mr Shinawatra himself seems to be veering around towards the Nepali Maoist successful choice of electoral politics, laced with low levels of violence. He wants his critics to stop accusing him of being disloyal to monarchy, the most revered institution in Thailand. Detractors of the government have alleged that the rash of bombing incidents are being staged by the establishment to keep the emergency in place and hounding the Red Shirts. The perils of the emergency decree have affected press freedom and increased the visibility of soldiers on the streets.

Echoing the fears of the government, Chief of Army-designate Gen Prayanth Chanocha has said that the ongoing political instability would “fall in the way of his aim of keeping Army out of politics”. Such a routine statement in Thailand by an Indian General is unthinkable. The annual reshuffle of the military takes place on October 1 in Bangkok. As many as 550 Army and Police appointments are changed at the stroke of the midnight hour.

General Chanocha has ensured that all his Class 12 mates at the Armed Forces Academies are elevated to Army Commanders. Only one General was overlooked for promotion as he had refused to join the Army crackdown to disperse the Red Shirts in May this year.

The most talked about case among the military is the one involving former Russian Army officer, Victor Bout, a big fish in the arms transfer business. He was arrested following a US sting operation in Bangkok about sale of weapons to Colombian FARC rebels. Mr Bout, apparently, knows how weapons reached the Taliban and the terrorists in Yemen and Somalia and is, therefore, sought in the US and Russia. America has invoked the US-Thai extradition treaty but an appeals court in Bangkok has turned it down. Reconciliation between Red and Yellow Shirts is a far cry, but people want to get on with their lives. First it was ‘Remaking Ratchaprasong’. Now it is ‘Bangkok Getting Ahead’. Mere slogans will not help. Fortunately, the Thai economy has shown remarkable resilience to short-term political shocks. Like in Sri Lanka, political violence has not had strong impact on growth. The economy grew at 9.1 per cent in the second quarter of this fiscal and is expected to stabilise around 8 per cent, the best since 1995.

The risks remain: three bomb attacks in one month are a big deterrent to tourism the country’s biggest foreign exchange earner. In Shanghai last week, Mr Vejjajiva made a bid to host the 2020 World Expo at the same time as political parties called for reconciliation. Healing the political wounds requires a reconciliation plan and the Royal touch. The King could grant a Royal pardon to Mr Shinawatra to usher in a peace process towards political stability. It is not asking for the moon.

MIDDLE

Life comes full circle
by Sai R. Vaidyanathan

Her wobbly feet could not hold her upright and she fell on the floor. I rushed to pick her up and put her in bed. She smiled and held on to two of my fingers that she could retain in her grip.

My wife heard the commotion and came running from the kitchen with tears in her eyes, but she stopped in the tracks when she saw her in my arms.

When she closed her eyes, I scanned the places where she could have hurt herself due to the fall and found that she had bruised herself on the knee. Her eyes winced in pain as I applied some ointment.

Her bright eyes followed anyone and everyone who moved about in her room and talking to her would elicit answers sometimes in monosyllables or nods and shakes of the head, but mostly in silence.

My wife and I took turns taking care of her — I, before I went to work, and she, in my absence. The routine was the same — feed her, clean her, bathe her, tuck her in bed.

Like children, she had an attitude and loads of cajoling was needed to bring her to our point of view. Feeding her was a task in itself as she would tightly clench her jaws if she didn’t want to eat. This forced us time and again to nudge at her chubby cheeks or distract her with some small talk. Her lack of teeth made her take semisolid food, but juices and milk were the things she preferred.

That was my granny — full of life and a pillar of strength for the family for decades. But the clock had turned full circle and now, we were making efforts to do to her what she had done for my father and me without much effort.

Countless times had she fed my father and changed his nappies and years later, when I was born, her overflowing love gave her the strength to do all that to me — though with shaking hands.

It wasn’t literacy that she relied on to manage the household efficiently, but her common sense and wisdom. Payments to the milkman, grocery shop, watchman, vegetable vendor, washerman happened on time without a hitch for more than half a century until she found all this was taking a toll on her health.

My wife, who now shouldered the burden, realised in no time the enormity of the job that the eldest member of the clan was taking care of without an additional wrinkle on the forehead.

Time managed to weaken her body, but not her spirit. Seeing our sad faces, she would say, “I still have the strength to fly to God’s feet.”

