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Advani stumbles
Paradise at a price |
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Ouch!
Birth of Bangladesh and after
It’s same everywhere
An explosion of surveillance
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Advani stumbles
With
his poorly enacted resignation drama, BJP veteran L.K. Advani has hurt his stature. He has made mistakes not expected of a political leader of his experience. First, he resigned without being clear about what he wanted. Then he stood down with nothing in hand. If the protest was over the elevation of Narendra Modi in the party hierarchy, he did not negotiate an honourable way out before calling it off. Modi enjoys strong support both within the party and the RSS. It was tactless on Advani’s part to swim against the current. He has ended up spoiling the euphoria in the party over the Goa announcement. In his resignation letter Advani complained about leaders in the party who were “concerned with their personal agendas”. He has further annoyed some of those who call the shots now. Leaders seen as his loyalists are already trying for a meaningful role in the Modi-led dispensation. For the past some years the chief architect of the party has got marginalised. He has been resentful of an increasing RSS role in the BJP affairs since he was forced to quit as the party chief following his praise for Jinnah as a “secular” leader in 2005. Yet he has allowed himself to be persuaded by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat to take back his resignation. Advani has been promised that his concerns will be addressed and that he will have a say in decision-making, particularly in the selection of the prime-ministerial candidate. This does not mean he can have his way. Despite his resignation, the party leadership refused to reconsider Modi’s appointment as the party’s campaign committee chairman. The party needs to bet on a winning horse in 2014 since a third consecutive defeat could be ruinous. Advani has to be realistic and recognise that age is not on his side and that his popularity is waning. Advani stands a chance to become the Prime Minister only if the NDA comes to power and insists on his leadership since Modi has as strong detractors as admirers. Retirement is still a respectable option for him.
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Paradise at a price
The
popular salutation to the beauty of Kashmir is attributed to Emperor Jehangir: “O there be paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here!” The magnificent valley, snow-capped peaks, sparkling streams and the beautiful people of Kashmir all have a part in creating the legend about the Valley that is like no other in the world. Some of the most memorable Bollywood film songs have been picturised in Kashmir, poetry in many languages expressed the poets’ love for the Valley and indeed had it not been for a prose punctuated by violence and militancy, Kashmir would have found its status as paradise unchallenged. Now, more and more tourists are thronging to the Valley, a tribute to its attraction as well as growing normalcy in the overall law and order situation there. As we can well expect, getting to paradise is never easy. You can either travel many hours to get there by road, or save time and fly down. As expected, though disappointingly, airlines have recently increased the air fares to a level where the only thing economical about the economy class air ticket is the dimension of the passenger’s seat. Even then, Kashmir continues to be an attractive destination as thousands of tourists make a beeline to the state. The beautiful environs do come at an increased cost as some local hoteliers and shopkeepers have increased the room tariff. The tourism industry is fickle, as the Kashmiris know only too well, having faced mass cancellations on various occasions when there were concerns about the security situation in the Valley. Everyone is a gainer from peace and tranquillity in the region, none more so than the people who live there and earn their livelihood by providing services to visitors. They would be well advised to facilitate the tourists who come from distant lands to savour their sojourn and cherish their little slice of memories of the paradise that Kashmiris live in.
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Ouch!
Shakespeare
may call a rose by any other name to find it would smell just as sweet. Sadly, by changing nomenclature, our great bard would’ve found the thorns and their prick would hurt just the same. That’s a package deal. A rose thorn would prick by any other name! A source of hundreds of poetic metaphors and wise quotes across cultures; the beauty of rose surrounded by prickly thorns that enhances its desirability is set to change, not by the pen of a Poet Laureate, but by a few scientists of the IHBT (Institute of Himalayan Bio-Resource Technology) at Palampur, HP, who have separated the thorns from the fragrant existence of a rose’s life. The thornless variety of red and pink roses, christened Himalayan Wonder, may put many philosophical questions to rest, raised by some of the most profound thinkers of the world. In Antoine Saint Exupery’s popular parable, “The Little Prince,” the prince wonders, “…why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing?” Are the thorns then not a declaration of the roses’ beauty? Roses grow thorns to motivate their seekers to take risk and protect their fragility. Try to touch them and they scratch and prick you. By robbing a rose of its thorns, a rose will be robbed of its vanity. It will be made easily accessible. This might reduce its desirability, its mystery and its market value. After all, a rose is like any other flower; only its thorns make its possession formidable. This scientific intervention may enhance the business of roses. Growing and taming thornless roses will be an easier task, but roses will lose their metaphorical relevance. Life is enriched not by commercial gains alone; it needs the sweet prick of thorns with the sweet fragrance of roses. How else would Oscar Wilde write the beautiful parable of “The Nightingale and the Rose” if the rose was bereft of thorns? Like the lover who loses his love in the story the rose will lose the mystery of beauty to make us wonder, “It’s not half as useful as logic.”
