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Drops of rain War of attrition |
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Boundary and other
tensions
When enough is not
enough
She restored the
dignity of the destitute
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War of attrition The
destruction of two multi-storeyed buildings in Gaza by Israeli air strikes on Saturday signalled further escalation in the prevailing conflict. The Israel Defence Force (IDF) did send out its warnings — through leaflets, text messages and automated phone calls, in response to which residents evacuated the target buildings. However, a number of residents were injured, and they all lost their homes. The targeting of the entire building, not just a Hamas operations room that is said to have been there, and the destruction of 44 apartments leaves the IDF open to the charge of being heavy-handed and worse. Battlefield weapons are, by their very nature, imprecise, and thus not designed to be used in densely populated areas. The use of heavy weapons in Gaza has been condemned by the United Nations. Israel is finding itself increasingly isolated in international fora by continuing on this course. While the Israeli population faces numerous rocket attacks on a regular basis, the casualties are limited, largely due to the ineffectiveness of the weapons as well as the state-of-the-art Israeli anti-rocket defences. Casualties in Gaza, on the other hand, have been heavy, and there were instances of schools and other public places being targeted by Israel. Peace brokered by the Egyptian government has found some response, but has not held out, something that both sides must share the blame for. Israel must realise that it is simply counter-productive to continue what has become a war of attrition in Gaza. Hamas has not been degraded to the extent that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers may have hoped for. After withdrawing its land forces, Israel is now using its total dominance in the air to strike targets in Gaza at will. Many of these targets are houses and institutions where civilians live and work. It hardly needs to be reiterated that killing civilians is wrong. Civilian deaths in Gaza have been far, far, more than those of Hamas and other militants. By continuing with actions that put civilian lives in such danger, Israel does itself no service.
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Thought for the Day
I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.
— Jack Benny, an American comedian
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Cotton crop in the Punjab THE first forecast for 1914 says that except in the south east dry area, precipitation was above normal in February, April and May, especially in the north and west, and normal in March, while the monsoon set in about the end of the third week of June, and gave sufficient moisture for unirrigated sowings except in parts of the south-east. Climatic conditions, therefore, were very favourable for irrigated sowings and normal for unirrigated sowings except in the south-east, where, however, unirrigated cotton is of most importance. As last year's area was a record one and the harvest price of that year's crop was lower than in 1912, some decrease was to be expected. Owing to favourable rainfall, extensions of perennial canal irrigation and an unusually good flow of water in inundation canals the irrigated area has increased by 17 per cent while the unirrigated area has fallen off by 20 per cent, due chiefly to the unfavourable conditions in the south-east dry area. The ruling Princes of India and the war THE spontaneous and enthusiastic offers of financial assistance from the Native States of India at the present crisis deserve more than a passing notice. Many have been the Foreign Office men who have in season and out of season dinned to our ears their complaint of the inadequacy of the assistance rendered by the Native States for the defence of India. The controversy, which was started so far back as 1884 during Lord Dufferin's Viceroyalty, over the Imperial Service Troops and the subsequent one over the Imperial Transport Corps had both their origin in this view of some Foreign Office authorities. The late Sir William Lee-Warner was the apostle of this view.
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Boundary and other tensions
The
Northeast has been in the news for all the wrong reasons: continuing assaults on the person and dignity of persons from that region in Delhi and elsewhere, which is an absolute national disgrace, continuing controversy over AFSPA, and killings along the disputed Assam-Nagaland border. The Bezboruah Committee has reported on the first issue. But over and above its recommendations, there must be swift and condign punishment of those indulging in and encouraging hooliganism. Also, it is necessary to propagate nationally, and especially in universities, booklets and film clips on the Northeast to educate local barbarians about their own country and countrymen in place of the totally useless official “Northeast Newsletter” produced today. Irom Sharmila's release from detention after being forced-fed through 14 years of hunger strike in protest against the imposition AFSPA was short lived as she insisted on continuing her fast. A hunger strike is a weapon of blackmail. Recalling Gandhiji's fasts under alien rule is wilfully mistaken. Moreover, a fast-unto-death is tantamount to suicide, a penal offence. If Irom were to perish fasting, the situation could spin out of control and the government would be flayed by its current critics. There are legal and constitutional means to battle what one considers unjust laws. The Jeevan Reddy Committee recommended a workable compromise a decade back. This was to remove redundant provisions from AFSPA and incorporate some others in existing laws. AFSPA causes psychological hurt. Further, since AFSPA can only be invoked in areas declared “disturbed”, public pressure can be applied on the authorities concerned to revoke “disturbed area” proclamations. There has been a wrongful use of AFSPA. These cases have invoked speedy investigation and punishment in many cases. But to lift AFSPA totally in areas subject to militancy, cross-border mischief and terror may be unwise. Militancy often occurs in remote uninhabited areas where city-based magistrates are not at hand to issue the necessary warrants of search, seizure and firing. Hence investiture of such powers in the armed forces is necessary. Ground gained at a great cost over time can be lost in an hour. It might be desirable for the DA Act and AFSPA to be withdrawn in phases in limited areas. But let the armed forces decide on the scope and tempo of such initiatives in collaboration with the local government, whether in the NE or in J&K. The Assam-Nagaland border dispute has been allowed to drag on for too long. Similar disputes exist between Assam and the new states of Arunachal, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland carved out of it. This stems from the discrepancy between the so-called administrative “Inner Line”, initially drawn in Assam a century ago to safeguard the settled areas with their tea gardens, oil fields and coal mines, and subsequent revenue lines delineated by the Raj to mark out additional forest working areas as valuable sources of raw material and revenue. So when Assam was reorganised, the question arose as to which Line should be the border. Sadly, inter-state disputes have reduced these areas to no-man's lands and havens for illegal activities. Central policy has been muddled. In the Assam-Nagaland case, the Sundaram commission recommended a joint survey. Nagaland unreasonably refused and there the matter has rested with periodic conflict. The answer, as this writer has long recommended, is that these disputed border strips be declared Trusteeship Zones, with the two contending states and the Centre as partners for, say, 50 years, and placed under a Centrally-directed joint administration to be developed as rail and road heads, infrastructure, communication and training hubs and special economic zones that attract industry and investment, using cheap NE hydro- power. Higher and technical education and health facilities could be located here. Revenues could be shared. But who is listening? The same lack of imagination drives the fatuous debate on ways to attract back Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley from where they were driven out under jihadi pressure 25 years ago. Few remember that 50,000 and more Kashmiri Muslims also fled the state - traders to end routine extortion and worse, youth for education and training, and girls to escape forced marriage to jihadi brutes. The Pandits lost their jobs and homes. If they return they will have to make a new beginning. Where? How? Building new ghettoes is no answer. With the Katra-Bannihal- Qazigund railway likely to be operational within two years, and maybe the planned lower-altitude, all-weather Bannihal tunnel as well, trans-Pir Panjal movement will become shorter, quicker and cheaper. With Srinagar becoming an active international airport and an additional 1000 MW of hydro-power coming on stream during this same period, a Baramulla-Srinagar-Qazigund-Bannihal-Katra-Jammu industrial-transport corridor, with a fibre optic transmission line and technical training facilities to boot, could come into being. One can conceive of a series of SEZ hubs along this corridor, specialising in agro-processing, herbal-based pharma, floriculture and IT-enabled services. J&K residents, be it the Pandit, emigrant Muslim or others, would gladly seize the rich opportunities that beckon. And non-State subjects should be welcome if they bring investment together with technical, managerial and marketing skills. Pettifogging arguments by little bigots crying wolf about “outsider” land grab and demographic change must be slapped down for the nonsense they are. Nor can J&K be condemned to be governed by the idiocy of people who ask why the State should not have a Hindu Chief Minister or by the diktats of Pakistan’s Hurriyat stooges. Umar Farooq dare not even own up to who assassinated his father in 1990 and joins in celebrating the late Mir Waiz’s martyrdom” by his assassins. Sadly, a section of the Pandits have allowed themselves to become pawns in the hands of the Hindu Right, which is as fanatical as the separatists. Pilgrimages are planned and opposed as insidious efforts to divide and mobilise communities and disturb communal harmony. The proposed Indo-Pakistan talks are off, thanks to the Pakistani High Commissioner's boorish insistence on meeting Hurriyat leaders on the eve of the Foreign Secretary-level talks, despite being warned against doing so. To argue that Pakistani VIPs have consistently met the Hurriyat over many years does not constitute an extra-territorial right. The parallel would not be Indian dignitaries meeting Baloch and Sindhi separatists on the eve of talks on J&K with Pakistan, but of defiantly meeting Gilgit-Baltistan opposition leaders such as Amanullah Khan of the JK Liberation Front and others in Islamabad if they have not been incarcerated or forced to seek refuge in distant shores. These critics have no place in Pakistan’s tightly-controlled Kashmir colonies ruled by the constitutional ideology of swearing by “the ideology of accession to Pakistan”. Anyhow, Nawaz Sharif is currently embattled in Islamabad with Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri, a cleric from Canada, seeking to topple him. This has enabled the Army more obviously to assume control over a weakened premier whose efforts to expand trade with India and try Musharraf for treason are not to the liking of the military as evidenced by spoiling fire across the LOC. Meanwhile, at home, the BJP in particular continues to debase democratic standards and push for a “Hindu nation”. Mr Modi is in danger of becoming India’s Nawaz Sharif, playing second fiddle to the RSS “army”. swww.bgverghese.com
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When enough is not enough A three-time M.L.A. from a rich urban constituency outsmarted others by inviting over 5,000 guests to dinner on the reception day on each of his three daughters’ marriages. He believed that only over 2,000 invited would stay for dinner and others would leave after greeting him with a “shagan”. Now for the purpose of sending invites, he would categorise his constituents as “very rich”, “average rich”, “average poor” and “very poor”. His men of confidence would politely hint about the “shagan” money. Starting with Rs 11,001, it was scaled down category-wise, the poorest expected to give only Rs 21. So, it was widely believed that in all the three marriages he came out richer. The tradition of “milni” on the auspicious occasion of marriage was cleverly used by the opium and liquor mafia in one of the districts of an erstwhile princely states. The reputation of a newly posted S.H.O. would precede his arrival at the station. If he was ruthless, they would greet him by giving 101 “thals” containing dry foods, sweets etc under which were placed wads of currency notes. In those days 101 “thals” were believed to show the status of a family, giving them to the bridegroom's family on the engagement ceremony. The mafia would scale down the number of “thals” to only 11 in case the officer was very honest and strict. The talk among the junior officers waiting for a posting in the field centred around one sentence: “Matha tek ke ayiana ke nahin?” (Have you been to the prayer room or not?). Some took the hint and some did not. Those who went quietly to the prayer room in the outhouse of the district officer, he would kneel in prayer, and while leaving, place a small bundle in one of the corners. This worked for them for getting a good posting in the district. Interesting but true that people are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they want still more. Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with a little. Human mind sometimes runs with the hare and hunts with the hound. One mischievous mind has righty quipped: “I think I have piles and I am not talking about my bank balance”.
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She restored the dignity of the destitute A biographer pays a tribute to Mother Teresa on her 104th birth anniversary. Called a ‘living saint,’ she embraced the dying, the crippled and the homeless. Her mission was to care for and love all those who were unwanted and perceived as a burden to the society and shunned by everyone. At 7am that Sunday morning, a Sister of the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa's organisation, arrived in a battered station wagon, drove him to the State Department, specially opened, where he got a new passport in 15 minutes. And then on to the Indian consulate where he got his visa just as quickly, before being driven to the airport. By now they were joined by five other Sisters; he soon learned why. That was because the Sisters could not get him a confirmed ticket, he was on standby. Reaching the airport, the Sisters sat him on a side as they began to work the queue, begging each passenger, systematically from the top of the queue, to surrender his or her seat for the doctor to be able to travel to Calcutta to save Mother Teresa's life.
The first passenger held out but the second succumbed! Meanwhile, the bewildered and bemused doctor said he would “report” them to Mother Teresa! The Sisters laughed delightedly, mission accomplished. Twenty-four hours later, the doctor reached in Calcutta to join the team, that was able to save her life. A few months ago, a couple of researchers in Canada produced a report entirely critical of Mother Teresa and her work, which found its way as doubtless intended into the media. Some of the issues they raised were about her overly dogmatic views on contraception, abortion and divorce, and also that she offered rudimentary medical care to the sick and dying in her hospices, instead of setting up a proper hospital in Kolkata. Here there was a cruel twist to the tale — that when she herself fell ill, she benefited from the best medical attention on offer. Life’s vocation Before I answer these accusations, let me encapsulate her life and her work. She was only 18 when she was convinced that her life's vocation lay in her becoming a missionary in far-off India. Skopje, where she was born on August 26, 1910 was so far removed from Bengal that, barring a few Yugoslav Jesuits who fired her young imagination, no one in the small Catholic community would even have known where India lay. Yet the early seeds of her faith, determination and compassion, nurtured by her widowed mother, impelled her to leave her closely knit family, first for Ireland to join the Loreto Order of teaching nuns, (and also to learn some English), and then by boat to faraway Calcutta, which she would grow to love so much that it would become indistinguishable with her own name Stepping out on the streets She lived and worked as a Loreto nun for close to 20 years before her true calling, once again, propelled her to find a way to the street, not as a lay woman but continuing to be an ordained nun. The Vatican itself gave her permission, fantastically for the first time in Church history, to step outside her secure convent into a huge and bewildering city. In 1948, Calcutta's pavements were swarming with teeming millions uprooted by the Partition, who now joined the hapless sufferers of the Great Bengal Famine of 1941-1942. Here stepped a 38-year-old nun, now dressed not in the recognisable nun's habit, but a sari similar to what the municipal sweepresses wore. She had no companion, no helper and no moneys. Confronted with disease, destitution and death all around her at a time (1948), when there was hardly any health care service to speak of, she did what was to become her hallmark. Finding a man dying in the street, she took him to a public hospital, which refused to admit him, precisely on the grounds that they would not waste a hospital bed on a life they said they could not save! Only when she sat before the hospital in dharna that they relented. The man died a few hours later. It was at this point that she began her search for a place where she could take those people whom hospitals refused, where she could nurse them — she had some medical training — and they could at least die being comforted and with some dignity. She begged various authorities and finally an officer in Calcutta Municipality gave her a pilgrims hall adjacent to the Kalighat temple, where she requested the police and municipal authorities to bring her all and any of those dying whom the hospitals refuse. I never needed to ask Mother Teresa why she had not set up a hospital instead, because I knew that a hospital would tie down her Sisters to a single establishment. And then who would care for those who fell by the wayside? The infant abandoned on a street, the sick and elderly turned out of their homes, leprosy sufferers or AIDS patients that no one wanted to even go near — who would look after them? How many of us actually do anything about the desperately poor we see on the streets? We only have to took within us to know that those who are quick to criticise Mother Teresa and her mission, are unable or unwilling to do anything to help with their own hands. Transcending religion Although staunchly Catholic, she reached out to people of all denominations irrespective of their faith, or even the lack of it. She did not believe that conversion was her work. That was God's work, she said. So while she lifted the abandoned baby off a street full of prowling dogs for the sanctuary of her Shishu Bhawan, she would never convert her, because that child would probably be adopted into a nice Hindu household, and such a conversion would then have been a cardinal sin which she would never commit. That is why people of all faiths were so accepting of this diminutive Catholic nun.
In my 23 years of close association with her, she never once whispered that perhaps her religion was superior to mine, or through it lay a shorter route to the Divine. Which is also why, when I asked Jyoti Basu, that redoubtable leader of West Bengal, what he, an atheist and communist, could possibly have in common with Mother Teresa for whom God was everything, he replied simply that, “We both share a love for the poor.”When Mother Teresa fell sick Let me now illustrate a personal account of one of Mother Teresa’s actual hospitalisations. In 1994, Mother Teresa fell ill in Delhi when she had come to receive an award. She developed high fever and possibly gastroenteritis. Against her will (“I will be all right by tomorrow”), I rushed her to a large public hospital, where she was hospitalised for over a week. I stood vigil. She was known to have a cardiac history, and it was up to the cardiology department or the gastro department to “take charge”. The sad truth is that no one wanted to, frankly scared she might die on their hands. She sensed this too, pleading with me to take her back to her beloved Kolkata. But she could not possibly have been moved. In those days when there were no mobile phones, the switch board at the hospital was jammed with enquiries. I took almost daily calls from Rashtrapati Bhawan and the PMO, but also from the White House, the Vatican, and chancelleries all over Europe. Ambassadors called frequently. Prime Minister Narasimha Rao offered treatment anywhere in the world. Finally, not quite recovered in my view, her Sisters took her back to
Kolkata. I have to say that the cardiac team was relieved to discharge her! There are are other cases of her hospital treatments that I am aware of. If only the Canadian research team had known the reality about her hospitalisations, perhaps they would not have been so uncharitable. The healing touch I can do no better in describing Mother Teresa's work and the continuing work of her Missionaries of Charity under Sister Prema, the present Superior General, than to quote the then Chairman of the Nobel Committee, John Sannes, from his speech at the ceremony honouring Mother Teresa at the award ceremony in Oslo in 1979. He said, “The hallmark of her work has been respect for the individual and the individual's worth and dignity. The loneliest and the most wretched, the dying destitute, the abandoned lepers, have all been received by her and her Sisters with warm compassion devoid of condescension, based on her reverence for Christ in man. In her eyes, the person who, in the accepted sense, is the recipient, is also the giver and the one who gives the most. Giving— something of oneself — is what confers real joy, and the person who is allowed to give is the one who receives the most precious gift ...This is the life of Mother Teresa and her Sisters — a life of strict poverty and long days and nights of toil, a life that affords little room for other joys but the most
precious.” A Noble soul indeed
The writer, the former Chief Election Commissioner of India, is the author of Mother Teresa: The Authorized
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T
SOME of you may have come across a heartwarming talk on the Internet where an American medical specialist in tropical diseases, George Lombardy by name, addresses a New York gathering regarding his first encounter with Mother Teresa. Let me encapsulate it for those who have not come across it. Years ago, when he was young and unknown, (often looking at the phone and wishing it would ring!), he astonishingly received a call from an unknown caller in New York enquiring if he was indeed Dr Lombardy. Having confirmed this, he next got a call from two doctors in Calcutta (now Kolkata), who discussed their patient's illness without disclosing the patient's name. Next, the first voice rang again to ask whether he could fly out to Calcutta the very next day. Dr Lombardy said what, tomorrow? it's a Sunday and in any case his passport had expired. Don't worry, said the voice, just be ready at 7am! 