OPED BEHAVIOUR

Mistakes: Our life-long companion
We make mistakes and make them every day, but are loath to admit them. Indeed, those who admit making mistakes are ridiculed, rarely trusted and often pitied. But isn’t it the right way to acknowledge mistakes and take corrective action ?
Johann Hari

Egg on his face, figuratively, is not all that rare.

Here is a series of questions that should be fairly straight-|forward, but are actually excruciating. When were you last wrong? What has been your personal life?

We all have a weird and paradoxical relationship with our mistakes. We can see that everyone around us makes errors all the time - yet we are always astonished when it turns out we are getting things wrong too. It is because, deep down, we see being wrong as shameful proof that we have been sloppy, or stupid.

This belief pervades our culture: we applaud the public figures who stay the course, even if it is wrong, and boo the ones who admit a mistake and make a U-turn or does a flip-flop. But what if - apologies for the irony landslide here - we are wrong in the whole way we think about being wrong?

A brilliant new manifesto has just been published urging us to reassess our relationship with our own mistakes: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by the American journalist Kathryn Schulz.

Perhaps the best place to start her story is with an experiment first staged in the University of Berlin in 1902 by Professor Frank Von Liszt. In a classroom, two students began to have an angry argument, until one pulled out a gun. As the panicked students around them drew back, a professor tried to intervene - and a shot was fired. The professor collapsed to the ground.

The witnesses, unaware that all three were actors following a script, were then taken outside and quizzed about what they had seen and heard. They were encouraged to give as much detail as possible.

Everyone got it wrong. They put long monologues into the mouths of spectators who had said nothing; they heard the row as being about a dozen different imagined subjects, from girlfriends to debts to exams; they saw blood everywhere, when there was none. Most people got a majority of their facts wrong, and even the very best witness offered a picture that was 25 per cent fiction.

The more certain the witness, the more wrong they were. Every time the experiment is run, the results are the same.

The implications are pretty startling. Human beings can't even accurately describe an event of great importance that we have just witnessed with our own eyes. What does that suggest about our ability to be easily right about much more complex questions ? In American Pastoral, Philip Roth calls life, an astonishing farce of misperception. Our abilities to perceive and reason are painfully limited, while the world is unutterably complex. We are peering at an entire universe through a drinking straw.

So the meaningful question about any human being isn't : does he get things wrong? With these limitations, we will all make big mistakes. The real question is: does he take the time to understand his mistakes and learn from them ? But you can only do this regularly if you know how to think about mistakes in a healthy way.

There are a few areas of human life where people have found a way to do this. Revealingly, they are the areas that make things work better than any other - the sciences. To pluck one example out of millions, when Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infections in the 1980s, almost all scientists disagreed. Now, after conclusive tests, everyone agrees.

It is not that scientists have less ego than the rest of us, or feel less sting when they are proven wrong. It is that they have developed rigorous techniques for constantly checking their claims against the evidence, and ruthlessly hunting out their errors and figuring out what they mean.

This approach can be extended. After two planes collided at Tenerife airport in 1977, killing 600 people, the airline industry introduced radical new protocols. Crew and ground members are now actually rewarded for reporting their own errors and screw-ups. The result ? Accidents fell dramatically, from 0.178 per million flight hours to 0.I04.

Now compare that to the way we conduct public life. One of the most predictable applause lines for any politician is to boast that he won't back down, look back or say sorry. Tony Blair wasn't unusual when he bragged: I can only go one way, I've got no reverse gear. But a car without a reverse gear would be banned from the roads.

Yet we have structured our public life so this seems like a sensible statement, while anyone who ever admits a mistake is talking themselves out of a job. You can hear the carping interviewers now: How can we ever trust you again, if you were wrong about this ? We make it easier to continue in error than to admit error and put it right.

If we want to face up to our mistakes more regularly, then we need to change the way we think about them. If we see them as proof of our own incompetence, we will continue to puff out our chests and pretend they aren't there. Is there a different way ?

Error is an essential step in the process of finding the right answer. Every scientist leaves behind a trail of disproven hypotheses and papers shot to pieces by colleagues. He doesn't see them as shameful, but as part of a process that was bringing him closer to the truth through experimentation.

Similarly, James Joyce, thinking about all the drafts he wrote that failed, said, "a man's errors are his portals of discovery".