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The greatest way to live with honour in this world is to be what we pretend to be. —Socrates
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Birth of Bangladesh and after When revolutions are in quest of freedom and justice even after four decades of the happening, this means that they have gone awry. If hartals and demonstrations are staged with the same frequency, the scenario becomes all the more sombre. This is what has taken place in Bangladesh. Kamal Hossain, the country’s first Foreign Minister, has written a book to give an account of it. I wish he had said more about the birth of Bangladesh and the failure to sustain the spirit of secular democracy it had evoked. This was a rare revolution which rose above fanaticism and factionalism and beckoned a democratic structure without the pull of religion. Hossain’s story is inadequate and does not tell why a country which fought against bigots so resolutely caved in when extremism reared its head. Not long ago, when Bangladeshis freed themselves from Pakistan in 1970, they rose as Bangladeshis. A Muslim nation fought against Muslims to make religious appeals meaningless. Unfortunately, after the liberation, the Bangladeshis got lost in religious warfare and parochial assertion. Hossain should have underlined the fact that the dream got shattered because religion had the better of secularism. Today’s Bangladesh scene seems to suggest that extremism is nearly indelible, and very few people rise above it. To trace the movement for liberation is to applaud the Bangladeshis’ triumph over passion and prejudice. It was an ideology which conquered petty considerations. Yet the story of independence was not that of a struggle alone to liberate oneself from the distant Rawalpindi. It was the birth of an ideology of egalitarianism and a society which would fight against sectarianism and religious divisions. The nine months of operation by the Pakistan Army tore all tiers of administration and the machinery of governance and imposed a dictator-like rule. There was also an element of hatred towards the weak and poor Bangladeshis who dared to assert their identity. The only way to do this was that they had to revolt. “What could we do when the Pakistan government, as Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman, father of the nation”, said, “They tried to kill every Bengali and destroy Bangladesh”? Destruction-wise, 2.44 million of the nation’s 14 million farmers were ruined and the rest lost bullocks, ploughs or seeds. Fiftysix million dwelling units, from pucca houses to thatched huts, were demolished. In addition, according to Mjib, “Pakistani soldiers destroyed 12,000 trucks out of the 18,000 we had. They burnt currency notes and took away all our foreign exchange. Our food godowns were demolished.” Disruption on such a scale made restoration of normal life impossible when Mujib took over. He explained that it would take time to set things right. But his appeal had little impact on the people who wanted the revolution to show results. They had seen one miracle happening — the liberation — but wanted another, economic prosperity. Building takes time. But the public had no patience. Also, the fire of freedom that burnt fiercely in the hearts lessened as days went by. On the other hand, many anti-liberation elements that had been silenced became active to prove that the liberation had never taken place and that the link with Pakistan should have never been broken. The more radical among the liberators also expected improvement from those in power. The country had too many guns. The radicals were not the only ones to find them useful. There were others of different political shades, and there were plain brigands without any politics. They did not give up arms. Mujib’s personal magic worked up to a point. According to one estimate, 100,000 to 200,000 arms were never surrendered. Violence lay latent in the land and it appeared with a vengeance when the liberation struggle was over. However, the most disconcerting development for the Bangladesh leaders was an incipient anti-India feeling, a country which had helped them to become free. “I wish I could die now because relations between India and Bangladesh are so good today that I do not want to see them deteriorating,” Tajuddin, once Prime Minister, told me. But Mujib was not worried when I met him. He said, “I know that some elements assisted by international interests are indulging in a whispering campaign against India. But they cannot sabotage the relationship between your great country and Bangladesh. A Bengali does not forget even those who give him only a glass of water. Here your soldiers laid down their lives for my people. How can they ever forget your sacrifice? You fed 10 million refugees for more than 10 months. Even now you are giving us food and other assistance. I can assure you that my people are not ungrateful. Therefore, those who are trying to foment trouble will not succeed in their designs.” Dacca’s