But error may be even more fundamental than that. From the moment we are born, human beings are creating theories about the world, based on limited evidence. It's how we survived: if our ancestors hadn't generalised that all lions are dangerous, you wouldn't be reading this. Errors are often simply this necessary impulse reaching too far, or misfiring. So the impulse that makes us wrong is also the impulse that makes us human.

Since reading Schultzis book, I have been trying harder to train myself to think systematically about my own mistakes. Every week, I make a list of what I have got wrong, personally or professionally, and try to figure out how to get it right next time. I can't entirely drain the pain from it but I do think there's a hunger out there for this approach: the most positive reaction I have ever had to a column was when I tried to publicly explore how I had got the Iraq war so horribly wrong.

What I learned from that awful mistake - the true factors that drive US and UK foreign policy, rather than propaganda claims - have led me, I think, to positive insights since. If I had instead run from the error and insisted it wasn't there, I would be stuck in a bloody blind alley, devoid of insights.

Tim Harford of Radio 4's More or Less has suggested an annual prize for the politician who makes the most constructive admission of error. It'd be a good start - but we will best seek a healthier approach to error in public life when we achieve it in ourselves.

You will get something wrong today, and tomorrow, and every day of your life. So will I, and everybody you know. You don't have a choice about being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror , so you suppress, ignore and repeat it - or to make it your honest, open ally in trying to get to the truth.

— The Independent

People need to be nudged, or do they ?
We do not always make the right choice. Does the state, then, need to nudge us to the right direction ?
Christina Patterson

A housefly etched on the porcelain in a urinal at the Amsterdam airport

Stick a bowl of cashew nuts in front of your dinner guests and they might eat so many that they spoil their dinner. Take the bowl away and they'll nudge. The Nudge Theory was developed by a couple of American academics who have also found favour at the White House.

Richard Thaler is a Professor of "Behavioural Science and Economics" and director of "Centre for Decision Research". Cass Sunstein is a Professor of Jurisprudence. Together, the pair are, according to the cover of their book, hot stuff.

Nudge first caught British Prime Minister David Cameron's attention when it was published two years ago, and was swiftly placed on a recommended (but not, one assumes, compulsory) reading list for Tory MPs.

It wouldn't be quite fair to describe the cashew nuts as Newton's 'apple' of nudge theory (that honour should probably go to the houseflies etched on the urinals at Schiphol airport, Amsterdam which apparently "nudged" men into urinating a bit more precisely, and are now almost more famous than the book), but the cashew nuts are certainly the key.

When Thaler plonked the bowl in front of his guests at a dinner party, watched them stuff themselves and then, worrying that his haute cuisine would be wasted, whisked it away, he appears to have undergone a eureka moment. His guests thanked him for his intervention and then (being economists) mused on how it was possible to be happier, now that their choices had been reduced.

Some of us (particularly those of us who, if faced with a barrel of kettle chips, would probably eat them until we literally dropped dead) have no problem at all understanding why his guests would be happier once released from the prison of their dinner-wrecking greed, but these, we must remember, were Americans. This was the land of the free (and the freedom fry), the land where it's more important to be able to carry a gun than to have fewer people murdered, and it's more important to be free not to pay for healthcare insurance than to help keep millions of your low-income neighbours alive.

This, presumably, is why the rather obvious point that people don't always make brilliant choices, and it's possible to give them a little "nudge" in the right direction, without resorting to anything as Stalinist as state intervention, is presented as if it were the lost symbol that humanity has been awaiting.

We are all, say the hot duo, "choice architects", making choices for ourselves, and making choices that will affect other people's choices.

Nudge is a very lively read, and you can certainly see that sitting around discussing its ideas would be a whole lot more fun than ejecting people from their council houses or snatching away their jobs (although, to be fair, Cameron and Clegg manage to make that look like great fun, too).

David Cameron hasn't suggested suspending laws about seat belts, drink-driving, or smoking in public buildings - horrible infringements of liberty though these all are. He hasn't suggested the abolition of the congestion charge. He has, however, endorsed his Transport Secretary's end to "the war on motorists". In Oxfordshire, the speed cameras have already been switched off. Speed cameras, according to the Department of Transport's own statistics, reduced fatal accidents by 42 per cent.

But freedom, as Donald Rumsfeld once said in another context, is messy. The context, of course, was the Iraq war, a war which our Cameron supported, but which his deputy thinks was a war crime. But let's not talk about that. Let's talk instead about etching houseflies on urinals.

— The Independent