Foreign Office is still peeved over the remark of foreign countries that the policies of Bangladesh are “New Delhi’s carbon-copy”. A Foreign Office man told me, “If only we could oppose you somewhere so that we project an image of our independence.” He betrayed a small-nation complex and it appeared that to prove their country’s separate identity, officials are tempted at times to adopt an anti-Indian posture. India’s size looks large. Many civil servants, suddenly becoming conscious that they were employees of a small and yet not prosperous country, indulge in anti-India talk. “Your country is too big,” they say. “Whether your neighbours like it or not, they have to be subservient to you.” Was this the assertion of old parochial sentiment or a complaint against their country’s inadequacy? All this is missing in Hossain’s book, the feeling of elation and frustration after its failure. There is no disclosure as such books promise. Hossain tells something about Mujib, but skips the much-talked-about weakness in his capacity to administer. Hossain should have also confirmed or denied the rumour that the Sheikh was sentenced to death by Pakistani’s military rulers and spared due to the intervention by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s popular leader. May be, Kamal Hossain has yet to publish Bangladesh’s untold story. We should wait for
it.
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It’s same everywhere Here
or there, men in the police uniform are the same everywhere. In public perception, they are law unto themselves. They can be authoritative, officious, brutish and even boorish, depending upon the prevalent circumstances. They can mould themselves to fit into any of these roles without vacillation, particularly when their avarice comes to the fore. They have no qualms whatsoever about stooping to any extent to make a quick buck. A few years ago, I happened to be in Delhi. After our shopping in Connaught Place, my wife wanted that we visit Gurdwara Bangla Sahib. Accordingly, I took a left turn near Rivoli cinema for the gurdwara. I was stopped immediately by a traffic police man because I was not supposed to have turned left without the green lights. I told him that I was not aware of it since I had come from another place. He did not seem impressed and demanded the documents which were duly produced. On seeing my driving licence, he seemed to condone my offence but felt it obligatory to admonish me mildly. “Sir, people like you should not be violating the government rules”, he went on to say. And then he let me go. I felt quite sheepish. However, I thanked him for his magnanimity and decided to move on. As I started my car, he came into his true colours. “Sir, chai pani ke liye to kutcch dete jao.” Fifty rupees were all that he asked for. I paid him with both a sense of relief and profound guilt. Again, a few days back when I happened to be in Delhi, I got embroiled in yet another similar episode. My grandson was driving me from Gymkhana Club to New Delhi railway station to put me on the evening Shatabdi for Chandigarh. Not realising that Rafi Marg was temporarily closed for one-way traffic, he entered it but soon realised the mistake and promptly U-turned to exit. We were promptly beckoned to halt by two policemen who were, perhaps, waiting for such an occasion. They threatened us with a penalty of Rs 1100 for violating the one-way traffic rule. The policemen were impatient and were flaunting Rs 1100 challan again and again. Their conduct was aggressive, to say the least. They would not let me come out of the car. They were obviously interested in a bargain and kept asking us to hurry up instead of hurrying up themselves with the challan. My daughter sitting in the rear seat was getting hassled and asked the policemen if Rs 500 were enough. It was perhaps beyond their expectation. He pocketed the money fast and positioned himself again at the same vantage point for his next catch. The enhanced penalty for traffic violation has only provided an opening to policemen to exploit the public. Knowing their reluctance to shell out heavy fines, the police strike quick bargains. It suits both parties, ethics getting a go-by. Indoctrination and inculcation of the value system at the initial stages of training alone may not help change the mindset. Policeman’s stature and self-esteem need to be enhanced. Here is yet another episode, an interesting encounter between the Chandigarh police and a university student. My grandson, in the same manner as mentioned earlier, was checked for tinted windowpanes in his car in Sector 17. After long entreaties that he had completed his studies in Chandigarh and that he was on his way back to his parents in Delhi in the next couple of days, the cops condescended and decided to let him go; but not without a cost. They asked him to fetch quickly a 1.5-litre coke bottle. He obliged them with a sigh of relief. They could well have extracted money from him but did not do so. Coke was only an element of humour in the
episode.
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An explosion of surveillance Whatever
the results of last weekend’s summit between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, its timing was magnificent. The American President, one presumes, was taking his guest to task over China’s record of internet thievery — just as accounts emerged in his own country of massive cyber-intrusion and data mining by the government he runs. Moral of the story: everyone does it.
And now it transpires that Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who has confessed to leaking details of the massive phone and internet data trawling by the US to The Washington Post and Guardian newspapers, is holed up in Hong Kong. Hong Kong now belongs to China. Will one great state pillager of electronic secrets have the ultimate say in whether the leaker is extradited back to face the justice of another great state cyber-intruder? Pots, kettles and the colour black have nothing on this. And make no mistake, not only will the Americans want him back. Juridical, they have a pretty solid case, too. For one thing, Snowden has confessed. Second, the programs he revealed — the collection of telephone call records and the Prism internet surveillance system — were legal, at least according to the vague and extremely broad powers given to the US government under the Patriot Act, which became law just seven weeks after the 9/11 attacks. That technically differentiates him from other great government leakers of recent history, like Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, and Mark Felt, the deputy FBI director in the early 1970s. Ellsberg brought to light systemic government deception over the Vietnam war; Felt helped reveal the series of breathtaking crimes by government that constitute the Watergate scandal. Nonetheless, Snowden has surely performed a precious public service. Governments have a right to secrecy, but not an unfettered one. It is moreover the nature of the beast that if you give a government an inch, it will take a mile, especially if the sacred mission of guarding national security can be advanced. But who guards the guardians? There must be some policing of the beast. In the US, this is the task of Congress; but in matters of national security, Congress is itself heavily muzzled by secrecy. That’s where leakers and whistleblowers come in. Civil libertarians are naturally appalled by government data mining. Other people (dare I suggest a majority) are not. What is undeniable, however, is that, thanks to a combination of the panic that followed 9/11 and the exponential advances since in information technology, data on ordinary individuals is being collected on an unprecedented scale, and not only in the US. Happily, however, the very explosion of the surveillance state since 2001 contains its own checks and balances, the seeds not of its destruction, but of its exposure. These days, more than a million Americans have top secret government clearances. At the same time, the previous jealous hoarding of information by each of the plethora of US intelligence agencies — widely blamed for the failure to stop 9/11 — is no more. “Need to know” has been replaced by “need to share”. But as the agencies, now augmented by armies of private security contractors, have pooled their knowledge, so has the likelihood grown of spectacular leaks. There has been a double multiplication; a multiplication of the number of people who, like Snowden, might become disgusted by the system of which they are a part, and a multiplication of the data to which they have access. Thus was a lowly army private and intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning able to lay his hands on huge quantities of secret State Department telegrams and pass them on to WikiLeaks. And now Edward Snowden. His exact career path is somewhat mysterious, but he never held a particularly senior job. Indeed, almost incredibly, it seems that he may not even have graduated from high school (but let it not be forgotten, Bill Gates dropped out of college, and look what happened to him). And, in further defence of Snowden, how much damage has he actually done? Has he really made the country less safe? The US government, of course, argues that he has — that those trying to harm America have been handed priceless information about the tools that America has to defend itself. But any government would say that. You don’t spend uncounted billions of dollars on a secret state, the business of which is invading personal privacy, only to admit that the whole shady edifice wasn’t worth building in the first place. In fact, serious terrorists must have assumed that the surveillance which is now public knowledge was in place all along. Those in the know in Washington claim that some terrorist plots have been thwarted. But the details remain unknown, hidden under the veil of necessary secrecy. You may take these assurances at their word, depending on your trust in government, or you may not. But don’t expect any great official illumination now. Naturally, there will be Congressional hearings. But these will be probably held by the respective intelligence Committees of the House and Senate — in other words, by bodies themselves complicit in the system. Their leaders are admitted into secrecy’s innermost temples, but only on condition that they, too, tell no one of the secrets vouchsafed to them. That’s why, every now and then, you need whistleblowers and leakers. Governments have a right to secrets, but equally we who entrust so much to government have the right every now and then to a decent debate about it. We’ve got one now. Thanks to Edward Snowden. —The Independent
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What Edward Snowden says: