JAN 1

Water priorities for urban India

The Aam Aadmi Partys proposal of 666 litres of free water a day raises the alarming prospect of further disadvantaging the already deprived sections of Delhi who get no piped water at all
The Twelfth Five Year Plan has proposed a paradigm shift in water management in India. One of our key proposals relates to urban water. In many ways, it could be said that the crisis of water and sanitation in urban India is even graver than in our rural areas. The Twelfth Plan focusses on a strategy that is both affordable and sustainable. We believe that Indian cities and industries need to find ways to grow with minimal water and minimal waste. As important as the quantum of water is the problem of its management and equitable supply. In most cities, water supply is sourced from long distances and the length of the pipeline determines the costs, including costs of pumping. In the current water supply system, there are enormous losses in the distribution system because of leakages and bad management. And equally important are the huge challenges posed by the fact that water is divided very unequally within cities. As per the National Sample Survey (NSS) 65th round, only 47 per cent of urban households have individual water connections. Currently, it is estimated that as much as 40 to 50 per cent of the water is lost in the distribution system. Electricity to pump water is anywhere between 30 to 50 per cent of what most cities spend on their water supply. As the distance increases, the cost of building and then maintaining the water pipeline and its distribution network also rises. And if the network is not maintained, then water losses increase. The end result is that the government finds it impossible to subsidise the supply of water to all and, therefore, does not deliver water as needed. The poor are typically the worst affected as they have to spend a great deal of time and money to obtain water since they do not have house connections.
Contamination and costs

Even as cities worry about water, they need to focus on the waste this water will generate. Sewage invariably goes into streams, ponds, lakes and rivers of a town, polluting waterworks, and health is compromised. Alternatively, it goes into the ground, contaminating the same water used by people for drinking. It is no surprise then that surveys of groundwater are finding higher and higher levels of microbiological contamination a sign of sewage contamination. This compounds the deadly and costly spiral. As surface water or groundwater gets contaminated, a city has no option but to hunt for newer sources of its supply. Its search becomes more extensive and as the distance increases, the cost of pumping and supply increases.
Sewerage systems and urban India

The 2011 Census reveals that only 32.7 per cent of urban Indians are connected to a piped sewerage system and 12.6 per cent roughly 50 million urban Indians still defecate in the open. Large parts of our cities remain unconnected to the sewerage system as they live in unauthorised or illegal areas or slums, where the state services do not reach. In this situation, it is important we invest in sewerage systems, but it is even more critical that we invest in building affordable and scalable sewerage networks, which requires a fresh look at the current technology for sewage and its treatment. If sewerage systems are not comprehensively spread across a city to collect, convey and intercept waste of all its inhabitants, then pollution will not be under control. Currently, according to estimates of the Central Pollution Control Board, the country has an installed capacity to treat only about 30 per cent of the excreta it generates. Just two cities, Delhi and Mumbai, which generate around 17 per cent of the countrys sewage, have nearly 40 per cent of the countrys installed capacity. What is worse, some of these plants do not function because of high recurring costs (electricity and chemicals) and others because they do not have enough sewage to treat. In most cities, only a small (unestimated) proportion of sewage is transported for treatment. And if the treated sewage transported in official drains is allowed to be mixed with the untreated sewage transported in unofficial and open drains then the net result is pollution. The added problem is that the location of the hardware the sewage treatment plant is not designed to dispose of the treated effluent so that it actually cleans the waterbody. Most cities dont seem to think of this factor when they build their infrastructure for sewage. They build a sewage treatment plant where there is land. The treated sewage is then disposed of, as conveniently as possible, invariably into a drain.
Reuse and recycling

Nothing less than a paradigm shift is required in the Twelfth Plan if we are to move towards sustainable solutions to urban water and waste management. Investments in water supply must focus on demand management, reducing intra-city inequity and on the quality of water supplied. This will require cities to plan to cut distribution losses through bulk water meters and efficiency drives. User charges should plan to cover increasing proportions of operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, while building in equity by providing a lifeline amount of water free of charge, with higher tariffs for increasing levels of use. Each city must consider, as the first source of supply, its local waterbodies. Therefore, cities must only get funds for water projects, when they have accounted for the water supply from local waterbodies and have protected these waterbodies and their catchments. This precondition will force protection and build the infrastructure, which will supply locally and then take back sewage also locally. It will cut the length of the pipeline twice over once to supply and the other to take back the waste. No water scheme will be sanctioned without a sewage component. Planning for full coverage and costs will lead cities to look for unconventional methods of treating waste. For instance, cities would then consider treatment of sewage in open drains and treatment using alternative biological methods of wastewater treatment. Biological methods of wastewater treatment introduce contact with bacteria, which feed on the organic materials in the wastewater, thereby

reducing its Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) content. Through their metabolism, the organic material is transformed into cellular mass, which is no longer in solution but can be precipitated at the bottom of a settling tank or retained as slime on solid surfaces or vegetation in the system. The water exiting the system is much clearer than the one that entered it. The principle has to be to cut the cost of building the sewerage system, cut the length of the sewerage network and then to treat the waste as a resource turn sewage into water for irrigation or use in industry. Indian cities have the opportunity to leapfrog into new ways of dealing with excreta, which are affordable and sustainable, simply because they have not yet built the infrastructure. Cities must plan for reuse and recycling of waste at the very beginning of their water and waste plans and not as an afterthought. It is also clear that cities must think through the plan for reuse for affordability and sustainability. The diverse options for reuse must be factored in for: use in agriculture, recharge of waterbodies, gardening, and industrial and domestic uses. In each case, the treatment plan will be different. But in all cases, the treated effluent will improve the hydrological cycle. It will return water and not waste to the environment. While a larger sewage treatment plant affords economies of scale in operation, a plant fitted to size collecting the waste of a group of houses, an institution or even colonies may have higher costs of operations, but there are substantial savings in the piping and pumping cost.
Free water agenda

Since groundwater is the single most important source of water in India today, the Twelfth Plan has launched an ambitious aquifer mapping and management programme. The aquifers in each city need to be mapped and participatory, while sustainable and equitable arrangements for groundwater management need to be worked out in a very location-specific manner. In the light of this massive reform proposed in the Twelfth Plan, it is somewhat disappointing to see the zeal being shown by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to rush into the 666 litres free water agenda. Indeed, this raises the alarming prospect of further disadvantaging the already deprived sections of Delhi who get no piped water at all. The AAP manifesto itself has a much more nuanced understanding of water issues in Delhi. The manifesto clearly acknowledges that over 30 per cent of Delhis residents do not get tap water in their homes. It also recognises that 17 lakh households do not have access to safe sanitation. The loss of revenue from freebies to those already getting water could end up pushing the unconnected even further down the deprivation ladder. It is to be hoped that the AAP will reconsider its water priorities, taking both the Twelfth Plan and its own manifesto more seriously.

Depreciating dreams
Are the continuing economic problems that the U.K. is facing turning the clock backwards to the pre-World War II era?
For my generation, and several subsequent ones, there was an assumption that we would better off financially than the generations before us. It was not that we expected great wealth; most of us most certainly did not. We did assume, however, that we would be able to afford to buy a

house, with a mortgage that would not swallow up all our income. We could also assume that our children would be able in due course to inherit the house a major part of our estate without fear that its value would have gone down. These were comforting assumptions, given that the memories that we, or possibly just our parents, had were memories of great financial difficulty. The period just before the World War II, as I know from talking to people who lived through it, was a period of financial depression. The feeling of the adult post-war generation, therefore, that we could afford to buy a house without crippling our income was encouraging and reassuring. In recent months, there has been much discussion of the cost of living in the U.K. and it has dominated debate in Parliament. That is the background against which we need to consider a study recently published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). For people born in the 1960s and 1970s, the study provides rather grim news. It found that people of those generations now in their forties and fifties are less likely to own a home than were those 10 years older. It found also that incomes, which had risen steadily since the World War II, are no longer rising. There are other factors which affect the financial circumstances of the latest generations. Among them, notably, is the cost of higher education. My contemporaries, if we gained access to a university, would enjoy the benefit of a scholarship, which meant that we were not liable to pay fees. Even when our children went to universities the fees payable, by present day standards, were notional. It is not, of course, quite as simple as it sounds. In my day, the number of university places, and indeed the number of universities, was much lower than today. Those of us benefiting from a university education were greatly privileged and the privilege came with virtually no fees. I have no doubt at all that that was an untenable situation. Extending the number of universities and university places was unarguably desirable, and if achieving that was possible only by increasing the cost to individuals, then so it must be. That, too, is not as simple as it sounds. We are living now in a time when employment possibilities are quite restricted. Paying off the debt acquired by experiencing higher education is, for many people, not at all easy. Of course it is easy to find reasons for all this. It is easy to make the point that expenditure by those in the younger generations has tended to be noticeably higher than that in ours but in making that sort of point it needs to be recognised that increasing affluence, and changing ways of life, bring with them certain assumptions. The significant thing is that the assumptions are different from those of the earlier generations. The challenging thing about all this is that, for whatever reasons, the expectation of steadily increasing wealth that my generation was able to make no longer seems to exist. If this is true and the IFS is a highly respected organisation people in the more recent generations will need to come to terms with some pretty radical changes. At the root of it all will be the need to try and

ensure that whatever the changes are, their effect will not be to turn everything backwards. I would certainly not want to see my childrens, and grandchildrens, generations having to go back to conditions from which our society has steadily escaped during the past half century or so. I do not have any magic solution to offer. What I do have is a feeling of certainty that some solution must be found. I am by nature an optimist, and I apologise for presenting my readers on this occasion with a more gloomy view than usual. Let me counteract it, without any sense of doing so with tongue in cheek, by wishing all of you a happy 2014, and thanking you for your many positive comments. E-mail: bill.kirkman@gmail.com

From displacement to disappearance

Camp after camp has been forced to disappear in Muzaffarnagar by the official authorities. The people displaced by the communal riots are now in small shanty settlements, 10 tents here, another 10 tents half a kilometre down the road
On December 26, 2013, a large group of visitors entered the Loi relief camp in Muzaffarnagar district, Uttar Pradesh. Loi camp a festering sea of displaced and despairing humanity, with tattered tents and slush as far as the eye could see, where children stare without even a hint of the smile that can sometimes hide deep in childrens eyes. The occasion was that a member of the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) had come to see the situation at first hand. Activists from the Joint Citizens Initiative (JCI), a collective of non-governmental organisations (NGO) working in these camps for over two months were also present. The full array of local administration was in attendance the additional district magistrate, the chief medical officer (CMO), the tehsildar and others. A meeting of survivors took place and a cacophony rent the air. We are being threatened and pressured by the administration to clear off government land. Do not remove us from here. We have no place to go. Even those whose names have appeared on lists entitling them to compensation said this. They said the promise of money in a bank is not the instant equivalent of a home, with a roof, livelihood or security. Where should we go today in this freezing cold? Compensation on paper doesnt mean we move on to a street with small children overnight. Give us time to rebuild our lives, our communities. And why just fling compensation at us? Arrest the guilty. Give us security, they said. Survivors who have not been deemed fit for any compensation were even more desperate to stay.
Assurances and upheaval

Administrative assurances were given that no one would be forced to leave. Official promises were made of milk, medicines and firewood in the days to come. The CMO admitted that in the first two months of the camps existence, the administration had not distributed any milk. But since news of children dying went viral, one milk powder tin has been given to each family, he told us, clearly proud of this largesse. One left the camp that evening somewhat reassured that

the visit had bought these internally displaced people some time a few extra weeks or months in which to get help; for NGOs to bring doctors to examine the 72 pregnant women in the camp (at least eight of them due to deliver any day now); to treat those sick; to distribute books, get admit cards and seek transfers of exam centres for young people so that they can give board exams and not lose a year of their life; to explore reconciliation for those willing to return; to try and help those who have got nothing from the government get some of their due. A few more weeks or months of shelter.. is that too much for survivors to ask for the enormous process of seeking rehabilitation and restitution after being torn so violently from their homes, roots and histories? But, next morning, thumbing their collective noses at the survivors, the NCM, and at the constitutional contract between citizen and state, the same array of local officials arrived, this time with a JCB excavator. In what is nothing less than an act of unconscionable State terror, they uprooted tents of all the displaced families whose names had appeared on the Rs.5 lakh compensation list. As a final act of viciousness, they dug large pits where the tent had stood, making sure it could never be re-pitched. Overnight, the Loi relief camp had become half its size. Pitted with holes. Many of its former residents scattered to the winds. Human debris. In this first round of bulldozing, the administration only removed families from nine identified villages where much of the murder and sexual assault had taken place. Only these nine (out of over 140 villages affected by the violence) are entitled to Rs.5 lakh displacement compensation per family, given after they sign an affidavit saying they will not return to their village, not occupy government land, and not live in a relief camp. Having extorted this commitment from frightened citizens, whom the state failed to protect, the same state is now determined to enforce this affidavit. (The Rs.5 lakh is given only to the head of the family, regardless of family size. If you shared a family choolah in your erstwhile village, this is all you collectively get, even if there are sons who are married, each with independent families and separate ration cards.)
No justiciable framework

Rs.5 lakh may sound like a decent sum after all, those displaced are by and large poor people. But break it down and its a pittance. Land prices in host villages (where relief camps had sprung up) have escalated with the expectation that riot survivors will be forced to buy land there. What was Rs.1,000 per guz (yard) has gone up to Rs.3,200. Buy a plot of 100 guz and there goes a chunk of the grand Rs.5 lakh, with little left for construction costs, and nothing left with which to eat. Besides, money alone does not mean reparation, rehabilitation or restitution. How should scattered survivors rebuild the shared community that was once theirs a village with a chaupal, a school, a playground, a graveyard, where their ancestors are buried? A village that holds the cultural inheritance that was theirs to give to their children, and to their children after that? A place called home? All this and more has been lost. All this and more needs to be regained. This is the debt owed by responsible states to their citizens when it fails to protect them. But in India we have neither the heart nor the vision. No law, no policy, no justiciable framework for internally displaced persons affected because of violence. So, State governments

decide capriciously how much money to throw at people, whom to give it to, and whom to leave out.
More displacement

What if you do not belong to these nine villages, and are not entitled to Rs.5 lakh as compensation? Tough luck. You have no business being scared, or trying to live on government land. So, you too are being asked to leave from Loi, Shahpur, Jhaula and other camps. Go home, go pitch a tent on another roadside, go to another State, or take a boat to another country. The Uttar Pradesh government only cares that you do not collectively sit like an eyesore in anything that can be called a relief camp, for it is identifiable, is irrefutable evidence of largescale human misery, of state failure, and, in election season, an open invitation to political opponents. Camp after camp has been forced to disappear. But where are the internally displaced persons? Look closer where the camps once stood and you will find them. In small shanty settlements, 10 tents here, another 10 tents half a kilometre down the road, 20-odd tents along the talab in Loi village. It is the same story in Shahpur. The camp has disappeared. Its people are now part of Indias great slum story, their tent clusters dotting the countryside of Shahpur village, here today, gone tomorrow; their permanent addresses unknown. Remember, these nine are the villages where most of the main criminal cases have been filed and the Rs.5 lakh is beginning to seem sinister, like hush money. Is this the message take the money and disappear? The result is that no witnesses will be found, and criminal justice will not be secured. Is that whats really going on? In Kutba, one of the nine villages designated for displacement compensation, where eight people were killed, only five arrests have been made. Warrants are out for another 36 people. Over three months after the violence, the police appear unable to find them. Even after counting the dead, there are so many more disappearances in Muzaffarnagar the relief camps, riot survivors and the accused. And this is just the beginning of election season in Indias most populous State. (Postscript: At the time of writing, December 30, 2013, the Loi relief camp had been emptied of all but a handful of tents. The effect of the JCB excavator could be seen in the way scared survivors began pulling down their rickety tents and creeping away in the days following December 26, in search of other innocuous hiding places. A police picket has appeared at the camp entrance to make sure they do not return. This has been their second forced displacement.) (Farah Naqvi, a writer and activist, is a member of the National Advisory Council. The views expressed are personal. E-mail: farah.naqvi64@yahoo.com) JAN 3

Moral of the story

Why do our films toe the moral line?

Ever wondered why many of our films feel the need to spell out the moral of the story? Or leave us with a responsible message at the end of it. Hollywood never feels the need to and is not afraid to take sides, even if means being politically incorrect. European cinema often questions the very notion of morality. Right and wrong sometimes is too simplistic and reductionist a lesson shoved down our throats. Rewind your mind to this brilliant exchange in David Finchers The Social Network when the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is being interrogated. Lawyer: Do you think I deserve your full attention? Zuckerberg: I had to swear an oath before we began this deposition, and I dont want to perjure myself, so I have a legal obligation to say no. Lawyer: Okay no. You dont think I deserve your attention. Zuckerberg: I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try but theres no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and, especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing. [pause] Zuckerberg: Did I adequately answer your condescending question? And we almost clapped. We were on his side though the lawyers were just doing their job. Theres a similar moment in Martin Scorseses morally questionable The Wolf of Wall Street when FBI officers land up on corrupt stock broker Jordan Belforts yacht to question him about his trade practices and he kicks them off the boat insulting their pay grade when they seem too righteous. He pulls out a wad of cash from his pocket and teases them that he had what they made in a year and throws the notes away, calling them fun coupons. The audience clapped. They just loved him. The Wolf of Wall Street is based on Jordon Belforts book and came to be severely criticised for glorifying the greed is good behaviour. And producer and lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio went on record in an interview to clarify: This film may be misunderstood by some; I hope people understand were not condoning this behaviour, that were indicting it. The book was a cautionary tale and if you sit through the end of the film, youll realise what were saying about these people and this world, because its an intoxicating one. (Interview in Variety magazine) But in todays times, everyone who uses Facebook is in awe of Zuckerberg. In our times of recession, everyone wants to get rich and is in complete awe of men who turned their lives around and got what they wanted. Cautionary tales sometimes caution you the other way around, especially since Fincher and Scorsese make it look so damn cool.

Are these films telling you This kind of greed will make you pay? Or are they saying Its good to be greedy but dont get caught. Is the cautionary bit or the moral of the story: Dont get caught? Both these modern heroes Zuckerberg and Belfort ended up choosing personal gain over friendship. The movies DO show us that they lost something, though they made truckloads of money. How we respond to this loss tells us something about ourselves more than the films or the filmmakers or the flawed heroes of these films. Back home, we have moral custodians, the Central Board of Film Certification that makes sure that every film ends with the right message. If the hero becomes a vigilante, the Censors, until recently, made sure theres a clip inserted before the happy ending that tells us that the hero served some time in prison. They couldnt get away with murder. If a girl is shown drinking, the board members are quick to ask you to remove it because it shows women in bad light. They couldnt even get away with drinking. The Wolf of Wall Street has all kinds of drinking, drug and sexual content and its quite a miracle that the film made it here, with only seven minutes of moral policing, despite being rated as an Adult film. Moral of the story? Even adults in India are not allowed to watch debauchery or morally wrong content because... Well, it is bad behaviour, children.

The Dilli dilemma

Are there any native inhabitants of Delhi at all, or are they all outsiders?
To many it might appear to be an overdose of Delhi, but for a city that has constantly reinvented itself, Malvika Singhs short biography of Delhi, Perpetual City has not come a day too late. Like the city, its windswept roads and its sun-kissed monuments, Malvikas sweet little book warms the heart of a Dilliwallah. Now Dilliwallah, as I understand it, is quite a misnomer. You can find Delhi in all its avatars from Lal Kot and Siri to Tughlakabad, Ferozabad, Deenpanah and on to Shahjahanabad and beyond. But today in 2014, it wont be easy to find a Dilliwallah in Dilli! Why, even the citys nomenclature is flawed. What is called Old Delhi is actually younger to many parts of New Delhi by almost 800 years. And what is usually referred to as New Delhi is at times older to some areas by as much as half a century. Ask the residents of the Walled City in areas such as Matia Mahal, Ballimaran or Chandni Chowk, and they will claim to be original Dilliwallahs. They have been the inhabitants of the kuchas, the havelis and the serais for around 400 years. Hence, across many generations, they have enjoyed the right to be called Dehlavis. Some use it in their name too. However, try and say as much to a handful of old residents in and around Nizamuddin BastiBhogal and they will give a knowing smile, claiming, as some of them do, that they have been in Delhi since the time of Nizamuddin Auliya, the Sufi, whose prognostication, Hunuz Dilli door ast sadly came true for the Tughlaq king, Ghayasuddin. Venture to South Delhi, to the area

around Mehrauli. Many claim their ancestors have been here since the time of the Sultanate, or better still, the Tomars! They are the real Dilliwallahs! The rest, according to them, are all immigrants, or worse, upstarts. It may well be partially true, but arent all of us immigrants here? Just depends on how far back you go in time. Some came with the Aryans, others later. Some settled during the reign of the Chauhans, others during the Sultanate, still others during the rule of Shahjahan, and still others during British rule when Delhi again became the Capital of India in 1911. And today in 2014, the trickle of immigrants continues. The sprawling metropolis is a magnet that draws people in all the time. Some find white collar jobs, buy flats, start families. Others move on to shanties and unauthorised colonies. But can any one of these people working and living in Delhi call himself a Dilliwallah? Nope. And then the biggest paradox. Delhi teems with millions and millions of people. Yet unlike, say, Kolkata, Mumbai or Chennai, there are few who call it their home. Millions stay here and earn their livelihood, yet the city is a little more than a rain basera, a night shelter. Come Diwali, Eid or Christmas, Delhi is deserted by thousands who head home to small towns of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Kerala, Tamil Nadu. Same when a resident gets married; the entourage goes native. Never mind that Zauq, the court poet of Bahadur Shah Zafar, once said, Kaun Jaye Zauq Par Dilli ki galiyan chhor kar?. Delhi is treated shabbily, very shabbily. No Dilliwallahs here. Everybody is either Bihari, Bengali, Punjabi or Madrasi (that easy if inaccurate stereotype for people from the South), but nobody is a Delhiite. In fact, not just on festive or special occasions, the citys residents keep away from it all the time. They build little avenues, little ghettos of their own, the Bengalis, the Madrasis, the Punjabis, the Muslims, the Sikhs and what have you. Inside the little pockets of isolation are celebrated festivals of the specific region or religion; outside, the world goes on as usual. It is like wearing trousers to office and coming back home to slip into tehmat, dhoti or mundu. No wonder, not many feel for the city and its vast history. Or Delhis ability to rise, like the proverbial phoenix, from the ashes. Or its medieval monuments, each one of them a statement in grandeur. Malvikas book which provoked me to think about Dilliwallahs, will, hopefully, give residents urgent reason to take pride in the city. And maybe, convince some to call it their own.

A multi-class urban party

The AAPs success in Delhi could possibly be emulated in similar urban pockets elsewhere, where civic concerns and a compact urban community could enable it to attract the different urban classes
Having graduated from a political movement to a party in government relatively quickly, in the small but significant State of Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is now poised to address its next challenge that of attaining national relevance. The partys success in Delhi had much to

do with some unique factors related to the capital city such as the extensive media coverage it received during the phase of its agitations for a Lokpal. But it was the partys strategy to move away from a single-issue movement (anti-corruption) with an element of anti-politics to a populist political organisation articulating real life issues of the ordinary citizens like inflated power bills and the inequitable distribution of water, that catapulted it to centre stage. It transited from being a civil society organisation committed to the realisation of the Lokpal to a political party seeking to implement the vision of Lokniti (decentralised, communitarian democracy).
Support base

By seeking to mobilise the urban poor on issues related to livelihood and welfare, the party was able to build a multi-class support base, which included many sections of the urban salariat and the lower middle classes. The partys calling card remains its stress on being anti-establishment, but its source of support among the poor is linked to expectations of better welfare delivery and empowerment. It is this mandate from the poor which has forced the AAP to form a government with the support of the very party that it has been stridently opposed to. The decision to accept support from the Congress has certainly dismayed a number of its adherents who identified the latter with malfeasance and as the primary enemy for the party, but for the poor, the AAPs ability to make a difference by being in government outweighs such tactical concerns. The AAPs garnering of support from Delhis urban poor except among Muslims who preferred to back the Congress possibly as a bulwark against a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was without recourse to narrow identitarian politics or patronage based on caste, religion or region. The urban poor drawn from the working classes in the informal sector, small traders, hawkers, migrants, etc. were also drawn to the emphasis on anti-corruption by the AAP as meaning better and direct welfare services and opportunities without having to rely upon unscrupulous middlemen. The urban poor identified the AAP as being different from the BJP and the Congress, who were seen as parties which had cultivated these middlemen and patrons. The support from the urban poor is reflected in the electoral performance of the AAP in the various slum clusters of the capital city. Conversely, in areas of Delhi which have a greater number of rural households and in the urban villages where such politics of patronage and castecommunity identity have a long history, the AAPs primary political message did not find as many takers. The AAPs success in Delhi could possibly be emulated in similar urban pockets elsewhere, where civic concerns and a compact urban community could enable it to attract the different urban classes. But the party would certainly encounter a more difficult challenge as an upstart in most places of the country which are predominantly rural or semi-urban.
National challenges

Since the 1990s, the federalisation of Indias polity has followed a course set by three distinct and significant phenomena. These include the dominance of Other Backward Classes and related caste identity politics following implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations;

an effective presence of the Hindutva right wing forces following the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, and the maturation of neo-liberal developmentalism following extensive economic liberalisation and globalisation. These phenomena have introduced various State-level dynamics and changed Indias political party system. The AAP has emerged as a political player by addressing a constituency that has been discomfited with the nature of the developmental process which has spawned corruption, crony capitalism and a new elite. But, there are other constituencies particularly in rural India which still see the need for patronage and identity assertion as a way out for the enhancement of their livelihoods. It is doubtful whether the AAPs message can make an immediate political impact here.
Social democratic space

Evidently, the AAP expects that its performance in government in Delhi and an adoption of a more comprehensive political and organisational strategy elsewhere would pay dividends in overcoming this challenge. For now, much focus is on the contiguous States bordering Delhi such as Haryana, and urban centres like Mumbai and Bangalore. Elsewhere, the party has sought to engage with and draw in groups from social movements in various States such as Tamil Nadu and Odisha to expand its political reach beyond readily available support bases in urban pockets. This strategy should keep it in good stead, but the immediate nature of the political party system should compel it to seek more allies beyond the civil society. Engagement and issue-based alliances with other political forces which have a similar anti-establishment message, such as the Left parties, would help the AAP in spreading its message more effectively. This is more so because there is a social democratic space in Indias national political spectrum that remains virtually deserted. The Congress historically played this role of a social democratic party, acting as a transmission belt, as political scientist Rajni Kothari called it, between the government and the people and having a distinct ideological world view. The withering away of Indias grand old party and its reduction into a corporatist party, dominated by special interests and one that seeks to practise social democracy more as instrumentalism and out of political compulsion rather than purpose, is not lost on many. The mainstream Left had once succeeded in occupying that space in States like Kerala and West Bengal where it translated its radical rhetoric into purposive welfarism. However, the ideological transformation of the Left from a radical, social democratic force in the 1970-80s to just another variant of developmentalism (most pronounced in West Bengal) has led to its political decline. Moreover, the left parties could not expand their areas of influence beyond three States due to their lack of political imagination in attempting to win over the many discontents with the present status quo across the country. The regional parties, since the 1990s, have also metamorphosed into corporatist entities themselves despite emerging initially as voices for backward sections that were not represented in the establishment.
Need for a vision

If the AAP constructs a well developed vision on matters of political economy and even international affairs, it would be able to occupy that vacant, social democratic space in conjunction with other like-minded parties. At a limited level, its emphasis on decentralised and

participative models of democracy, if put into practice, could bring about better social audits of welfare services and delivery and could enhance the institutions of social democracy that are already in place. Presently, the AAP has relied on an ad hoc approach to constructing an overall vision on economic or strategic matters, with an emphasis primarily on political decentralisation. It has perhaps done so to limit any internal differences between a largely left-of-centre leadership and an activist base drawn from the middle classes. But the sooner it comes up with a thoroughgoing vision that places it as a firmly secular, social democratic party and one that suitably addresses the uniqueness of Indias diverse political economy, the better it would be for the party to increase its support base and influence. In other words, the AAP has to come up with clear views on how it seeks to tackle issues related to the concentration of wealth, crony capitalism, jobless growth, crisis of the peasant economy, etc. It must also delineate its views on more purposive ways of identity recognition, and eliminating hierarchies and discriminations based on caste, gender and ethnicity. The AAPs rise as an anti-establishment force and the opening up of a social democratic space in Indias polity is not unrelated to global trends. In much of the developing world, a similar process had emerged in recent decades, as an outcome of the discontent with what is broadly defined as neoliberalism. If in Latin America this took the form of a pink tide against the elite, the anti-establishment emphasis sought to open up new spaces for democracy in the Arab world. These developments and the national challenges the party faces make it all the more imperative for the AAP to have a larger world view than it currently has. (Srinivasan Ramani is senior assistant editor with the Economic and Political Weekly.)

Telangana: no constitutional barriers

We must preserve the Union power to redraw State boundaries unfettered by new constitutional restraints as the flexibility to create suitable state-nation arrangement has sustained Indian federalism
Now that the proposal for a new Telangana state has entered the legislative stage, in the State Assembly and subsequently Parliament, the constitutional question will take centre stage: does the absence of a supporting State Assembly resolution for the creation of a new Telangana state, an outcome which remains likely, render a parliamentary amendment unconstitutional? In this essay I show that this constitutional question sits at the fault lines of two conflicting constitutional impulses on federalism in India: first, the imperative of crafting an accommodating state-nation and second, to guard against the excesses of venal partisan federalism. On balance, I conclude that the absence of a State Assembly resolution is not a constitutional barrier to the creation of Telangana. We must preserve the Union power to redraw State boundaries unfettered by new constitutional restraints, imposed either by the President or the Supreme Court, as the flexibility to create suitable state-nation arrangements has sustained Indian federalism and political unity.
Legal argument against creation

The constitutional legal argument against the creation of Telangana rests on the claim that a State Assembly to which the President refers a Bill to alter State boundaries under the proviso to Article 3 must consent to this proposal for it to be constitutionally valid. As has been pointed out in the opinion columns of this paper, this argument faces a significant hurdle. The Supreme Court has repeatedly clarified that while the State Assemblys resolution is an important procedural requirement under Article 3, a negative vote or a failure to vote on the referred Bill does not impose substantive constraints on the Union power to enact such legislation. In Babulal Parate (1959) a five-judge Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court confronted the political jostling around the status of Bombay in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The President had referred a Bill to the State Assembly, which proposed a three-way split between Gujarat, Maharashtra and a Union Territory of Bombay. After the State Assembly approved this Bill, it was amended by Parliament to include Bombay within the State of Maharashtra a not so insignificant change! Despite the significant unilateral alteration by Parliament, the Supreme Court concluded that this was not a sufficient reason to strike down the Union law as the States had no rights under the Indian Constitution. This view of the role of State legislatures where State boundaries are altered has been reaffirmed recently in Pradeep Chaudhary (2009) where the final Union law creating Uttaranchal State included the entire Haridwar district while the one approved by the State Assembly included only Haridwar city. Hence, we are in no doubt that even if the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly rejects or refuses to pass this resolution, this will not be a constitutional barrier to the creation of the Telangana State unless the Supreme Court changes its interpretation of Article 3. Hence, the constitutional argument against the creation of the Telangana State is not about what the law is but what it should be. There is nothing in the text of the proviso to Article 3 to indicate that Parliament must accept or act upon the views of the State legislature. Further justification for such a view should be understood to be the result of the embrace of a particular type of federalism: a holding-together federalism that adopts state-nation strategies. In Babulal Parate, the court observed that: None of the constituent units of the Indian Union was sovereign and independent in the sense the American colonies or the Swiss Cantons were before they formed their federal unions. The Constituent Assembly of India, deriving its power from the sovereign people, was unfettered by any previous commitment in evolving a constitutional pattern suitable to the genius and requirements of the Indian people as a whole. Unlike some other federal legislatures, Parliament, representing the people of India as a whole, has been vested with the exclusive power of admitting or establishing new States, increasing or diminishing the area of an existing State or altering its boundaries, the Legislature or Legislatures of the States concerned having only the right to an expression of views on the proposals. As Stepan, Linz and Yadav show, in a federation of this type, the Unions capacity to shape State boundaries to respond to claims for political autonomy based on linguistic, ethnic, religious or tribal identities has arguably strengthened the capacity of the Indian federation to endure over the last 60 years. Any attempt, by the President or the Supreme Court, to constrain this Union power with new constitutional or political limitations may have a lasting impact on the future of the Indian federation. However, it appears that the state-nation and holding together federalism justification for the Union power to create new States does not take the problem of political partisanship seriously

enough. As many commentators have argued, the Congress party may well be endorsing the Telangana state to secure partisan electoral gains. So should the President of India or the courts intervene to craft neutral constitutional rules that prevent the federal constitutional arrangements being exploited for partisan political considerations? In the last three decades, the Supreme Court has intervened in at least three types of disputes to craft neutral constitutional rules that prevent partisan federalism: proclamation of regional emergencies or Presidents Rule under Article 356; appointment of Governors and their exercise of executive power and to prevent the abuse of Union executive power to preserve law and order in the States. Despite the courts intervention, partisan federalism has become ubiquitous in Indian constitutional culture. In the last decade, on almost every issue on which federalism has been invoked by the States, it has been by parties in opposition to those at the Union government: the ostensibly federal division on the GST, NIA, CBI power, Lok Pal Bill, FDI in retail or the Communal Violence Bill is better explained by opposition party control over State units. However, we must be careful in characterising federalism in India as inexorably partisan in character, particularly in the realm of new State creation.
Legitimate & partisan mobilisation

The diverse range of political mobilisation that gives rise to State reorganisation claims in India alerts us to the analytical problems of distinguishing between legitimate political mobilisation and partisan mobilisation. While linguistic State reorganisation in the early decades of the Republic is now construed as legitimate constitutional redrawing of boundaries there is no doubt that several regional party formations benefited from this process: the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu and the Shiv Sena are prominent examples. The Akali parties benefited from the creation of a Sikh majority Punjab state and as Louise Tillin (Remapping India, 2013) persuasively shows, the Bharatiya Janata Partys political interests were critical to the formation of the States of Uttaranchal/Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. So, invariably States have emerged from legitimate demands for political autonomy anchored by political parties which either motivated or benefited from the creation of new States. Is the movement for the creation of a Telangana state an exception to this historical pattern? There is one issue on which the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee Report is emphatic and clear: that the political demand for a Telangana state is perceived as legitimate due to the persistent underdevelopment of these regions. The Gentlemens Agreement settled in 1956 devised statutory means to eliminate under-representation and underdevelopment in the Telangana region. Article 371-D was introduced in 1973 to formalise the Six-Point Formula through a nonterritorial asymmetric arrangement to reserve jobs and educational opportunities to people from the region. The failure of these statutory and constitutional arrangements led to the present demand for a new State. While the Telangana Rashtra Samiti and the Congress may potentially benefit from the formation of a new State, only those who pay no heed to the facts would claim that this is the only motivation for the state of Telangana. The present division in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly on the Telangana Bill is unambiguously along regional and not party lines. So, to conclude, should the President of India or the Supreme Court change the balance of power between the Union and the States in the process of State reorganisation by insisting on an

affirmative State resolution under Article 3? There are three compelling reasons not to do so: first, Indias successful holding-together federalism model has helped us craft an enduring statenation by allowing the Union to redraw State boundaries; second, though we have crafted neutral constitutional rules to check partisan federalism in several cases, it is difficult if not impossible to do so in the context of State reorganisation. Third, there is no limited set of constitutional principles that ex-ante justify the formation of States, as the primary justification for State formation is of an ex-post political character. In these circumstances it is best left to the political process to craft a resolution to competing group claims for political autonomy and statehood rather than the President or the Supreme Court to second-guess this process through constitutional rules. (Sudhir Krishnaswamy is professor of law, Azim Premji University, and visiting Dr. B.R. Ambedkar professor of Indian Constitutional Law, Columbia Law School.)

JAN 5 For sure, the new broom is here

I had become cynical of our politics, and convinced that Indian democracy was being systematically smashed by the leading political parties that have been following policies that help only the elites and the corporates. I had believed that in the coming elections the nation would find itself between the devil and the deep sea. But the unexpected and phenomenal success in Delhi of the Aam Aadmi Party, with the broom as its symbol, seems to be a positive development that warrants a suspension of the cynicism. We had never seen the broom in public or in politics. In our homes the men wont normally touch it as sweeping is not considered a manly task but a womanly one. The broom is needed to clean our homes and surroundings, but it has had a belittling reflection. The AAP has removed the untouchability of the broom. It seems the broom is becoming an essential tool that India and Indian politics need today. We have to clean up criminality in politics with brooms. We have to clean out gender inequities. We have to cleanse the policies that serve only the elites. We have to clean up the bureaucrats who spend crores of rupees on foreign trips even as the Planning Commission determines the imagined poverty line. We have to clean poachers and deforesters off the Ministry of Environment and Forests. In short, we have to clean out the parasites, those whose policies help the corporate world to rape the environment and to rob the poor of their right to live, off Indian politics and democracy. We want our secularism back, we want our democracy back, we want our environment back. We want our rivers, our forests, our paddyfields, our fresh air and our freshwater back. Now, for the clean-up

As the AAP has effaced the untouchability of the broom; people all over the country should now take it in their hands and, in the 2014 general elections, clean out undesirable elements from Indian politics. India doesnt need bickering in the name of caste and religion. It doesnt need the secular edifice to be demolished. India doesnt want to shine or be a superpower at the cost of its environment and the poor. India needs to be a country where the poor, the disadvantaged and women can live with dignity and pride. There was only one man who truly represented the Indian aam aadmi, and that man is called the Mahatma. What India needs is to convert that frail mans dreams, mostly forgotten by even the so-called followers of the Mahatma as they ruled the country for decades. The following was his dream: I shall work for an India in which the poorest shall feel that it is their country, in whose making they have an effective voice, an India in which there shall be no high class and low class of people, an India in which all communities shall live in perfect harmony. There can be no room in such an India for the curse of untouchability or the curse of intoxicating drinks and drugs. Women will enjoy the same rights as men. This is the India of my dreams. Let us hope the broom will help us realise the India of the Mahatmas dreams. (The writers e-mail is lscvsuku@gmail.com)

That ultimate liquid asset called water

Water is the very elixir of life, a precious commodity gifted by nature. Its worth is known only when it is scarce. Thus, it is essential to conserve water. Keeping in mind the Supreme Courts ruling that natural resources meant for public use cannot be converted to private ownership, a few States, including Chhattisgarh and Kerala, which had planned to sell river waters on a commercial basis to industries had to abandon the proposal. Similarly, leasing out rivers and reservoirs for fishing or other commercial activity too had to be put on hold. Privatisation of water supply is a sensitive issue, as also the price charged for water consumed. About 90 per cent of the water available goes for agricultural and industrial use, thus leaving about 10 per cent for human consumption. Changes in agricultural practices could help conserve water. For example, the use of sprinkler and drip irrigation can reduce water consumption by over 30 per cent. Using drought-resistant seeds will ease the water burden. Instead of growing water-intensive crops like sugarcane, farmers are switching to alternative agricultural and horticultural products which demand less water. Industries are seeing the advantage of changing processes to make them less water-intensive. A recycling plant at the Bangalore railway station reuses water after proper cleaning, thus effecting

savings. Recycled water is being offered in the Bangalore industrial area at a lower rate to encourage more industries to opt for recycled water to save costs and conserve water. Moreover, some of them have started recycling to reduce water consumption. A city like Singapore, which imports water, recycles water and encourages individuals and industry to use such water for non-potable purposes. In the foreseeable future, such recycled water could be used even for drinking, when peoples mindset changes. Some cities have laid down mandatory rules to harvest groundwater. However, it is no longer free. A permit is required to drill a bore-well. Moreover, whats needed is to levy a charge for extracting groundwater, which is community property. Rainwater harvesting is catching on, and is mandatory in cities and towns. Urban water supply is plagued by leaks and contamination. Maintaining pipes and taps properly could go a long way in conserving water. Drought-prone areas have realised the advantage of rainwater harvesting. This is an ancient practice followed by ancient civilisations near the deserts where the rainfall was meagre and tended to run off wastefully. Mini bunds, increasing storage capacity of village tanks and planting trees are all aimed at harvesting rain when it occurs. A few villages in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan have demonstrated how scanty rainfall could be utilised better through run-off prevention and charging underground water springs. Water Poverty Index (WPI) is a measure that combines indices of water availability and access with indices of peoples capacity to pay. There may be abundance of water but not paying capacity for water use. In general, water poverty is related to income poverty, the WPI is inseparable from Human Development Index (HDI) where we rank abysmally low compared even to developing countries like Thailand. The poor have no reason to feel good given such a hopeless situation where there is a daily, relentless struggle to access clean water at an affordable price. (The writers email is dbnvimi@gmail.com)

The Centre cannot hold

It is perhaps because a national, party-based politics of the old-fashioned kind is in crisis that mobilisations at the centre are so concerned with recovering the nation as an undifferentiated and even anti-political idea
National debate in India has been dominated over the past few years by just two issues: security and corruption. Both are marked by their malleability, with concerns about security shifting from terrorism to rape, and those about corruption moving easily between the criticism of individuals and institutions. Such issues are no longer in the control of political parties or the state, and are as likely to be used by them as against. For whether it is a single man or the entire government that is blamed for threats to security and the impunity of corruption, these problems are now consistently posed as those of governance. And the language of governance is dominated by the

desire for equality as an undifferentiated and so universal good, rather than, say, justice as one that is based on discriminating between citizens.
Liberalisation and expression

The social movements that increasingly tend to give these undifferentiated issues their visibility often share their activists and forms of expression with one another. Candlelight vigils, for example, emerged in the 1990s to publicise the murder of young women like Jessica Lal and Priyadarshini Mattoo, whose assailants could evade justice because of their political connections. In the following decade such practices were extended to commemorate terrorist attacks, and today protests against both rape and corruption switch between the silent vigil and the angry demonstration as modes of expression. These largely middle class manifestations of discontent are also unprecedented, given the fact that political parties are largely absent in their organisation. Such novel forms of mobilisation all date from the period of Indias economic liberalisation, which created a new space for organisation and debate in an increasingly mediatised civil society. But while they have dominated popular interest nationally, what goes unnoticed is how these debates still have little traction for regional politics, where the inequalities of caste, class and community continue to define both protest and voting patterns. There seems to be a widening gulf between politics at the State level, whose influence has been expanded by the steady devolution of power in the country, and at the centre, which can no longer be held by single parties but only in large coalitions with several regional ones. It is perhaps because a national, party-based politics of the old-fashioned kind is in crisis that mobilisations at the centre are so concerned with recovering the nation as an undifferentiated and even anti-political idea. Such mobilisations are led, therefore, by social movements that are highly critical of party politics, setting governance against government in forms like the Jan Lokpal Bill, which seeks to make Parliament accountable to civil society beyond the electoral process. After all, issues like corruption or security are so unexceptionable as to be universal, and therefore define the nation outside politics by excluding any substantive opposition, for who could argue in favour of them?
Governance vs. government

While both social movements and the political parties that seek their support proclaim their allegiance to the countrys founding fathers, the governance that preoccupies them does not belong to a national history. If anything it was the colonial state that sought to justify itself by the language of fair and competent administration. Since it was run by foreigners who did not depend on elections or vote banks, the administration was, by definition, thought to be impartial and non-political. And by the end of colonial rule, the vocabulary of development had come to lend additional legitimacy to an unaccountable bureaucracy, from where it has been inherited by equally unrepresentative international organisations and global civil society. But as a global category, governance achieved its current status during the post-ideological period following the Cold War. Premised on the retrenchment of the state, which was meant to

outsource many of its former functions to private enterprise, non-governmental organisations and the institutions of civil society, governance redefined government as managerial oversight. In the form of good governance, then, management was promoted by international organisations like the U.N., NATO, the World Bank and the IMF, at least initially to manage the transition of postSoviet societies to democracy and capitalism. Governance of this kind was explicitly anti-political, and meant to reduce the hold of a corrupt and tyrannical state upon its citizens. Yet, the social movements that emerged to oppose such states have been able, in spectacular cases like the colour revolutions of Eastern Europe or those of the Arab Spring more recently, to topple governments but not to form them. Given their distaste for party politics, it could not have been otherwise. So it is remarkable that India Against Corruption has produced the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), though we have yet to see if it is able to balance asocial movement with institutional politics, or maybe transform one into the other. As Cambridge historian Shruti Kapila has argued, the populism of the AAP links it to groups like the Tea Party in America, whose support of political parties does not detract from its anti-statist nature.
Paradox of populism

A precedent for this situation may be found in Hindutva, Indias first great social movement of the post-Cold War period. Achieving a massive mobilisation in the media-saturated civil society created by liberalisation, Hindutva is propagated by a political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and apparently non-political organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal, which together constitute the hybrid association of the Sangh Parivar. Rather than being merely conspiratorial, the secretive character of the RSS, for instance, serves to demonstrate its deliberate policy of working outside an arena defined by the institutions of parliamentary democracy, while still being part of a family that includes a political party. The Hyderabad-based political scientist Jyotirmaya Sharma has pointed out that by wrangling for control of the BJP, the RSS seems to have forsaken its traditional policy. This either suggests that Hindutva as a social movement is being subordinated to a political party, or the reverse, both possibilities remaining open if the state is imagined to represent civil society in a managerial way. But more interesting than the shifting balance of power between the two might be the fact that Hindutva has never possessed a theory of state. Unlike the vision of an Islamic State, with its distinctive if non-egalitarian constitutional structure, Hindutva has no alternative political model. And this is its triumph as much as its tragedy, since the absence of such a model repeatedly casts Hindutva back into a social movement. The BJP has struggled, with varying degrees of purpose and success, to free itself from Hindutva as a social movement, or rather to subordinate the latter to parliamentary politics. And today, its vision of becoming normalised as Indias conservative party looks like it is about to be fulfilled by a leader who, ironically, is the man most associated with Hindutva as a social movement. Such are the paradoxes of populism.

Will the BJP finally manage to absorb the social movement that gave rise to it, or will the latters attempt to recover the nation in non-political terms end up establishing a majority-defined democracy against the republic? For being a political category, the republic is opposed to majority rule as a social form, meant as it is to create a public space in which majorities and minorities are made up of shifting and temporary interests, rather than the permanent demographic facts that populism on the Left as much as the Right relies upon. The only parties that depend upon social movements in India today are the gigantic BJP on the one hand, and the still very small AAP on the other. Although they are very different and even opposed to one another, it is instructive that both parties stake their reputations on governance rather than government. Does the devolution of power in India, and its consequent political fragmentation, suggest that the centre can only hold in such non-statist ways? Is the national arena demarcated by the media fated to represent civil society, with the state serving as its agent in ensuring good governance under the watchful eye of a Lokpal or Vikas Purush? Only those who still act in the world of politics can answer these questions. (Dr. Faisal Devji is Reader in Indian History and Director of the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.)

A battle for the soul of Islam

With Osama bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda in disarray, moderate Muslims were set to reclaim political Islam from extremists. But 2 years later, the Islam projected by extremists is back with a vengeance
One does not have to be a revolutionary poet like Faiz Ahmad Faiz to look at events in the Muslim world and lament at being deceived by the promise of a false dawn as he memorably did at the time of Indian independence, Yeh woh sehar to nahin jiski arzoo le kar, chale the yaar ke mil jayegee kabhi na kabhi. Barely two years ago around this time, the Arab Street appeared to be on the cusp of a historic democratic revolution that was supposed to define Islam in the 21st century. An Islam compatible and at ease with the democratic values of free speech and tolerance. With Osama bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda in disarray, moderate Muslims were set to reclaim the much maligned political Islam from extremists. The sight of articulate young Muslims with their Blackberrys and iPhones yearning for change and pushing for a radical break with the past mesmerised the world. Even card-carrying Islamophobes were forced into rethinking their pet theories about Islam. It was hailed as Islams belated Enlightenment moment a heady time when even a minor street protest came to be celebrated as a sign of Muslim awakening. William Wordsworths

paean to the French Revolution could well apply to the Arab Spring, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!
Its own making

Yet, all that seems so long ago now. The old terrifying face of Islam projected by extremists is back with a vengeance. The so-called jihadis have seized back the crucial edge in the battle for the soul of Islam. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that, unwittingly, moderate Muslims have thrown away the gains briefly achieved in those heady days in 2011. Few revolutions in modern history have turned out quite so badly, and been so greedily devoured by its own children. Today, much of the Muslim world is in worse shape than before a seething cauldron of hate and bigotry, and torn by sectarian violence. Crucially, for once, the Great Satan has nothing to do with what is going on there. There is no George W. Bush, no Tony Blair. Indeed, America has gone to some lengths to keep out of it even at the risk of alienating some of its European allies.
Revival of hostility

The mess is entirely of Muslims own making. It is the Great Satan within who is wreaking the damage. Islam is at war with itself, which is raging, simultaneously, at several levels between moderates and extremists; between Shias and Sunnis; and between pro-West (Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies) and anti-West (Iran, Lebanon, Syria) Muslim powers. Perhaps, for the first time since the emergence of political Islam in its present ugly form in the last century the target of hate is not the West. It is very much an intra-Muslim affair. The warriors as well as their targets are all indigenous. Mostly, it is Muslims fighting other Muslims with Christians often caught up in the crossfire. One of the most disturbing aspects is the bloody resurgence of Shia-Sunni hostility. Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria all have been sucked into a cycle of Muslim-on-Muslim violence that makes the Catholic-Protestant troubles in Northern Ireland look like kids stuff. In Iraq alone, more than 6,000 people were killed in Shia-Sunni violence in 2013 a death toll not seen since 2008, according to the BBC. Across West Asia, a form of ethnic cleansing is going on with Shias being forced to flee Sunni-majority areas, and vice versa. The region is awash with refugees from both sects raising the spectre of a Palestinian-style crisis of the stateless/homeless Muslims. It is reckoned that more than a third of Syrias population has been displaced, with a knock-on effect being felt throughout West Asia. In Lebanon, the presence of Sunni Muslim refugees has put pressure on its already fragile sectarian balance. Tensions are being fuelled by the Shia militant group Hezbollah which is actively backing the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a fellow Shia from the Alawite sect. And all this is happening with the blessings of Shia/Sunni regimes aligned to rival sectarian interests.

Its a proxy war with Shia Iran, Iraq and Syria in one camp, and the Saudis and their Sunni allies such as Qatar in the other. The ouster of the Mohammad Morsi government and the persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood have nothing to do with protecting Egypt from Islamist extremism or upholding secularism and democracy. It is Saudi Arabia flexing its Sunni muscles as it did when it helped crush a nascent uprising in Bahrain. (To avoid any perceptions of bias, let me declare that I am a Sunni.) The leaderless Tahrir Square revolutionaries have been a casualty of a wider quasi-religious struggle among major Muslim powers for supremacy. Rather than setting the agenda for a new Egypt, they have ended up serving others agendas. First the army used them to get rid of Hosni Mubarak by portraying itself as the defender of the revolution, and then to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood which, as the only organised political force in the country, posed a threat to its influence. The failed Arab Spring is an object lesson in how not to organise a revolution. Contrary to the romantic notion of a spontaneous revolution, it is actually a cold beast which needs credible leadership, a high level of organisation, a coherent ideology and a clearly thought-out plan for afterwards. Instead, what we saw on the Arab street was only idealism and anger. No leadership, no organisation and no alternative script. This allowed all sorts of elements with their own agendas the army, dodgy dissidents at home and abroad, and extremists to step in and hijack the show. The only exception is Tunisia where after initial chaos, Ennahda, a well-organised moderate Islamist party, has been able to provide a semblance of stable democratic alternative.
Insecurity of Christians

And what about Islams fabled respect towards other faiths? There has been an alarming increase in anti-Christian violence with attacks on churches, Christian homes and businesses without any apparent provocation. In Egypt, the minority Coptic Christian community is living in fear after a series of attacks allegedly by Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Hundreds of churches and other properties belonging to Christians have been destroyed or looted apparently because the Coptic Pope Tawadros II spoke in support of military rulers. In Syria, Christians have been attacked by anti-Assad forces who accuse them of supporting his regime. Christians all over West Asia feel insecure and there is a climate of fear. There are reports of large-scale Christian flight from the region with almost one-third of Christians having fled Syria alone, it is claimed. The Christians being targeted are not western expats; they do not represent western interests. Not that it would have made attacks on them any more legitimate. They are historically settled communities as Arab as any Muslim Arab in terms of their historical roots in the region. Understandably, there is deep concern about the future of Christianity in the land of its birth.

Prince Charles, one of the few high-profile friends of Muslims in the West and who has done a lot of work to promote Muslim-Christian dialogue, has voiced his dismay. He told an interfaith audience in London recently that he had spent 20 years trying to build bridges between Islam and Christianity to dispel ignorance and misunderstanding. But these bridges were now rapidly being deliberately destroyed by those with a vested interest in doing so. He urged Muslims, Jews and Christians to unite in outrage against the turn of events in the region. Beyond the disappointments of the false Arab dawn, however, is the broader question of the existential crisis facing Islam in the land of its birth. Given its regressive trajectory, liberal Muslims, especially, will be right to worry about the shape in which Islam emerges from this crisis. It doesnt look good. hasan.suroor@gmail.com

Environment Ministry softens stand

Projects falling within wildlife zones back in reckoning
Several project proposals which were taken off the list for forest clearance as they fell within wildlife zones or were awaiting comprehensive assessment will be considered afresh by the Forest Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Environment and Forests in January. The proposals include exploration for coal in Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh, in zones that were earlier identified by the ministry as being part of a wildlife corridor. There is also a proposal to permit iron ore excavation in Saranda, Jharkhand, where permission for mining was blocked after the area had been identified as an elephant reserve. Yet another proposal is for the 700 MW Tato-II Hydroelectric Project on the Siyom in Arunachal Pradesh without a cumulative assessment study the ministry earlier mandated for the river basin. The Forest Advisory Committee is the statutory authority under the Forest Conservation Act. It is headed by the seniormost forest officer, Director-General of Forests, and comprises several senior forest officials and some non-official experts. All proposals for forest clearance are assessed by this committee, and the Environment Minister takes the final call on the projects based on its reviews. Rarely does the Minister go against the committees views and the listing of projects on the agenda for the panel is done with the Ministers knowledge. The proposals in Singrauli include exploration for coal in the Dongri Taal, Patpahariya, MarkiBarka East and Marki-Barka West blocks. They are in close proximity to the Sanjay-Dubri Tiger Reserve. The blocks were earlier earmarked by the Ministry as falling within areas with tigers. Even a refined study by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) concluded that two of these were important for tiger conservation. The NTCA noted that they fell within the zone that should be declared an ecologically sensitive area.

Iron mining in the Saranda forests is proposed in what was notified as the Singhbhum elephant reserve. In 2010, while permitting some public sector undertakings to mine at one end of the reserve, the Ministry ruled that no other mining leases be permitted in the Saranda forests, but has gone back on its decision. At the same time, the Centre has dithered for several years on greater protection to elephant reserves and on establishing a conservation authority, which was recommended by a committee on the lines of the NTCA. Empowering the authority with legal mandate would make it difficult for projects to be sanctioned in elephant reserves. Tato-II project appraisal was earlier put on the back burner after the committee sought a cumulative assessment of all projects planned in the river basin. But after hectic discussions between the Environment and Power Ministries and after the Cabinet Committee on Investments considered the issue, the FAC is set to discuss the plan again without the assessment. It claims that this is the first project in the river basin that has come up for forest clearance and so it can be taken up for approval without cumulative assessment. But the Ministry gave environment clearance in 2005 for another project on the same river basin downstream.

Mapping the Kashmir trajectory

Instead of wielding a partnership with the people of Kashmir by addressing their grievances and assuaging their fears, India put in place a system of extended patronage pivoted on select individuals
Narendra Modis proposition of revisiting Article 370 has opened a Pandoras box of sorts. Animating the intellectual landscape, it has triggered a variegated debate over the constitutional jurisdiction, technicalities and legal course of the Article. However, beyond the juris prudentia there is a need to understand the genesis of the conflict and its various expressions.
Through the Pakistan prism

At the core of the conflict lies Kashmirs aspiration for autonomy, epitomised in the preservation of its distinct regional identity and character. The recipient of a vibrant historical legacy, a rich civilisation, discrete geographical and demographic features and an eclectic value-system in contrast to the prevalent regional orthodoxy, Kashmir over the ages evolved a distinct regional pride and identity. Intermittent phases of foreign rule marred by ruthless oppression and a tendency to alter the Kashmiri way of life sharpened its regional identity. Its sense of self became defined by the desire to resist the alien yoke and retain the glory of indigenous rule, elevating the significance of identity to Kashmiri lives. As a deterrent to foreign intrusion, Kashmiri identity further recoiled within its regional demarcation, and this at times manifested itself in a more militant form. Indias inability to recognise the undercurrents of Kashmirs preoccupation with its identity further exacerbated Kashmiri vulnerability. Generating an additional set of grievances, it stymied the prospects of a constructive and trustful engagement

between India and Kashmir. Indias overtures in turn stemmed from its own insecurities based on its presumption of Kashmirs proclivity toward Muslim Pakistan. Misconstruing Kashmirs inherent inclination for autonomy with a preference for Pakistan, India erroneously built the edifice of its relationship with Kashmir through the prism of Pakistan. This deprived India of the initiative to construct an independent and proactive association with Kashmir based on positives rather than the reactionary political architecture it eventually ended up creating. While Kashmir always had a socio-cultural and religious fascination with Pakistan which persists to this day, it conveniently kept its political interests apart. Despite the inroads of the Muslim League (ML) throughout India on the premise of a shared religious ideology as a means of coalescing a geographically disparate people, it failed to strike an influencing chord in Kashmir. The corresponding movement in Kashmir was more region-centric than pan-Indian. The sociopolitical congruity of Kashmir also allowed its freedom movement to be more sophisticated and evolved based on tangible issues and concrete agendas rather than the abstract of Islamic appeal alone. The inclusive nature of Kashmiriyat along with the early influence of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the utility of a resourceful Pandit community within the regional context, kept the freedom movement in Kashmir at a distance from the ML. The organisational assistance that Sheikh Abdullah, spearheading the Kashmiri movement, received from the State Peoples Party a subsidiary of the INC which supported the cause of the subjects in the princely states and the personal differences between him and Jinnah further eschewed the possibility of any political convergence. The opposition of the ML along with the J&K Muslim Conference to the Quit Kashmir movement in 1946 and the lack of audience given to G.M. Sadiq by the top leadership in Pakistan when sent there as an envoy by Sheikh Abdullah in October 1947 seemed to have been the last straw that prevented rapprochement between Kashmir and Pakistan. The successive stances by the Pakistani state in the form of aligning with the detested Maharaja (Standstill Agreement though a tactical necessity for Pakistan), subsequent economic sanctions, infiltration of the tribesmen and their ensuing loot and rampage and the inclination of Sheikh Abdullah toward India all reinforced the chasm between Kashmir and Pakistan in those early days.
Alignment with India

The alignment with India on the other hand far from the lofty discourse of converging ideologies was also a tactical move based on astute calculations. Sheikh Abdullah perceived that he would be able to maintain a higher degree of autonomy within the democratic and liberal set-up espoused by the INC as opposed to Pakistans centralised polity. The secular slogan of the Indian polity was also conducive to the pluralist social fabric of Kashmiriyat as against the primacy of the majoritarian religion within Pakistan. The grass-roots disposition of the INC would also accommodate the socio-economic mobility envisioned by him. Above all, the left-leaning populist leadership of the INC would be more amenable to the radical land reforms envisaged by Sheikh Abdullah, an anathema to the landed elite at the helm in Pakistan. The bedrock of Sheikh Abdullahs political ascendancy and power, it was this last factor which overwhelmingly swung the decision in favour of India (beyond the populist appeal, the manner in which the land reforms were implemented were a structural disaster in the long term as enunciated by visiting American agrarian and economist Daniel Thorner in 1953). Here too, India was unable to recognise the intricacy of Kashmirs union with India. Based on a set of calculated ideals rather than a natural

overlap of interests, the premises underlying Kashmirs union with India were systemically eroded. Rather than skilfully employing the complexities of Kashmirs relationship with Pakistan and itself to an advantage, India allowed its misplaced judgment to cloud its decision-making on Kashmir. Instead of wielding a partnership with the people of Kashmir by addressing their grievances and assuaging their fears, India put in place a system of extended patronage pivoted on select individuals. This was to serve as a one-stop fix-it-all. Not only was it a short cut to manage the state rather than govern it, it was also a means of checking dissent and Kashmirs inherent proclivity for self-governance which India perceived as secession. This exacerbated the widening fissures between India and Kashmir. The more the patronised clique failed to deliver, the more desperate the attempts by India became and the more entrenched was the reifying belief that India was at the root of all ills in Kashmir. The more India fumbled in Kashmir; the more Pakistan was brought back into the political frame. For the masses in Kashmir, Pakistan began to represent the idol standing up to India and challenging it, something they couldnt do on their own and celebrated in extension in the form of Pakistan. More than the love for Pakistan, it was the rancour (that India had generated for itself) that endeared Pakistan to Kashmir. However, notwithstanding its grievances toward India, Kashmir very prudently maintained the fine distinction between its socio-cultural affinity with Pakistan and its political ambitions which distinctively remained wedded to the preservation of its discrete identity. It was against this backdrop that despite coming on the heels of an emotive uprising in 1964, Kashmir refrained from collaborating on Operation Gibraltar with Pakistan in 1965. As Kashmir has today very pragmatically compartmentalised its sentiment for Azadi with that of participation in elections under Indian aegis, it had very long ago struck a balance with Pakistan by compartmentalising its socio-cultural affinity to it from its indigenous political goals.
Another lost chance

Kashmir cautiously gave India another chance in 1975 in the form of the Indira-Sheikh Accords. Despite the opportunity to start all over and extend a sense of trust and sincerity, India, embroiled by the dynamics of its internal political battles and the autocratic tendencies of its leadership, was unable to seize the moment. Responding instead by explicit intervention in the political set-up of the State much to the chagrin of the populace, the rigged elections of 1987 proved the last blow. By then the elements of ethnic conflict as delineated by Ted Gurr were present in full force in Kashmir: identity, grievances, opportunity and capacity. The last element stimulated by the Kashmiri diaspora and logistically assisted by Pakistan was instrumental in transforming the peace-loving Kashmiri into what Donald Horowitz termed as the Reluctant Secessionist. Pushed to the precipice did Kashmir have a choice? Aspiring for the preservation of its identity and the symbols representing that identity, was it asking for too much? Driven by its paranoia had India employed the tools of compassion, magnanimity and prudence instead, the trajectory of Kashmir would have been very different today. True to its cause, despite the infiltration of myriad ideas and influences, the clarion call in Kashmir remains Azadi (Independence) its expression of self-preservation.

(Asma Khan Lone, daughter of JKLF leader Amanullah Khan, is a political researcher with roots in both the Indian and Pakistani sides of Kashmir. E-mail: asma_sgl@hotmail.com)

A financiers wealth
How does a fabulously rich man house his books?
I have often gushed over the lavish libraries of the United States, but what I saw on my most recent visit was a positive temple to the arts. An exhibition of Leonardo Da Vincis drawings took me to the Morgan Library & Museum on Madison Avenue in New York City. It was bonechilling weather, so I rushed into the building without admiring the exterior as I would otherwise have done. Once I had taken in the drawings and wandered through exhibits on Edgar Allan Poe and Booker Prize winners, I ventured to explore the rest of the building. In a corner of the airy entrance courtyard was a modest door that pointed me to Pierpont Morgans 1906 Library, the kernel of the institution. John Pierpont Morgan was a financial giant of the late 1800s, and as the new century was born he commissioned a library to house his rich collection of books, manuscripts, prints and drawings. A portrait of the man looms over the fireplace of his private study. His tooled-leather desk stands there, and his privileged visitors perhaps sank into those sumptuous armchairs and sofas as they perused a volume. The walls are covered in red damask silk, and the ceilings are of carved and painted wood. The books are locked behind glass and grille cases along the walls, and medieval icons and Renaissance paintings are displayed above them. In one corner is the entrance to a vault containing rare manuscripts and editions. It is now left open for visitors to peer into, though we cannot enter. A thick Persian carpet hushes our footsteps. From there the visitor slips into the Rotunda, a pillared extravagance of bronze, marble and mosaic with allegorical paintings on its domed ceiling. A copy of the Declaration of Independence is displayed here, one of the hand-written copies dating from 1776. The Rotunda leads to the main library, dominated by a Citizen Kane fireplace, tapestries and a coffered ceiling. When J.P. Morgan decided to do up his interiors, he evidently shopped in European castles. There are three levels of inlaid walnut wood bookcases in this room, the upper levels reached by narrow galleries. Theres no visible way to get up there, but the guide tells us there is a secret staircase behind one of the bookcases. A private tunnel, she says, leads to what was once Morgans own residence. We cant look into the cloth- or leather-bound books from those shelves, of course. For the 20 dollars I paid to get in, I expect only to see, not to touch. But many treasures are displayed in glass cases, including Mesopotamian cylindrical seals, books in jewelled bindings, and a letter dictated by Elizabeth I to her cousin Henry III of France and rendered by a secretary in exquisite Gothic script.

Morgans library has three Gutenberg bibles, but that seems like nothing after what weve seen. No doubt theres another princely American banker somewhere who has four, and when I find him Ill gush some more. Keywords: book wise column, libraries of the United States, Morgan Library & Museum, Pierpont Morgans 1906 Library, John Pierpont Morgan

Backing Bangladesh
India is too strategically powerful and too close a neighbour to play a partisan role in favouring any political party over another in Bangladesh
By every account, the January 5 election, Bangladeshs 10th so far, was a low point for democracy. The boycott of the 18-member Opposition alliance meant half the seats Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinas Awami League (AL) won were uncontested, and about half of the remainder were against unknown candidates with estimates of the turnout just 22-30% of the voting population. Ms. Hasina has now returned to a parliament that echoes only with her voice, but the voice is a hollow one, like the victory itself. Ms. Hasina may have won a three-fourths majority in the Jatiyo Sangshad, but three-fourths of her electorate didnt vote. For her rival, Khaleda Zia, whose Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led the boycott, there are parallels to her own victory in February 1996, when Ms. Hasina boycotted the polls, until widespread protests forced a second election that Ms. Hasina won in June 1996. While it is significant that India has backed the polls, it is equally important to notice that the United States slammed them, saying it is disappointed, and the United Kingdom, Australia and the European Union have called for another poll at the earliest. Ms. Hasina has also come under much criticism for putting Ms. Zia under a virtual house arrest in the lead-up to the elections, which Ms. Zia described as the death of democracy. India has done well to defend Bangladesh from the international onslaught and from the comments of human rights organisations that have followed. There are several reasons why Ms. Hasina had no alternative but to hold elections. To begin with, Bangladesh would have been headed for a constitutional crisis if they had not been held in January. Ms. Hasinas decision to hold them without a caretaker government at the helm was, in fact, mandated by the Supreme Court. Secondly, Ms. Hasina can hardly be blamed if other parties chose to boycott. In 1992, terror-torn Punjab saw an election that was boycotted by all but one of the Akali parties, where the Congresss Beant Singh was elected Chief Minister by winning just 9% of the potential electorate.
Targeted violence

Ms. Hasinas supporters would also argue that Bangladesh has seen some of the worst targeted violence in the run-up to these elections. More than 100 people have been killed in the past few months, in protests and clashes by members of the Opposition, the violence driven largely by members of the Jamaat-e-Islami that was banned from politics five months ago. Bearing the brunt of the anti-election clashes have been the countrys minorities, notably Hindu villages

where thousands have had their homes burned in Jessore and Southern Chittagong, and have been forced to take shelter in temples and neighbouring areas. Many have likened the targeting to the pre-liberation pogrom carried out by Jamaati leaders in 1971 that they are now facing war crimes tribunals over. In taking them on, Ms. Hasina has faced formidable opposition, not just from within Bangladesh, but from the international community. The U.S. has consistently issued statements against Ms. Hasinas government for the working of that tribunal, getting vocal support from British parliamentarians, and groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Ms. Hasina has stayed the course in supporting those trials, carrying out the execution of Jamaati leaders at no small cost to her image domestically and internationally. Ms. Hasina has also risked losing some of Bangladeshs biggest donors from Saudi Arabia after she took on NGOs that she claimed were funding jihadist activities by JI cadres. Given this situation, it would seem natural that many in India would call for South Block to play a protectors role for Ms. Hasina and the Awami League, and balance out some of the pressures she faces. Yet, this too, would be a blunder. India is too strategically powerful and too close a neighbour to play a partisan role in favouring any political party over another in Bangladesh.
Losing face

For all but two of the past 22 years post Army-rule, it has been these two begums that have been in power. Despite its concerns over Ms. Zia and the BNPs policies, India gains little by political partisanship. South Block has burned its fingers playing that game in the neighbourhood in the past: in 2008, then National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan had indicated Indias preference for Sushil Koiralas Nepali Congress Party, and then had to walk backwards an uncomfortable distance after the Maoists won the polls. In 2012, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Maldivian President Mohammed Waheed to congratulate him for assuming power, and lost face after it became clear the move was completely undemocratic, and India then spent much time championing the cause of deposed President Nasheed, who eventually lost the recent election. Even in the run-up to the Bangladesh elections, Indias open support for Ms. Hasina became the biggest reason for the criticism against her. When Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh went to meet Jatiya Party chairman Hussain Muhammad Ershad to dissuade him from boycotting the polls, the move boomeranged badly. At a press conference called directly after the meeting, Mr. Ershad announced that Ms. Singh had told him India was opposed to the rise of parties allied to the Jamaat-e-Islami, and the rhetoric against India only rose with the perception that it was playing a larger role than Bangladeshis would want any foreign country to play. In a recent article in the Dhaka Tribune titled, Why India should rethink its Bangladesh policy, social media activist Shafquat Rabee criticises India for backing Ms. Hasina despite the crackdown by her on the Opposition. The article says: Many in Bangladesh now believe in the following grave accusations: that India is behind the dayto-day security protection of certain Bangladeshi leaders. India is carrying out stealth operations inside Bangladesh wearing Bangladeshi forces dresses. India has trained and sent special operations teams in Bangladesh.

India is lobbying Western countries to take Ms. Hasinas side. Clearly, the belief is outrageous and unfounded, but India must avoid the impression that it has put its hopes on only one political party or leader.
Change in approach

Instead, India must play a role that favours Bangladesh regardless of which party rules it and the first step would be to simply keep its promises. More than two years after Dr. Singh made his historic visit to Dhaka along with several Chief Ministers, his promises of ratifying the Land Border Agreement, and of clearing the Teesta water settlement havent been fulfilled. Instead, in Bangladeshs narrative, they are being seen as symbols of Indias unreliability, if not its perfidy. On the economic front too, there is much India can do to back Bangladesh. The violence of the past year has had a disastrous impact on its textiles industry that accounts for about 75% of its economy. According to the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), export orders have come down by half in the past three months, and nearly one billion dollars worth of business could be at risk if the situation doesnt improve by June 2014. Indias garments exports business is a rival of Bangladeshs, but there is no reason why India cant pick up some of the slack in Bangladeshs exports for its own retailers. In the field of IT and telecommunications too, for example, Indian companies must be encouraged to invest in Bangladesh, which is poised for a second revolution once it speeds up its internet access. In the bigger picture, the key to prosperity in both Bangladesh and Indias north-eastern States is the development of the highway and infrastructure corridors to the east. The road to East Asia has been cut off for far too long, even as ASEAN countries have built wealth and interdependence through interconnectivity amongst themselves. None of these may be possible in the short run, even as Ms. Hasina prepares to grapple with the political crisis that the elections have thrown up. But as she reaches out to her rivals, and as Ms. Zia hints at a possible rethink on the alliance with the Jamaat-e-Islami, India must make its voice heard in favour of Bangladesh, the nation, rather than specific parties. It would seem obvious that the current parliament would be a temporary one, until reconciliation is effected in Bangladeshs polity, and all of Bangladesh heads to vote in the next election. For, as U.S. political commentator Thomas Keane wrote recently, The solution to bad elections isnt no elections. Its better elections. (Suhasini Haidar is Foreign Editor, CNN-IBN)

Other side of hartals

Much has been said about the negative effects of hartals, and it is high time somebody stood up in their defence even if it is from a reluctant supporter. Several good things come with every hartal. Let us look at the eco-friendly nature of the hartal. That day about 99 per cent of vehicles are off our roads, and the results are breathtaking. There is

a significant drop in air and noise pollution levels and all roads become a joggers or health walkers paradise. Even kids can be seen playing cricket on some of them, making up for the general shortage of playgrounds. One can hear the birdsong while inhaling crisp, carbon monoxide-free air. Then, all that foreign exchange savings: we all know a substantial part of it is spent to buy crude oil from abroad. A days hartal translates into significant savings. On normal days, so much of petrol and diesel is burnt in merely idling at traffic signals, or in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There are educational and academic aspects. The sight of sleepy eyed young children in uncomfortable neck-ties and nylon socks (despite the humid weather) being dragged to school in buses or overloaded autorickshaws is common. They then undergo gruelling hours in cramped classrooms where the stress is on information overload and not on creative thinking. Most students welcome hartals as god-given holidays. See how hartals unify the family. For most of the working population, only Sundays are left to relax or be at home. But then most of it gets spent in going to church or temple and attending to household chores that have been kept pending. On hartal days, breakfast, lunch and dinner happen as a family on the dining table and there is no danger of friends or distant relatives trespassing at odd times. You can now watch that movie that you never got time to see. As all fast food or junk food restaurants are closed, families will have no option but to get back to the basics, and children can enjoy some nutritious home-made food. krishi1505@yahoo.co.in

Of tea, coffee and commerce

Doctors usually advise against the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea. But a patient asked me during consultation: How many cups of tea should I give my kids each day? Before I could comprehend what he was saying, he waved a copy of The Hindu (Oct. 10, 2013, Coimbatore edition), which quoted an official of the Tea Board as saying: The benefits of tea on the health front should be widely propagated. An office-bearer of an organisation was also quoted as saying that a series of meetings would be held with the help of the Tea Board to promote tea-drinking among children. The Tea Board has often urged the public to drink more tea to lower the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer (The Hindu, Sept. 25, 2001), quoting scientific literature on the value of tea in protecting people from these diseases, but conveniently ignoring literature on the possible and proven adverse effects of excessive tea consumption. Green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong tea, pu-erh tea, and so on are all derived from the plant Camellia sinensis, native to China and India. Tea has for long been considered to be a healthy drink full of flavonoids and other goodies like antioxidants that have a variety of positive health benefits reducing risk of cardiovascular diseases, stroke, cancer, obesity, infections,

osteoporosis, hypertension, neurological disease, cognitive impairment, and so on. Scientific literature carries evidence in favour of tea, especially green tea which has more than 30 polyphenols and a catechin called epigallocatechin (EGCg) which act on the human system in positive ways. How much of this evidence is created by paid research is a different question. Industry has a big stake as after water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage, and as there does not seem to be a downside to tea. But some studies indicate that excessive consumption of tea or tea-based dietary supplements may cause osteoporosis, Alzheimers Disease, digestive disorders, premenstrual syndrome, cardiovascular problems, urinary system disturbances, sleeplessness, kidney stones, oesophageal cancer, nervous disorders, and so on. Side-effects Adverse effects are caused by the presence of fluoride, aluminium, tannins, oxalates, caffeine, and so on in tea leaves, especially in those that are not hand-picked and are machine-processed. Caffeine-related side-effects are more pronounced in children even when consumption is in small doses. Canadian guidelines recommend that young children should not get more than 45 mg of caffeine a day. A study by Jashua Lambert et al at Rutgers University, funded by the National Institutes of Health, revealed that excessive consumption of tea or tea-based products could cause chromosomal damage, foetal leukaemia and liver damage. One commercial brand of green tea extract was found to contain excessive levels of polyphenols, or plant-based antioxidants, whereas a cup of green tea has only about 8 mg. Another study led by Dr. Kashif Shafique of Glasgow University found that the risk of getting prostate cancer is 50 per cent more in men who drank more than seven cups of tea a day, compared to those who consumed less. Propaganda All the negative evidence is drowned in the cacophony of aggressive marketing propaganda. Nowadays, even in the medical field, industry seems to define the diagnostic and treatment options through controlled and sponsored (read paid) research. Business promoters often use scientific observations selectively to mislead the public and augment the sale of their products. One may quote from the Journal of the American Medical Association (June 1999), and the Nurses Health Study and Physicians Health Study and appeal to the public to drink more coffee to lower the risk of gallstones, and to drink alcohol daily to protect against heart attacks and bad cholesterol levels. Claims No doubt, tea leaves are generally and nutritionally good, like many other leaves we use in our diet, but the tall claims are commercially motivated. A little tea may be good, but it is unduly

glorified by business. And now it seems it makes business sense to get children addicted to tea. They are already victims of irresistible commercial junk food that is unfit for human consumption. There is no conclusive scientific evidence that tea, including green tea, reduces the risk of coronary artery disease, stroke, cancer or early death due to any cause. The U.S. National Cancer Institute does not recommend for or against the use of tea to reduce the risk of any type of cancer. Dissemination of imbalanced information does more harm than good. And if a little tea is good, more of it need necessarily not be better. So, take the Tea Boards words with a pinch of salt. (The writer is a Respirologist at the Pay What You Can Clinic, Perundurai, Tamil Nadu. He earlier served at the Perundurai Medical College & Research Centre. E-mail: drtramaprasad @gmail.com ) Keywords: Tea vs Coffee debate

The great population conundrum

Unless we keep our insatiable wants under check, this paradox will haunt us
In recent years, a paradox has been noticed all around us. While people generally condemn population growth, they also seem to welcome it. Like all paradoxes, it does contain two seemingly absurd statements which cannot be easily reconciled, although the first half of the conundrum is simple to appreciate. In almost every field of activity, ever-increasing population creates its own problems. To travel on business or pleasure, you need to book train or air tickets quite in advance. Even within your own city, commuting to work takes its toll. Along busy streets traffic moves at a snails pace, and when eventually you do reach your destination, finding a parking place is equally difficult. If you try to avoid travelling and get things done on the phone, you are invariably greeted with the recorded message: All lines on this route are busy, please try after some time. Quite often, a businessman has to wait for months before he can get an electrical connection for his factory. If you are seeking employment, the situation in the job market is no different. Then again, whether you are a busy housewife or a working woman, you have to bear with long queues for your childrens school admissions. You know, all this is because of the increasing population, and you start hating it.

Why would anybody then welcome the increasing population? To answer this question one has to make a closer inspection. In economics, a consumer is a person who is the final user of products or services generated within a system. Naturally, if the total number of consumers greatly exceeds the quantity of goods and services produced, waiting lists are unavoidable. So, while as consumers we condemn the increasing population, it would be interesting to see the situation from the point of view of the producer. In the economic sense, a producer is a person or an organisation producing goods or services for sale, thereby creating economic value. Obviously, producers would always be interested in selling more and more of their goods and services in the market. Schools and colleges, for example, want more and more admission-seekers; shopping malls long for bigger and bigger crowds; builders would like to sell an ever-increasing number of houses and apartments; newspapers need more readers and TV channels and movie producers want more viewers. Organisers of sports events look for more and more spectators. Airlines are interested in flying more people across the world. The list is unending. Experience, however, tells us that there is a limit to the number of goods or services to be sold to the same customer. So the only viable promise seems to come from newer and newer consumers becoming available. That is one reason why manufacturers the world over are vying with one another to get a strong foothold in the Indian consumer market, and why Destination India clearly seems to be their one-point programme. No wonder, then, that producers in the globalised economy actually welcome an ever-increasing population.
Consumers & producers

Of course, in real life our society is not strictly divided between some people as just consumers and others as only producers. All through their lives the same people are both consumers and producers. In their role as consumers they condemn the ever-increasing population, and when acting as producers or in some way being involved as producers, they welcome it. This is the most intriguing paradox of our time. And although deep within us we do know that the ever-increasing population is unsustainable, as long as we do not consciously and willingly keep our insatiable wants within reasonable limits, this paradox will continue to haunt us. (The author is an entrepreneur who is also involved in the work of an NGO active in the fields of education and development). arwindbondre@gmail.com

Arming India into dependency

The government-to-government weapon contracts between the U.S. and India, with no competitive bidding or transparency, are deepening Indias import dependency without arming it with a decisive edge.
The blossoming of ties with the United States has become an important diplomatic asset for India in recent years. Yet, the heady glow of the much-ballyhooed strategic partnership helped obscure prickly issues that arose much before the Devyani Khobragade episode. In truth, the Obama administrations reluctance to accommodate Indian interests on major issues, coupled with the fundamental challenge of managing an asymmetrical relationship, has created fault lines that are testing the resilience of the partnership. One aspect of the relationship, however, has thrived spectacularly U.S. arms sales to India. In just a few years, the U.S. has quietly emerged as Indias largest arms supplier, leaving Russia and Israel far behind. This development is linked to the Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear deal. Although it remains a dud deal on energy, with little prospect of delivering a single operational nuclear power plant for years to come, it has proved a roaring success in opening the door to major U.S. arms sales. The 2005 nuclear agreement-in-principle incorporated a specific commitment to ramp up defence transactions. The booming arms sales rising in barely one decade from a measly $100 million to billions of dollars yearly have seemingly acquired an independent momentum. Nothing better illustrates this than the fact that, at the height of the Khobragade affair, India, far from seeking to impose any costs on America, awarded it yet another mega-contract a $1.01-billion deal for supply of six additional C-130J military transport aircraft. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the White House last September, among the gifts he took for President Barack Obama was a commitment to purchase $5 billion worth of new arms. Today, Indias largely one-sided defence relationship with the U.S. is beginning to look akin to its lopsided ties with Russia, with weapon sales serving as the driving force. However, unlike the torpid Indo-Russian non-military commerce, the two-way Indo-U.S. trade has quadrupled in just seven years from $25 billion in 2006 to about $100 billion in 2013. Still, few Indians are raising the key questions: How are Indias security interests being advanced by substituting the corrosive import dependency on Russia with a new dependency on the U.S., without progress to build a domestic arms-production base? What makes the strategic partnership special, given that Washington also has special relationships with Indias regional adversaries a security alliance since 2004 and strategic partnership since 2006 with Pakistan, and a constructive strategic partnership with China since 1997 that predates the strategic partnership with India? Is a relationship locking India as a leading U.S. arms client sustainable in the long run? Lets be clear: India can never emerge as a major international power in a true sense, or acquire a military edge regionally, if it remains dependent on imports to meet even its basic defence needs. The capacity to defend oneself with ones own resources is the first test a nation must pass on the way to becoming a great power.

Leading arms importer Ominously, a still-poor India has emerged as the worlds biggest arms importer since 2006, accounting for 10 per cent of all weapons sold globally. Such large-scale imports might suggest that India is pursuing a well-planned military build-up. In truth, such imports lack strategic direction, given the absence of long-term political thinking or joint tri-service planning and command. They are being made in a haphazard manner, although any imported weapon makes India hostage to the supplier-nation for spares and service for the full life of that system. The rising arms imports, far from making India secure, are only exposing new gaps in its capabilities to decisively win a war. The inveterate dependency burdens Indian taxpayers, forcing them to subsidise foreign military-industrial complexes. Worse still, defence transactions remain the single largest source of kickbacks for Indias corrupt and compromised political elites. This factor alone explains why India has failed to replicate in the conventional-arms sector its impressive indigenous achievements in the fields where imports are not possible the space, missile and nuclear-weapons realms. For the U.S., displacing Russia as Indias largest arms supplier has been a diplomatic coup. Rarely before has America acquired a major arms client of such size so rapidly. The U.S.s India success indeed parallels what happened in the early 1970s when Egypt switched sides during the Cold War, transforming itself from a Soviet arms client to becoming reliant on American arms supplies. The difference is that unlike the perpetually aid-dependent Egypt, India buys weapons with its own money. With U.S. military spending slowing and other export markets remaining tight, American firms are eager to further expand arms sales to India. The fact that the U.S. now conducts more military exercises with India than with any other country creates a favourable political milieu for its defence firms to aggressively push their wares for sale. Even so, the troubling lack of competitive bidding or transparency in the arms deals all clinched on a government-togovernment basis has become conspicuous. In the one case where India invited bids to buy 126 fighter-jets American firms failed to make it beyond the competitions first round. Diplomacy without leverage The annual value of Indias arms contracts to the U.S. already surpasses American military aid to any country other than Israel. Diplomacy, to be effective, must be backed by leverage and crosslinkages to minimise the weaker sides disadvantages. Yet, New Delhi has not tried to leverage its contracts either to persuade the U.S. to stop arming Pakistan against India or to secure better access to the American market for its highly competitive information-technology and pharmaceutical companies, which are facing new U.S. non-tariff barriers. Indias new frontier of dependency has emerged even as the U.S. bolsters Pakistan with generous military aid. To be sure, the U.S. signed a four-point declaration of intent with India last September to move beyond the sale of complete weapon systems to co-production through technology transfer. Translating that intent into practice wont be easy, though. According to the joint declaration, efforts to identify specific opportunities for collaborative weapon-related projects will be

pursued in accordance with national policies and procedures. But if U.S. policies and procedures do not evolve in the direction of facilitating such collaboration, the declared intent will remain little more than pious hope. The declaration clearly sought to pander to Indias desire for a less inequitable defence relationship. By dangling the carrot of India being upgraded to the same level as Americas closest partners, the declaration also peddled a catchy slogan excitedly lapped up by the Indian media. The U.S. is now willing to co-produce some smaller defensive systems with India, such as the Javelin anti-tank missiles. Such restricted technology transfers, the U.S. believes, will pave the way for securing additional multibillion-dollar contracts to sell large readymade weapons to India. Significantly, U.S. arms to India fall mainly in the category of defensive weapons. Russia, by contrast, has transferred offensive weapon systems to India, including strategic bombers, an aircraft carrier, and a nuclear-powered submarine. Will the U.S. be willing to sell high-precision conventional arms, anti-submarine warfare systems, long range air- and sea-launched cruise missiles, and other conventional counterforce systems that could tilt the regional military balance in Indias favour? The China factor Another issue relates to the strategic benefits from a closer defence relationship. True, such a relationship will have a countervailing value vis--vis China. Yet, it is also true that America has a deeper engagement with China than with India. Indeed, China is now central to U.S. economic and strategic interests. This fact helps to explain why the Obama administration has chartered a course of neutrality on territorial disputes between China and its neighbours, shying away from holding joint military exercises in Arunachal Pradesh. A wake-up call for Asian states that rely on the U.S. as their security guarantor was Obamas inaction on the 2012 Chinese capture of the Scarborough Shoal, located within the Philippines exclusive economic zone. Americas indifference to its commitment to the Philippines under their Mutual Defence Treaty emboldened China to effectively seize a second Philippine-claimed shoal. This is proof that despite its pivot toward Asia, the U.S. wont act in ways detrimental to its close engagement with China. Obamas foreign policy bears a distinct transactional imprint. A wise India would consider declaring a moratorium on arms purchases from all sources to give itself time to strategise its priorities and clean up its procurement system. A moratorium of just three years will save the country a whopping $20 billion without compromising national security. With non-traditional threats ranging from asymmetric warfare in the form of cross-border terrorism to territorial creep through furtive encroachments now dominating Indias security calculus, procurement of more mega-weapons to meet traditional security challenges must wait until the nation has added strategic direction to its defence policy.

(TBengali Hindus in Muslim-majority Bangladesh

he writer is a geostrategist and author.)

The Partition was swift and vicious in the Punjabs and Sindh where religious minorities have ceased to exist for all practical purposes. This is not so in the Bengals, where many still live on their ancestral land
Few moments in the past century have evoked as much hope in its stakeholders as the emergence of the secular nation-state of Bangladesh in the eastern part of the subcontinent. That nation is in serious turmoil. In the last two years, the Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist PartyJamaat-eIslami combine has been partially successful in using its massive economic clout and propaganda apparatus to portray itself as a victim of state-sponsored witch-hunting. The witch-hunting boils down to two things that can finish off the Jamaat as a viable political force. The first is the de-registration of the Jamaat as an electoral force as per a Supreme court order that bars any party that puts God before the democratic process. The second is the war crimes trial of those who committed crimes against humanity during 1971. Much of the present Jamaat leadership was heavily involved in murder, rape, arson and forced conversions. In a subcontinent where politics thrives on the erasure of public memory, this episode has stubbornly refused to disappear. A dilly-dallying Awami League government was almost forced by the youth movement in Shahbag to pursue the war crimes trial seriously. Facing the prospect of political annihilation, the Jamaat responded by a three-pronged offensive. It marshalled its cadres and young Madrassa students and use them for blockading Dhaka. It lent its activists to a BNP in disarray to act as boots on the ground. It carried out targeted attacks on the homes, businesses and places of worship of Hindus, the nations largest religious minority. In 2001, after the BNP-led alliance won the elections, the usual pattern of murder, rape and arson targeting Hindus happened on a very large scale. Hindus have traditionally voted for the Awami League. The guarantee for jaan and maal (life and property) is important for the survival of any people. In the Awami League regime, although property and homestead have been regularly taken away by the powerful persons of the party, systematic attacks on minorities are not part of the partys policy. The same cannot be said of the BNP-Jamaat partnership, which regularly threatened both jaan and maal. It is not hard to see why Hindus chose the devil over the deep sea. This time, Hindus seemed to be out of favour from both sides. While they were targeted by the BNP-Jamaat for coming out to vote at all, in other areas they were targeted by Awami League rebels for coming out to vote for the official Awami League candidate who happened to be of the Hindu faith. There have been disturbing signs over the past few years that at the local level, the difference between the secular Awami League and the communal-fundamentalist

BNP-Jamaat is beginning to disappear, though publicly the former does not tire in parroting the staunchly secular ideals of 1971. A throwback to 1971 The violence unleashed against the Hindus this time, before and after the January 5 polls, have been worst in Jessore, Dinajpur and Satkhira, though many other places like Thakurgaon, Rangpur, Bogra, Lalmonirhat, Gaibandha, Rajshahi and Chittagong have been affected. Malopara in Abhaynagar, Jessore, inhabited by Bengali Dalit castes, has been attacked repeatedly. Large-scale attacks on villages, businesses and places of worship, able-bodied men being on night vigils, women huddling together in one place all these things brought back memories of 1971 for many of the inhabitants. In Hazrail Rishipara of Jessore, women were raped at gunpoint for the crime that their families had voted in the election. Dinajpur has been badly hit with cases of beatings, arson on homes, shops, haystacks and crops. Both Jessore and Dinajpur being areas bordering West Bengal, crossing the border in self-preservation is a sad trek that many have undergone. It creates an environment that forces the remaining Hindus to ask the question Why am I still here? Partition continues. The Partition was swift and vicious in the Punjabs and Sindh where religious minorities have ceased to exist for all practical purposes. This is not so in the Bengals, where many still live on the ancestral land claimed by nations whose legitimacies are much more recent than peoples ancestral claims over their homestead. More than 25 per cent of Bengals western halfs population is Mohammeddan (the figure was 19.46 per cent in 1951, after the 1947 Partition). In the eastern half, 8.5 per cent of the population is Hindu (it was 22 per cent in 1951). In Bengal, secularism has political currency. It was one of the foundational principles of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. How did things come to be this way? The autocratic years of Sheikh Mujibur Rahmans BAKSAL, the long years of army rule when the barracks used Islam to create a veneer of political legitimacy beyond the Awami League and pro-liberation forces, the overtures by mainstream parties to fundamentalist groupings all these have given religion-based politics a front-row seat in the nation. Religiopolitical organisations have not been immune to the violent turn of this brand of politics internationally in the last two decades. Pro-Pakistan forces, which looked to faith-unity as the basis of statehood, did not disappear after the Liberation War. They were broadly and transiently (as it increasingly seems) de-legitimised due to their role in the atrocities of 1971. But what about the project that religion marks a nation? What about the splinters of such an idea stuck deep in political and societal structures? That trend has persisted, even expanded. In the imagination of all the ruling factions since 1947 during East Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh periods, there has been a tacit understanding of the normative citizen a Mohameddan Bengali male or a Bengali Mohameddan male. Hindus there are a living reminder of an identity that is not fully coterminous with ideas that conflate Bengaliness (or Bangladeshiness) with that normative citizen. Their progressive numerical marginality makes

this conflation project easier. Such projects often live in the underside of mindscapes that can be secular in very many declarations. Thus, they can be marginalised without being actively targeted, in innocuous everyday dealings. The majority can decide to be whatever it wants and the minority has to follow suit in a modern nation-state. So, Bengali Hindus were expected to become Pakistanis overnight in 1947 just as others elsewhere were expected to suddenly become Indians. While Bengali Muslim politicians have the autonomous agency to de-Pakistanise themselves at will, East Bengali Hindus could only publicly do so upon an explicit cue from their Bengali Muslim brethren. Just like other minorities, extra-territorial loyalty is the slur that is bandied about. And this is also what makes minorities cautious, anxious and lesser citizens in a polity where they cannot critique their state in all the ways a majority community person can. Still one cannot but hope that the Peoples Republic of Bangladesh would live up to some of its original ideals. Minorities have fled the nation-state for want of security in large numbers, year after year. There is significant presence of minorities in the bureaucracy and local administration. Even during the recent spate of violence, the state has transferred police officials for failing to provide security. This reality exists too. It is this reality that partly prevents a mass exodus of Hindus beyond the levels seen at present. For many, they have too much to lose to be able to leave. And that is a problem for a religious majoritarian nation-state. (The writer is a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Estrangement and engagement

The challenge is to extricate India-U.S. dialogue from the pattern of complaining against or making excessive demands on each other
The handling of Indian Deputy-Consul Generals case by the U.S. Government is symptomatic of a deepening divide between India and the United States. President Barack Obama in 2010 declared India-U.S. relations to be the defining partnership of the 21st century. He told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh later that India is a big part of my plans. There is actually no plan to show, big or small. Even as both governments struggle to put the recent incident to rest, the high-handed U.S. action has guaranteed that the manner in which it transacts business with India will change. Indias foreign policy goals today include creating a facilitating environment for Indias continuing transformation; securing access to markets, investments, technology, energy sources, and strategic minerals needed for development; coping with the impact of climate change; securing the global commons outer space, the oceans, transportation and communication networks, and cyber-space; and reforming the United Nations and Breton Woods institutions, even while the United States and other industrialised countries are moving away from the open, democratic and rule-based conditions for international commercial and financial exchanges. Except the latter, these are not generally at odds with U.S. interests.

Closer home, India seeks to combat terrorist groups in the subcontinent, maintain maritime security, including by protecting the two choke points of the Indian Ocean the Gulf of Hormuz and the Straits of Malacca and promote stability in Indias larger neighbourhood and the world. Indeed, many of these are also U.S. goals. Dramatic change The dramatic change in India-U.S. relations, a full decade after the end of the Cold War, was propelled by Indias economic growth and, paradoxically, by its nuclear weapon tests of 1998. Indias relations with the other great powers began to change too, but only in synch with and partly as a consequence of the transformation of the India-U.S. relationship. It became clear also that the future success or failure of Indias external engagement, including that with the United States, would be determined by Indias economic performance. The India-U.S. bilateral agenda straddles myriad fields. If a relationship were to be judged by the number of bilateral summits Dr. Manmohan Singh has had six bilateral summits with Presidents of the United States and full-spectrum official dialogue mechanisms there are now 35 of them in operation, spanning civil nuclear industry, counterterrorism, cyber security, culture, defence, energy, higher education, health, space, and science and technology then there is no denying the multi-faceted interactions between the two countries. Meetings must be judged by desirable outcomes, not by their count but by their content. U.S. leaders had committed to support Indias permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council and to the four principal international export-control groupings. But without proactive diplomatic pursuits like when U.S. was seeking Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG)s approval for the Civil Nuclear Agreement many Indians see these as empty promises. The United States is Indias most important trading partner. Bilateral trade in goods and services exceeded $100 billion last year. While the standalone picture is satisfactory, the comparative one is not. India is only the 13th largest goods trading partner of the United States. Of the two-way trade in goods (2011) of $57.8 billion, precious stones (diamond and gold) accounted for $12.6 billion. Mutual investments have been modest by global parameters from India, estimated at about $10 billion; and from the United States, about five times that. The nearly three million persons of Indian origin who contribute significantly to American economy, and 100,000 Indian students on U.S. campuses, symbolise strong people-to-people ties. Except for information technology, however, the two countries have not found good ways to leverage this link. The size of National Security Agency (NSA) operations in India and the foot-dragging on access to David Headley have left an adverse impact on the Indian psyche. At the same time, U.S. business and government representatives complain about Indias nuclear liability law, tax regime and intellectual property rights protection. India continues to have concerns about U.S. protectionism, changes in immigration laws affecting movement of Indias skilled workers, and the absence of a response on concluding a totalisation agreement exempting temporary Indian workers from paying U.S. social security taxes, which amount now to $1 billion annually.

Future agenda The challenge is to extricate India-U.S. dialogue from the contentious and transactional pattern of exchanging crib and laundry lists, complaining against or making excessive demands on each other. Fresh ideas to be explored include a bilateral investment treaty, a comprehensive cost-benefit study of a free trade agreement, monsoon weather forecasting, clean energy technologies, and U.S. investments in innovative technologies to increase productivity and build manufacturing capacities without which there cannot be significant growth of employment and consumption in India. India has proven through its resource-constrained development that a different type of frugal innovation can be forged, such as GEs ultra-low cost ECG machines, hand-held echo-scans, biomass devices, prosthetics, and inexpensive drug discovery. Indeed, joint innovation can be tried for a range of low-cost and sustainable products and services, spanning the areas of agriculture, energy, environment and science and technology. Defence cooperation is set to grow. India is acquiring U.S. weapons-locating radars, attack and heavy lift helicopters, transport and reconnaissance aircraft, and light-weight howitzers. An estimated half a percentage of Indias GDP is lost to the country in buying weapons abroad. India-U.S. defence ties must quickly be lifted beyond a vendor-buyer equation and move towards joint research, development and production of the most advanced weapons systems that India needs. The United States could work with India much in the same way as Russia does on the Brahmos short-range cruise missile, the nuclear submarine, and the fifth generation fighter aircraft. Co- development and co- production, with India treated on a par with Americas closest partners, as suggested in the Joint Declaration on Defence Cooperation of September 2013, could build confidence about assurance of supply, lower acquisition costs, and energise the nascent indigenous India defence industry. Indians are watching how and when this comes about. At the inaugural of the India-U.S. strategic dialogue in June 2010, the then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to their joint responsibility to determine the course of the world. Given their different histories and distant geographies, Indian and U.S. geo-strategic interests can never completely converge. Yet, there is consonance in their concern about the consequences of the rise of China. China and the United States have adversarial relations with each other. So do China and India. Both India and the United States independently are trying to find the best possible entente with China. The present gap between China and the United States in economic, technological and military power is roughly the same as the gap between India and China. This is the overall setting in which intra-Asian relations are being calibrated. This requires deeper conversations between India and the United States, minus pivoting, rebalancing, and containment against China. India and the United States also share a common interest in dismantling the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan. Neither country wants safe havens for al-Qaeda and associated terrorist groups. Renewed U.S. messaging to Pakistans leaders to resolve all disputes with India

bilaterally has been helpful. As for terrorism, India should not expect the United States to solve problems that India needs to itself address. Nevertheless, the U.S. inclination to cut its losses and run from Afghanistan is incomprehensible. From an Indian perspective, the spectre of resumed Taliban rule in parts or the whole of Afghanistan in full cooperation with Pakistan looks catastrophic. To allow this could be understandable in pursuit of a higher foreign policy objective as was the case when the United States supported Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis in order to pursue its extraordinary opening to China, which in turn set the parameters of Sino-American relations for the next four decades and undermined the existence of former Soviet Union. The gains from this abdication are hard to comprehend. Equally damaging is a U.S. public posture that emboldens elements such as the Jamaat-e-Islami to subvert democracy and development in Bangladesh. There is no real dialogue between India and the United States on Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Asian security architecture. The pursuit of a transformed or special relationship will be meaningless if there is low regard for Indias concerns in its South Asian contiguity. The pendulum between the two democracies is still swinging between estrangement and engagement. The unfettering of Indias economy gave the relationship its uplift. Its current deceleration is a dampener. Indeed, President Obama seems to have taken a step backward. He shows personal regard for Dr. Manmohan Singh, but not enough practical commitment. The fundamental lack of resolve to address specific issues is eroding public goodwill on both sides. Perhaps the most we can hope for at this juncture is that the relationship does not become worse.

Turmoil in the heart of Africa

The crisis in the Central African Republic and the ongoing military intervention highlight the security challenges in Africa and the need for a rapid reaction force
The Central African Republic (CAR) is an impoverished country of 4.5 million inhabitants spread over 623,000 sq. km, located in the centre of Africa, which became independent from France in 1960. It has recently turned into another hub of instability. Responding to an urgent appeal from the African Union and the transitional authorities of the CAR, on December 5, 2013, France decided to deploy 1,600 soldiers in the country. The French soldiers are bolstering the African-led International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA). Several international partners many European have contributed with logistical and financial support. This intervention was urgent and necessary to prevent a catastrophe. Since rebels ousted the ruling government in March 2013, the daily life of civilians was reduced to exactions, arbitrary arrests, looting, recruitment of child soldiers, scorched villages, rape, mutilation, and summary executions. One out of ten inhabitants was forced to abandon their house, 70,000 Central Africans have fled the country, and 2.3 million people urgently need help. Even more

disquieting, the clashes between Christian and Muslim groups had assumed extremely dangerous communal and religious tendencies. Threat of anarchy Anarchy in the CAR is also a threat to its neighbours, especially Sudan as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan, where the United Nations maintains peacekeeping operations with large Indian contingents. In an already quite fragile region, the CAR must not become a new sanctuary for trafficking, militias and terrorist groups. Our goals are clear. The first is to restore security in the CAR, check the spiralling extortions and religious drift, and enable the return of relief organisations as well as the reinstatement of a functioning government. The situation is still fragile, but the initial results are encouraging. Through dissuasive patrolling, French soldiers have been able to avert widespread massacres at a time when the situation in the capital city of Bangui was becoming particularly critical. The second goal is to put the MISCA in a position to ensure control over the security situation, with the task of disarming militias and facilitating political transition before 2015. We support swift augmentation of MISCA capabilities from 2,400 men to 6,000 men. The French engagement is temporary and not a substitute for African efforts. But in the face of the urgency of the situation, it was necessary to act promptly with sufficient and swiftly deployable resources. France, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, responded in keeping with its international responsibilities and on the basis of a UN mandate. Resolution 2127 provides for the option of a UN peacekeeping operation to follow the MISCA, should the Security Council so decide. Working hand in hand with our African partners, we hope to enhance the international forces swiftly and stabilise the situation on the ground within a few months. The intervention in the CAR is quite different from that which took place in Mali. Mali required countering a terrorist offensive led by particularly determined groups operating from strongholds they already occupied in the north of the country. We repulsed and defeated this offensive, helped Mali regain its territorial integrity and have democratically elected political authorities, with the presidential election held in July and legislative polls in December. Of course, on the ground, the fight to defeat any terrorist resurgence continues. In the CAR, we have to disarm militarily not a specific enemy but completely out-of-control militias, and prevent communal violence between Christians and Muslims. In the face of such crises, terrorism, piracy, and all kinds of trafficking, Africa must organise ways to deal by herself with such challenges rapidly and efficiently. At the Summit for Peace and Security in Africa, held in Paris in early December, the African Heads of State and government agreed on the necessity of forging collective security in Africa by establishing an African rapid reaction force in the coming months. France hails this important development and will support this force. The international community must rise to this challenge together in the interest of Africas security, which is important for all of us, well beyond the boundaries of this continent.

(The writer is Frances ambassador to India)

Too scared to turn left or right

The Aam Aadmi Party is in favour of a solution-based, commonsensical approach to problems and seeks to escape the trappings of the Left or the Right
There is a tremendous new energy on the streets of Delhi and, almost surreally, it is spreading to other parts of the country. The phenomenon is a tribute to the Aam Aadmi Party, a spunky political debutant already in government in the national Capital and with plans to contest over 400 Lok Sabha seats. In retrospect, it is clear that the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP tapped into popular resentments bubbling under the surface. The emotions found release with Mr. Kejriwals promise of systemic overhaul and transformative politics. The stampeding crowds at the AAPs offices, the rush of the whos who to join its rolls and the frightened responses of its political rivals, all speak to the newcomers emergence as a harbinger of hope in a political environment sullied by greed, graft, waste and incompetence. Great expectations Yet the danger with excessive expectation is that it can quickly turn into disillusionment and despair. The AAP faces two potential pitfalls. First is its near free-for-all style of governance, evident in such hasty and baffling decisions as turning the Delhi Secretariat into a Janata durbar (since dropped) and calling upon people to sting corrupt officers. Without a proper structure and discipline, these solutions can degenerate into tools of vigilantism, leading to a blurring of lines between liberty and licence. The second is the AAPs refusal to define itself ideologically. In an interview to CNN-IBN, the AAPs national executive member, Yogendra Yadav, denied that the party was socialist and said that the binaries of the 20th century, either Left or Right, do not make sense. An entry in the AAP website, now removed, had ridiculed the demand for ideological clarity, saying ideology was for pundits whereas the AAP saw itself as solution-based, open to using solutions from the Left and the Right. The attractions of a solution-based, commonsensical approach are undoubtedly enormous, especially to audiences fatigued by the opportunistic aspects of politics. It is also true that there is a jaded, outmoded feel to politics compartmentalised as Right or Left; secular or communal. More so when parties and politicians themselves feel no discomfort in crossing the divide, often for the flimsiest of reasons. But can a party function without a sense of history, without an understanding of its own roots and why and how it has evolved to its present? The Anna movement had a strongly regressive streak. The AAP has moved away to saner positions without frontally confronting and

interrogating that past. The AAPs army of supporters may want to treat ideology as baggage and see the party as a grand standalone phenomenon, but that would be delusional because history has lessons to offer to forget which is to risk repeating it with tragic consequences. Previous movements Consider the fate of Indias previous anti-corruption movements. Two kinds of popular movements have led to party formation in India those based on self-respect and identity and the more pan-national ones focussed on political corruption and misrule. The former category is made up of largely regional parties such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). In the second category fall a series of anti-corruption mobilisations of which two are regarded as milestones in Indian political history the Total Revolution call of 1974-1975 and the antiBofors movement of 1988-1989. Led by Jaya Prakash Narayan and V.P. Singh respectively, both movements targeted the Congress, and the end result of each formed a political alliance the 1977 umbrella Janata Party and the 1989 Janata Dal coalition that eventually disintegrated because the leadership mistakenly believed that ideology could be brushed under the carpet. Both accommodated the RSS, believing its involvement to be necessary to fight the corrupt congress. But there is a curious back story to this story. The rightward tilt of the two movements can be traced back to 1971 when the Opposition banded together into a Grand Alliance to fight Indira Gandhis destructive politics. That alliance was routed. However, JPs 1974 Total Revolution call and the then ongoing student protests in Gujarat provided the perfect backdrop for the Grand Alliance constituents to regroup. JP gave the constituents credibility and they gave his movement political muscle. This mutual support resulted in the formation, in 1974 itself, of the Janata Morcha, a loose coalition that went on to defeat the congress in the 1975 Gujarat assembly election. This setback, coupled with her unseating from the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat, led Indira Gandhi to impose the Emergency. The 1971 Grand Alliance was formed by the Congress (Organisation), the Swatantra Party, the Jan Sangh and the Praja and Samyukta Socialist Parties. The Congress (O) was backed by big business, the princely class and the media. The Swatantra Party drew its membership from the princes, wealthy industrialists and extreme right-wing elements. Driven by the RSS, the Jan Sangh had a clearly spelt-out Hindu nationalist goal. The Socialist parties joined this grouping because like the rest they abhorred Indira Gandhi and saw her policies as destructively leftist. The 1974-1975 Janata Morcha, which began as a coordination front for JP, consisted of the Congress (O), the Jan Sangh, the Socialist Party (formed by the merger of the two socialist parties) and the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD). The BLD in turn was a coalition of seven parties, among them the Charan Singh-led Bharatiya Kranti Dal and the Swatantra Party. The 1977 Janata Party was a product of the merger of the Congress (O), the Jan Sangh, the Bharatiya Lok Dal and the Socialist Party.

Confusing? Far from it, what the narrative establishes is a rightwing continuum. The 1971 Grand Alliance, the 1974-1975 Janata Morcha and the 1977 Janata Party all had roughly the same constituents. The RSS provided the logistical support for each of these formations as it would do more than a decade later for the Janata Dal. Indeed, by 1989, the leading lights of the Janata movement had faded away. But, as before, the RSS and its political offshoot, now the Bharatiya Janata Party, would drive the anti-corruption movement. JP believed that the RSS had changed. He said in March 1975: I have to admit that the RSS has undergone a change and is still changing By including these organisations in the movement for Total Revolution, I have made an attempt to decommunalise them and now they are not communal.. Indira Gandhis response to this was typically caustic: Anybody who has read the speeches of RSS leaders can judge for himself Many of them are positively against certain communities in India Such forces have been given respectability. They have been given an opportunity to reach out to areas where they had no foothold before. This is extremely dangerous to the future of the country.. (Source: Ajit Bhattacharjee; Unfinished Revolution). JPs blinkered view of the fight against corruption led to the inevitable. The socialists opposed the Jan Sanghs continuing allegiance to the RSS, resulting in the collapse of the Janata Government. The fall of the V.P. Singh Government in 1989 was almost an action replay, with VP realising too late that his accommodation of the RSS and the BJP gave the latter credibility and a chance to revive itself post its 1984 debacle. The clash of ideologies was written into the script. Three interesting facts emerge from this. All pan-national anti-corruption movements so far have been against the Congress. All of them have had a strong right-wing content which led them to self-destruct. The Jan Sangh/BJP gained in respect and influence by associating with these movements. The Anna movement was uncannily similar to the earlier anti-corruption movements. The JP and Anna movements sought to overthrow the system and were set against the same background of corruption, runaway inflation and an explosion of public anger against those in power. V.P. Singhs anti-Bofors campaign struck a powerful chord with the people in much the same way as did todays 2G and other scandals. And like his predecessors, Anna chose to be ideology-neutral, associating himself with Baba Ramdev and holding up Narendra Modi as the ideal Chief Minister. His protg Kiran Bedi has since come out in open support of Mr. Modi. Baba Ramdev was Mr. Kejriwals first port of call on his anti-corruption journey. It was later that he turned to Anna. But, since forming the AAP, Mr. Kejriwal has evolved in a more progressive direction, which is surely the reason why someone like Mallika Sarabhai has joined the party. But the AAP also harbours the very regressive and gender-insensitive Kumar Vishwas, the video recordings of whose comic shows make for cringe-inducing viewing. The fight against corruption is critically important. But the neglect of ideology can prove ruinous for this cause. The AAP has a historic responsibility to make a clean break from the past and emerge as a party that can combine systemic overhaul with a progressive, clearly-articulated vision.

Keep an eye on gene therapy

Two men with progressive blindness have partially regained their vision after taking part in the first clinical trial of a certain gene therapy. The men were among six patients to have experimental treatment for a rare, inherited, disorder called choroideremia, which steadily destroys eyesight and leaves people blind in middle age. After therapy to correct a faulty gene, the men could read two to four more lines on an opticians sight chart, a dramatic improvement that has held since the doctors treated them. Writing in The Lancet, doctors maintain that further trials are as effective, the team could apply for approval for the therapy in the next five years. Some other forms of blindness could be treated in a similar way. Choroideremia is caused by a faulty gene, called CHM, on the X chromosome. The disease mostly affects men because they have only one copy of the X chromosome. Women have two copies of the X chromosome, so a healthy version of the gene on one chromosome can largely make up for any defects on the other. The therapy uses a genetically modified virus to smuggle healthy copies of the CHM gene into light-sensitive cells in the retina and supporting tissue called retinal pigment epithelium. Surgeons injected modified virus particles behind the retinas of the patients in an operation that could be completed in an hour under general anaesthetic. The therapy only works on cells that have not been destroyed by the disease. It cannot replace cells that have died off. Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014

JAN 18 Justice in judicial appointments

A more independent judiciary based on an equally independent Judicial Appointments Commission is a categorical imperative for democratic praxis in India
With a proactive role based on the power of judicial review, the higher judiciary in India has attained an unprecedented significance. However, in the areas of judicial management and appointments, there is little scope for euphoria. In selecting judges for the constitutional courts, the collegium system has exposed itself. In the words of Justice Krishna Iyer: There is no

structure to hear the public in the process of selection. No principle is laid down, no investigation is made, and a sort of anarchy prevails. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar warned against the system of judges selecting judges by saying that to allow the Chief Justice practically a veto upon the appointment of judges is really to transfer the authority to the Chief Justice which we are not prepared to vest in the President or the Government of the day. However, no sane criticism of the collegium system would advocate for restoration of political supremacy in judicial appointment. The country is presently seriously debating on the issue and attempting legislation. My recent visit to the U.K. Supreme Court reminded me of the progress that a modern constitutional democracy has made in judicial management in general and appointments of judges in particular. India cannot afford to ignore the quality of the British judiciary in the ongoing efforts to bring radical changes, especially because we have adopted the Anglo-Saxon system. The judges in the higher judiciary in the U.K. are appointed on the basis of recommendations made by the independent Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC). Regional representation in appointments is ensured. The Judicial Commission has a representative and participative character. The procedures are transparent. There is no predominance either of the judiciary or of the executive. There is no collegium syndrome, much less any kin syndrome. Nor is there any political highhandedness. The JAC is an independent body which is given the task of selecting candidates for judicial offices in courts and tribunals in England, Wales and also tribunals which have jurisdiction over Scotland and Northern Ireland. There is fair and open competition which ensures assessment of inter se merit. The process is lengthy and complex. However, it is more effective and accountable. The Constitutional Reform Act (CRA) 2005 was recently amended by the Judicial Appointments Regulations, 2013. There are 15 members in the JAC including the Chairman. All of them, except the three judicial members are selected through open competition. Apart from the members from judiciary and legal profession, there are also judicial officers who are not legally qualified and also eminent persons from the public. There is a well-designed and systematic selection process for induction of Judges at all tribunals and courts including the High Court. It involves the request for vacancy position, advertisement, receipt of applications, shortlisting, references, candidate selection, panel decision, statutory consultation, checks, decisions on selection, submission of report to the Lord Chancellor and finally the procedure for quality assurance which includes review of the progression of the candidates and observation of the interviews and test results. The statutory consultation is a mandatory requirement as per the CRA. It is an integral part of the selection process. After the finalisation of selection, the JAC recommends the name of the candidate to the appropriate authority. JAC thus selects the Lord Chief Justice, Heads of Division and the Lord Justice of Appeal.

Selection to Supreme Court However, the JAC on its own cannot select justices for the U.K. Supreme Court. It is governed by Sections 25 to 31 and Schedule 8 of the Constitutional Reforms Act 2005 as amended. Sections 50 to 52 of the amended Act say about the minimum benchmark for appointment as justices of the Supreme Court. Experience at the bar is given due importance. The Lord Chancellor should constitute the Selection Commission by addressing a letter to the president of the Court who chairs the Commission. The president should also nominate a senior judge in the U.K., who should not be, however, a Justice of the Supreme Court. Thus the system in the U.K. inherently guards against the vices of the collegium system. There is a member of JAC from England and Wales, Judicial Appointments Board (JAB) in Scotland and JAC in Northern Ireland. Again, and significantly, at least one of the representatives of such a commission should be a layman. Thus the judicial appointment is no more a matter concerning only lawyers or judges. It is meant for the public, for there is no republic without the public. In the process of appointment to the U.K. Supreme Court also there is a mandatory consultation process with a group that includes senior judges in the Supreme Court to the Chancellors of the High Court and the President of the Family Division. Likewise, there should be consultation with the Lord Chancellor, the First Minister in Scotland, the First Minister in Wales and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Thus regional representation is ensured. The report should be finally submitted to the Lord Chancellor who should again consult with the judges and politicians who are already consulted by the Commission. Only thereafter the Lord Chancellor can recommend the name of the candidate to the Prime Minister who in turn should advice the Queen to issue formal orders of appointment. Consultation in the U.K. does not mean concurrence by the judges as it occurs in India after the Supreme Court judgments in 2nd Judges case (1993) and the 3rd Judges case (1998). And it makes a very big difference. India has now accepted the need for a Judicial Appointments Commission in principle as evident from the cabinet decision on August 23, 2013 that was followed by introduction of a Bill in that direction. But whether the composition of the Committee, with two eminent jurists, is vulnerable to political intrusion that could jeopardise the independence of the judiciary, is a fundamental question being widely asked. We should restructure the committee by enhancing its democratic character and by ensuring procedural fairness. We cannot, however ignore the global trend in the realm of judicial appointments which is more towards independent commissions. The United States Institute of Peace has published a Report on judicial appointments and judicial independence. It says that judicial council promises to be a happy medium between the extremes where neither the judges nor the political heads have the final say. A duly constituted commission is capable of reconciling the need for independence with accountability. About 60 per cent of the countries have adopted the system of judicial council in some form, according to the said report.

Screening of cases In sharp contrast to the Indian situation, there are days when no cases are listed at all in the U.K. Supreme Court. Appeal is not a matter of routine. Nor it is a matter of right. Leave to appeal is not automatic. Only when there is a substantial legal or constitutional issue, the Supreme Court entertains the appeal. As such there is no docket explosion, as we face. However, the situations are incomparable in terms of population and other socio-economic factors. Therefore, the Indian Supreme Court cannot probably emulate the British path in this respect. Our Supreme Court, on the other hand, needs to be a common mans court, and there should be easy access to the system for the ordinary citizen as visualised by the framers of the Indian Constitution. Incidentally, one may see that the judges of the U..K Supreme Court do not wear official robes during court proceedings. Lawyers also could dispense with official robes on mutual consent. Proceedings of cases of public importance or constitutional relevance are telecast live. As such there is little scope for media trial. These are all small but significant instances which reflect institutional democracy and transparency. The openness of the system is ensured in all facets of judicial process, starting from the selection. Presently there are twelve Justices in the U.K. Supreme Court. Lord Neuberger is the president and Lady Hale is the deputy president in the bench. John Rawls rightly said that justice is fairness. The Supreme Court of the U.K. simply demonstrates it. A more independent judiciary based on an equally independent Judicial Appointments Commission is a categorical imperative for democratic praxis in India. (The author is a lawyer practising in the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Kerala. He can be reached at kaleeswaramraj@gmail.com)

A voice for probity in public life

Justice J.S. Verma, whose birth anniversary falls on January 18, was heard with respect and fear by the erring judge, dishonest public servant and wily politician
January 18, 2014, will be the late Chief Justice J.S. Vermas 81st birth anniversary. He passed away on April 22, 2013. Revisiting and recalling his achievements should inspire the younger generation of lawyers and citizens who did not have the privilege of knowing him. Justice Verma strode across the judicial horizon for over 25 years with giant steps. He was appointed to the Madhya Pradesh High Court in 1972, became Chief Justice in 1986, was elevated to the Supreme Court in 1989, became Chief Justice of India in March 1997 and retired on January 18, 1998. Later he was appointed Chairperson, National Human Rights Commission. Every office he occupied was enhanced by his efforts.

It is the fortune of a lucky few to die at the summit of ones glory. Justice Vermas report after the brutal gang rape of Nirbhaya, given in record time (December 23, 2012 January 23, 2013) made him an iconic figure nationally and internationally. His celebrated judgment on sexual harassment in the workplace (Vishakha) was a huge leap forward in womens Human Rights jurisprudence. His judgment on judicial appointments and the Collegium system was path-breaking. As amicus curiae in the Jain-Hawala case (Vineet Narain v. UOI), I had the advantage of an insiders view. An invisible bond of shared values was fashioned between us. The Bench, (Justice Verma, Justice S.P. Bharucha and Justice S.C. Sen) stood up to the Executive and the political class as never before. The summoning of the Revenue Secretary, the CBI Director and the Director of Enforcement at each hearing in the Supreme Court and the monitoring of CBI investigations caught the imagination of the people. It was a seminal case dealing with corruption and the criminality of powerful persons and the pressure from the Bench and the ongoing hearings led to the resignations of three Cabinet Ministers V.C. Shukla, Balram Jakhar and Madhavrao Scindia, two Governors Motilal Vora and Shiv Shankar and the Leader of the Opposition L.K. Advani. Justice Verma quoted Lord Denning with approval. Lord Denning had observed that the Commissioner of Police like every constable in the land, [] should be, and is, independent of the Executive. He is not subject to the orders of the Secretary of State, [] no Minister of the Crown can tell him that he must, or must not [] prosecute this man or that one. [He] is answerable to the law and to the law alone. He was a judicial warrior with a lion heart. His crowning achievement as Chief Justice of India was the formulation of the Restatement of Judicial Values in 1997 a voluntary code of conduct with ethical dimensions unanimously adopted by Supreme Court judges. After retirement, he headed the National Human Rights Commission and his active interventions after the Godhra riots of 2002 reflected his commitment to minority rights. His personal visits to Gujarat and dynamic approach silenced international criticism and projected Indias enduring concern for minorities. He was a valued and sought-after speaker in many international conferences. He was invited by the Malaysian Bar, Lawasia, the International Bar Association and Transparency International to head the Panel of Eminent Persons to review the 1988 Judicial Crisis in Malaysia arising out of the removal of the Lord President Tun Salleh Abas and two senior Supreme Court judges Tan Sri Wan Suleiman and Datuk George Seah. The panel confined itself to the material available to the earlier tribunals and reported that the removals were not justified and unconstitutional and non est. Embodiment of integrity He was one of our tallest judges who left his imprint on every field of adjudication. He was innovative, intelligent and indefatigable but above all he was the embodiment of integrity. Judicial power in his skilful hands became a rapier not a bludgeon. His finest hour was after

retirement, when he eschewed private gain for public service no juicy arbitrations, no neverending Commissions of Inquiry, and yet, he was generous in offering advice freely to the humble NGO or to Presidents and Prime Ministers. Justice Verma was a powerful voice for integrity and probity in public life; a voice heard with respect and often with fear by the erring judge, the dishonest public servant or the wily politician; a voice which reverberated throughout the length and breadth of India. Whenever human rights, the rule of law or the independence of the judiciary were imperilled, his prompt and forceful interventions protected Indian citizens. He truly became the Peoples Tribune mirroring the Roman Tribune that protected the plebeians from the patricians. I maintain, said Lord Macmillan, that the ultimate justification of the law is to be found and can only be found in moral considerations. He spoke as he lived, following rigorous standards. Justice Jagdish Sharan Verma will always remain an inspirational moral influence in our judicial firmament, encapsulating character, courage and craftsmanship not unmixed with compassion a priceless gift which we must cherish, preserve and enhance. (The writer is president, Bar Association of India. Email: anildivan@gmail.com)

Shale or not, emissions will continue to rise

Global greenhouse gas emissions are set to rise by nearly a third in the next two decades, putting hopes of curtailing dangerous climate change beyond reach, a new report by BP has found. The drastic rise in emissions, despite international efforts to cut carbon, will reportedly come despite the predicted enormous growth in the use of shale gas. Shale gas, previously inaccessible because the exploitation of these resources requires technology that have only recently been perfected, will account for a rising proportion of the growth in energy in the years approaching 2035, but its use will not cause a decline in greenhouse gases. The finding deals a blow to proponents of shale gas, who have argued that its use will cut emissions. Burning gas produces much less carbon dioxide than burning coal, but the effect of a huge rise in shale gas exploration will not ameliorate the increases in emissions that scientists say will take the world to dangerous climate change. Proponents of the fuel have argued that shale gas can counteract dependence on coal. But while shale gas use has increased dramatically, particularly in the United States, where it brought down gas prices from $12 to below $3 at one stage, global emissions have continued to rise as the coal that would otherwise have been used has been exported elsewhere.

BP in its global energy outlook said gas would take a 27-per-cent share of global energy consumption and global emissions would rise 29 per cent by 2035, with a similar share for coal, oil, and an amalgamated low-carbon sector including nuclear, hydro, wind and sun. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that emissions must peak by 2020 to give the world a chance to avoid a further two degrees of warming, beyond which the effects of climate change become catastrophic and irreversible. Tony Bosworth, Friends of the Earth energy campaigner, says: The real answers to the energy challenges we face [are] energy efficiency and renewable power. Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014 Keywords: Global greenhouse gas emissions, shale gas

Faith and families: the name game continues

A personal account of how the millstone of being identified with a religion hangs heavy much of the time
I was born in a liberal Muslim family in 1950. There was nothing liberal about my name, though: Mohammed Nadeemullah Khan. The mixed neighbourhood where I grew up never found it worthy of notice. But some children in school found its association with a religious community a source of entertainment at my expense. Digs on beards, lungis, skull-caps, Friday baths, and the perennial favourite circumcision. It never descended to fisticuffs or a brawl; probably I was too timid, probably I needed their friendship. So, no serious damage done. Evenings of high-energy romps in my lane with friends helped flush out whatever trace of inadequacies I might have carried home. This innocent ragging decreased as I moved to the higher classes, and disappeared in college. Meanwhile, the world of my private thoughts and beliefs was describing its own trajectory. The earliest I can remember is a vague, unconscious acceptance of the benevolence of all supernatural beings across the religious board. This changed during my mid-teens to a sharp appreciation of the singularities of the faith I was born into. I got into occasional fasting and prayer and recitation of the Holy Book. In my late-teens, scepticism gathered strength. I was

muddled, yes, afraid, yes; but I preferred confusion and fear to unsupported certainties. This was the result of the company I kept, the books I read. Well before I married at 27, I was a full-blown, hard-core, unrelenting atheist; which also meant I would marry someone who, at the very least, sympathised with my state of (un)belief. It thus happened that my daughter and son arrived to parents for whom any kind of unsupported belief was anathema. If they were to grow up as free-thinking persons, why, then, should they carry the mill-stone of being identified with a religion to which they bore no allegiance? I had carried its weight around my own neck, albeit mildly. I had managed by deliberately projecting a secular persona. The aggressive, intolerant fringe within and without the Muslim community had started gaining strength, and we could foresee the demonisation of the entire community on account of these lunatics. We didnt want our two kids to have to pay for a faith they wouldnt even be buying. So we chose religion-neutral names for them and rolled them out for easy assimilation in a name-obssessed society. The plan was that they would marry outside the concern of religion, and free themselves and their progeny of affiliation with anything except good sense. They grew up with an indulgent irreverence for handed-down wisdom. The daughter, a 35-yearold careerist now, does not want to marry only because society expects her to. She hasnt met the right man yet. The son, now 31, is happily married to a girl born in another (un)faith. Before he met her, I had asked him whether he would marry a Muslim. Why not? he replied. All I would care for is compatibility! It revealed to me my own insecurities that those innocent raggings had engendered. It occurred to me that as a first-generation atheist I carried with me the passion of a neo-convert. My children often call me the Osama bin Laden of atheism. They are completely in consonance with the rational position, but they do not carry the same abhorrence for the faith their father does. They didnt have to hack their way into a world of human beings out of the smoky, suffocating, spooky, soul-destroying, yet strangely mesmeric space of gods and demons and prophets. Could their neutral names have shielded them from the ravages to which I was subjected in school? Our foresight, it appears, helped them slip past the emotional vulnerabilities of childhood and adolescence. It could not insulate them, though, from the morbid curiosity of a name-obsessed segment of society. My daughter recently took up a job in Ahmedabad. She had been alerted to the unbridgeable polarisation that has taken place between Hindus and Muslims since the 1985 riots, and later the Godhra riots in 2002. But it was only when broker after broker showed either unwillingness or helplessness to find for her a cosmopolitan area that the dimensions of the divide hit her. Tamey Juhapura nu ghar dekho ne ben, ek dum a one chhey! Or try Jangpura, or Jamalpura, or any of the ghettoes. Jodhpur? No! Vastrapur, Ambawadi, Bodakdeo, Satellite? Mushkil chhey, ben, mushkil chhey. The girl, however, was determined. She planted herself in a guest house and lived out of a suitcase till she finally landed a decent flat in Prahlad Nagar, owned by a Delhi Sikh. Prahlad

Nagar? said the astounded Muslim autorickshaw man chatting me up from the railway station to my daughters flat. Whats a girl from a good Muslim family doing there? Why didnt my daughter hide behind her religion-neutral name? Because Prithviraj Chavans Mumbai had exposed its inadequacy to cover her culpability from end to end. Before signing a tenancy deal in Santa Cruz, she was required to go for police verification. That required identity proof. She flashed her passport which, alongside her sanitised name, carried her fathers name. The landlord was livid. Kai tumhi? Itkya mahattvachi gosht saangat naahi? (What did you mean by concealing such vital information?) We just dont rent our house to Muslims. The Society rules dont allow it. My son did better while looking for a flat in Mumbai. He used his company-issued identity card, that didnt carry his fathers name. In Bengaluru some years ago, the story was the same. It had driven both my children up the wall with its Saary Amma, Saary Saar, we cannot give our house to Muslims. Yet, whether in Ahmedabad, Mumbai or Bengaluru, my daughter and son have always managed to find gracious landlords, all Hindus. For them the name has been only for the purpose of identifying an individual, not to get a peep into the secret gods that animate their beings. Yet, I dont consider myself any worse a victim of social vagaries than all of us who share this earth with other human beings. I have earned decent money, lots of respect, and phenomenal friends all of them Hindus! I write only to raise consciousness about the people who have suffered because of our vicious human kinks. I only desire to raise awareness about the demon that can so easily take charge of every one of us. nadkhan.iimc@gmail.com

Understanding Arvind Kejriwal

Strange things without any rational basis can happen in a nation of 128 crore people. Now, Arvind Kejriwal is projected as an honest and different politician who fights evil. Only when the electronic media calm down will his real face emerge. Consider how he got out of government service. While serving as a Joint Commissioner in the Revenue Department (Income Tax) under the Finance Ministry, he went on a sabbatical (paid leave) from November 1, 2000 to October 31, 2002, and went abroad. One condition for such leave is that the employee must serve continuously for at least three years after return, failing which he or she must pay back the salary he drew over two years with penalty. There is a bond to be executed, with witnesses and guarantors. Mr. Kejriwal re-joined duty on November 1, 2002 but at once went on 18 months leave without pay: he did not serve continuously. He resigned in February 2006. As he had jumped bond, his resignation was not accepted.

The Income Tax Department sent him a notice in 2007 and again in 2008 asking him to pay up. Mr. Kejriwal, who was by then appearing on TV almost every day, expected the government to budge. He said the government could deduct the dues from his retirement benefits; as he had done no wrong, his dues must be waived. After sending a notice on August 5, the department sent another in September asking him to pay up before October 27, 2011 failing which he would not be relieved and he would not get his retirement benefits. Attachment of his property and criminal action could follow. Mr. Kejriwal termed it an attempt to create obstacles to his agitation against corruption. When he did not respond by October 27, the department asked his guarantors to pay. Mr. Kejriwal pleaded his friends should not be disturbed. When it became clear the government would initiate proceedings, he announced on October 30, 2011 that he would borrow from his friends and pay the dues of Rs.9.28 lakh. He wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on November 3, 2011 enclosing the cheque. Certain things tend to be forgotten amid the din. An impression has been created that the Aam Aadmi Party enjoys the support of 2.2 crore Delhiites. It got only 29 per cent of the votes. That means 71 per cent of voters rejected it. The AAP laid 18 conditions to get Congress support, some of them mere administrative actions like removing red beacons from vehicles. He said he had written to the BJP and the Congress on these, and once he got replies he would go to the people and ask them what to do. However, the Congress did not accept the conditions. Yet, the AAP formed the government with Congress support. It is doubtful whether the schemes announced by AAP can be implemented. The Delhi government has a deficit of Rs.1,725 crore. After announcing a 50 per cent reduction in power tariff, he announced it was only under consideration. He had asked people not to pay power bills. Many did not, and faced power theft cases. If Mr. Kejriwal withdraws the cases that would be a bad precedent; no court will permit that. If he does not, his followers will feel victimised. While he promised 700 litres of water per capita, residents in many areas now beg for at least 20 litres. Only 68 per cent of households have piped water supply. Mr. Kejriwal is known for his sensational announcements. During a first round of fasting action, he said he would expose corruption by 15 Union Ministers. In December 2013 he said he had proof to show five Ministers had Swiss bank accounts. He said in November 2012 the Central government had a list of 700 Indians who had stashed money in HSBC Bank in Geneva, and demanded that foreign banks give all the names to the government; he asked HSBC Banks staff members in India to resign. The most popular of his stunts was restoring power connections severed for non-payment as he felt the tariff was high. As cameramen clicked away, with a pair of cutting pliers he connected the wires on June 27, 2013. Although it was an offence under the Electricity Act, the electricity authorities did not act fearing his TV-based backing. He chose to take law into his hands, sending a message that he did not believe in a democratic way of functioning. This is in tune with his other activities like offering dharna in front of the Prime Ministers house, violating orders under Section 144.

What Mr. Kejriwal has done, has been done by so many other politicians. Prashant Bhushan of the AAP wanted a referendum held in Kashmir to determine peoples opinion on the presence of the Army. Mr. Kejriwal said it was Mr. Bhushans personal opinion but the consent of local citizens must be ascertained. But there is no difference between a referendum and getting peoples consent. On January 12, Mr. Bhushan said the police must be withdrawn from Naxalitehit areas. Mr. Kejriwal is yet another politician who has resorted to politics as his last refuge. I wonder if Meera Sanyal, V. Balakrishnan and Captain Gopinath have done their due diligence before joining the AAP. (The writer is secretary of the Consumer Protection Council, Tamil Nadu, and is based in Tiruchirapalli.)

Britains face of modern poverty

First she stopped heating her apartment, putting furniture in front of the radiators to try to forget they were there. She unscrewed most of the light bulbs, turned off the hot water, and sold her iPhone, her watch, her television and even her curtains to feed herself and her 2-year-old son. Then she wrote about it in a blog post titled Hunger Hurts that soon spread widely. Poverty is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one Weetabix and says, More, Mummy, bread and jam please, Mummy, she wrote, as youre wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the pawnshop first, and how to tell him that there is no bread or jam. Jack Monroe (25), a single mother who changed her name from Melissa because Im just not a Melissa, is an unlikely ambassador for the growing ranks of Britains poor and now one with a $40,000 book contract. Her sudden slide into poverty two years ago and her plucky online diary, A Girl Called Jack, chronicling the reality of life on the bread line have turned her into a celebrity in Britain. She is now courted by politicians, charities and even supermarket chains, and people regularly ask for her autograph. Ms. Monroe, who left school at 16, has more than 31,000 followers on Twitter and now writes a weekly food column for the newspaper The Guardian, featuring recipes costing less than 1 ($1.64) a person. Her austerity cookbook is due out in February. There is no simple tale here about a broken home, bad schools, drugs or racial prejudice, no familiarity in her path into poverty. As one of her neighbours in this seaside town in southern England put it, She could be anybodys daughter. Her story has made her a popular pawn in the debate about the future of the welfare state, which the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, has been trying to slim down.

Since coming to power in 2010, Mr. Cameron has overseen nearly $100 billion in welfare and spending cuts, with more in the pipeline. Charities like the Trussell Trust, which runs 400 food banks, say half a million people relied on food aid in the final eight months of last year, three times as many as in 2012. The Guardian called Monroe the face of modern poverty, proof that in post-financial crisis Britain, neither the job market, which is sluggish, nor the benefit system, which is shrinking, can be relied upon to maintain a basic living standard. The opposition Labour Party was quick to recruit her for a campaign against high energy prices. The charity Oxfam just took her to Tanzania to visit one of their projects, and the supermarket chain Sainsburys picked her for a television piece on how to cook with Christmas leftovers. Ms. Monroe, who dropped out from school when she was 16, worked in shops and restaurants until she got a job as an emergency dispatcher, where she eventually made $44,000 a year, just over the average income in Britain. But in November 2011, she suddenly found herself out of a job. In the months that followed, Ms. Monroe fell into a spiral of mounting debt and growing panic. Bills piled up. As she settles into her new apartment, still modest but with a decent-size kitchen, her priority is to make her son forget their hungry spell. New York Times News Service

Genes and environment in brain development

The overlap between the behaviours of genes and the environment challenges the age-old debate of the apparent dichotomy between nature and nurture
The age distribution of Indias population shows a young country, our so-called demographicdividend. Yet, poor maternal and foetal nutrition, poor sanitation, open defecation, infections and diseases such as diabetes in mothers severely affect the development of Indias children. The health of our young people is of great importance and will ensure their future as productive adults and healthy seniors. The long-term consequences of early ill health can be severe. Recent studies point to the high prevalence of stunted growth of children in India aged 0-5 years. The frequencies are comparable to those in sub-Saharan Africa. Research is also challenging the conventional belief that the brain is the organ least affected by early developmental problems stemming from nutritional deficits or diseases. Importantly, the cognitive consequences of early developmental disorders can range from the mild to the severe. Many who do not show obvious impairment could be affected. The frequency of severe cognitive disability may only indicate the more widespread range of less obvious impairments.

Some of these can be manifested as more serious deficits or loss of cognitive abilities in later life.
Strategy for diagnosis and cure

Disorders of early brain development, therefore, represent a growing and major public health issue for India. The solutions to this complex problem will come from diverse interventions, many of which are ongoing. An immediately effective prevention could come from addressing maternal and foetal health and nutrition. Early diagnosis and identification of the most effective strategy for management is another important component. Recent advances in neuroscience provide valuable understanding and tools for early diagnosis and management of brain developmental disorders and likely avenues for developing effective treatment. These brain disorders are a disparate group of currently untreatable conditions that include both autism spectrum disorders and intellectual disability (previously known as mental retardation). The precise causes of these neuro-developmental disorders are complex, involving both genetic (nature) and environmental (nurture) factors. Using laboratory organisms, such as worms, flies, fish and mice, scientists have made major breakthroughs in understanding the way the human brain develops. Transfer of knowledge from the laboratory to the human context was made possible by some major advances. First, studies in brain development were aided immensely by the human genome project and projects on the genomes of all the above laboratory organisms. These genome projects and related biological studies in the laboratory suggested that the ways in which the brains of different animals, including humans, developed have shared mechanisms. The human brain, which is much more complex, uses the same rules for its construction as a mouse does for its brain. This is analogous to a modestly sized computer sharing the same principles for its construction as a network of many such computers, each slightly modified from the other, to create a massive parallel computer. Similarly, studying how the brain of a laboratory animal, such as a fruit fly, a worm or a mouse, develops has taught us about the very complex human brain. Advances in brain-imaging technologies and pathology have also contributed significantly.
Model organisms

In the laboratory, scientists can manipulate one gene at a time in the developing brain, keeping other tissues normal. These sophisticated studies are done in tissue culture or through the use of model organisms. The studies have revealed information on the importance of correct timing and location of the expression of genes during development for a brain to form and function normally. When these genes are defective the animal has an abnormal brain and consequent abnormal function and behaviour. These fundamental studies have contributed much to the understanding of human brain disorders and evolving of treatment mechanisms. Recent scientific breakthroughs that targeted rare genetic forms of brain disorders have identified pivotal developmental processes that are necessary for

normal brain development. Studies of the human genome, and the research that logically followed, have led to the recognition that the key biological processes identified from genetic causes may be shared across many kinds of brain disorders, indicating that discoveries in one group of disorders will inform the other and vice versa. Just as defective genes (nature) affect brain development in specific ways, environmental and lifestyle factors (nurture) can do so too. Studies in the laboratory and in human populations demonstrate that nurture through diet, lifestyle and the impact of infection works itself into nature by affecting gene expression. Genes that are disrupted in neuro-developmental genetic disorders in humans show a remarkable overlap with those that underlie abnormal development of the brain that are driven environmentally. There are critical periods in foetal brain development when environmental insults or gene defects, acting in similar ways, can cause lasting damage. This striking overlap between the ways genes and environment act challenges the age-old debate on the apparent dichotomy between nature and nurture. Genetics not only points to the causes but also provides insights for potential treatments of these disorders. This is perhaps best illustrated by research being done on Fragile-X and Rett Syndromes, where interventions have been shown to be effective in laboratory models of these disorders. Indeed these interventions are effective, irrespective of the age at which they are initiated. Thus, in mice at least, the disease can be treated even in the mature animal. These studies have led to the first rationally based therapeutic interventions that are now in large-scale human clinical trials elsewhere in the world. In each case, we will know how effective these interventions are only after such trials are completed. India must embark on its own research and therapeutics as the environmental and genetic factors here are different from those of Caucasian populations amongst whom most studies have been conducted. We have a strong foundation in basic neurobiology and human genetics and excellent clinical neurologists and clinicians. We are therefore well placed to address, understand and eventually treat disorders of brain development in the Indian context that are caused by a wide range of inherited as well as environmental factors. The best international interactions and collaborations are vital so that lessons learned here and elsewhere can be shared and progress is faster. There is also an urgent need to train the next generation of clinician-researchers to better understand and treat these disorders. Much will be required by way of resources and these must be garnered. However, more challenging than resources is the courage to embark on such a course that weds basic and clinical research and to take it forward, step by relentless step. The size of Indias problems in these, and indeed all other health challenges, is huge and seemingly intractable. Yet, this is matched only by our potential to search for and find solutions. India can lead in research on neuro-developmental disorders in human populations and by doing so provide hope to people here and the world over. (The writer is Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India)

Freeing temples from state control

What is scandalous is the corruption after the takeover of temples as politicians and officials loot the temples wealth and land, and divert donations of devotees to non-religious purposes
The Supreme Court delivered a landmark judgment on January 6, 2013, allowing my Special Leave Petition that sought the quashing of the Tamil Nadu Governments G.O. of 2006 which had mandated the government takeover of the hallowed Sri Sabhanayagar Temple (popularly known as the Nataraja temple). The Madras High Court Single Judge and Division Bench had in 2009 upheld the constitutionality of the G.O. by a tortuous and convoluted logic that new laws can overturn past court judgments that had attained finality earlier. The Supreme Court in 1953 had dismissed the then Madras Governments SLP seeking the quashing of a Madras High Court Division Bench judgment of 1952 that had upheld the right of Podu Dikshitars to administer the affairs of the Nataraja temple while dismissing all charges of misappropriation of temple funds against the Dikshitars. The Supreme Court thus made this judgment final and hence that which cannot be reopened. But in 2009 the Madras High Court did precisely that. In 2014, in my SLP, the Supreme Court Bench of Justices B.S. Chauhan and S.A. Bobde therefore termed this re-opening of the matter as judicial indiscipline and set aside the 2009 Madras High Court judgment as null and void on the principle of Res Judicata. In their lengthy judgment, the Bench has clearly set the constitutional parameters on the scope of governmental intervention in the management of religious institutions. In particular, the Court has opined that any G.O. that legally mandates a takeover of a temple must be for a fixed limited period, which I had suggested as three years. The Dravidian movement intellectuals and politicians in various parties in Tamil Nadu are incensed with the judgment. The recent article Reforms in the House of God (A. Srivathsan in The Hindu January 13, 2013) is one such example that laments the Supreme Court judgment. In this Dravidian movement background, it is not difficult to understand the views of those who believe that Hindu temples ought to be managed by the government, and that any deviation is a social, ethical, moral and legal sacrilege! In Mr. Srivathsans article it is stated that: For almost a century, the Tamil Nadu government has been trying to bring the Chidambaram Natarajar temple or the Sabanayagar temple as it is officially known, under state administration. This is one expression of the outlook that only Hindu religious affairs need to be managed by the government. The obvious question, why should a secular, socialist government control only Hindu places of worship, but not Muslim and Christian religious institutions clearly has been avoided. But the country has moved on after the phase of British imperialist grip on Tamil Nadu during which phase the Dravidian Movement was founded. Prominent leaders of this Movement had declared that blowing up of the Nataraja Temple by a cannon is the goal of the Dravidian

Movement. Unfortunately for them, in the last two decades, the rising popularity of the Hindu religion among the youth, and the debilitating corruption in financial affairs of the Dravidian movement have made such a violent aim unattainable. But the biggest roadblock is the Constitution of India. In fact, what is scandalous is the corruption after takeover of temples by the Tamil Nadu officials, MLAs and Ministers by looting the temple wealth, lands, and jewels, and the reckless diversion of donations of devotees to non-religious purposes. For example, temple properties: Tamil Nadu temples, under Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowments Department, has control over more than 4.7 lakh acres of agricultural land, 2.6 crore square feet of buildings and 29 crore square feet of urban sites of temples. By any reasonable measure, the income from these properties should be in thousand of crores of rupees. The government, however, collects a mere Rs.36 crore in rent against a demand of mere Rs.304 crore around 12 per cent realisation. How much is under the table only a court-monitored inquiry can reveal. In any corporate or well-managed organisation with accountability, those responsible would have been sacked. Yet, we have people rooting for government administration. Temples themselves: The Srirangam Ranganathar Temple paid the government a (yearly) fee of Rs. 18.56 crore (2010-11) for administering the temple; for employees rendering religious services, like reciting Vedas, Pasurams during the deity procession, no salary is paid. There are 36 priests in Srirangam who perform the daily poojas they are not paid a monthly fixed salary. They are entitled to offerings made by devotees and a share in the sale of archana tickets. Yet the temple pays a monthly salary ranging from Rs.8,000 to Rs.20,000 for the temples government-appointed employees, like watchman, car drivers etc. who perform no religious duties. The situation is significantly better at the famous Nelliappar Temple in Tirunelveli. In this temple, priests performing daily pujas are paid monthly salaries, but ranging from Rs. 55-Rs. 72 (and this is during 2010-11). But did some politician not say you can have a hearty meal for Rs. 5 per day? But it is just Rs.1.65 per day, going by the standards of the secular government. Many large temples maintain a fleet of luxury vehicles, typically the fully loaded Toyota Innova, for the use of VIPs! And for the use of assorted Joint and Additional Commissioners and, of course, the Commissioner himself. It is very difficult to understand the religious purpose such extravagance serves or even a secular purpose! The HR & CE takes away annually around Rs.89 crore from the temples as administrative fee. The expenditure of the department including salaries is only Rs.49 crore. Why does the government overcharge the temples literally scourging the deities for a sub standard service? Temple antiquity: The third contribution of the government is the mindless destruction of priceless architectural heritage of our temples. There are several instances of sand blasting of temple walls resulting in loss of historical inscriptions; wholesale demolition of temple structures and their replacement by concrete

monstrosities; in a temple in Nasiyanur near Salem, an entire temple mandapam disappeared, leaving behind a deep hole in the ground, literally. Recently the government started covering the floor of Tiruvotriyur temple with marble, a stone never used in south Indian temples. The original floor was of ancient granite slabs with historical inscriptions. There are several initiatives for renovation of temples the bureaucrats rarely consult archaeologists or heritage experts. Without knowledge, experience, competence or appreciation and with great insensitivity they use inappropriate chemicals on ancient murals, insert concrete/cement structures, use ceramic tiles to embellish sanctum sanctorum and construct offices within temple premises. Ancient monuments 300 to 1000 plus years old are never renovated, only restored, a distinction that escapes the babus. More importantly, the Supreme Court, in the 2014 Chidambaram case has held that the government cannot arbitrarily take over temples, which is what has been happening in Tamil Nadu under the Dravidian movements influence. In the case of Trusts and Societies, takeover of temples can happen, the Supreme Court held, only on establishing a clear case of mal-administration and that too the takeover can be for a limited period, and the management of the temple will have to be handed back immediately after the evil has been remedied. There are several large temples in Tamil Nadu under government control for several decades. If the Supreme Court judgment is applied, then the government is in illegal, unethical and unfair control of these temples. apart from being answerable for innumerable acts of dereliction of duty, defiling of temples that has resulted in loss of several thousands of crores of rupees to the temples and to their antiquity. That is my next move to liberate all Hindu temples presently in government control on expired GOs. In the future we need to bring some mosques and churches to rectify the mismanagement going on in these places. Then the secularism of Indias intellectuals will be truly tested. (The writer is a former Union Minister and a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party)

Kashmir: fewer troops, more peace

Long-term deployment of soldiers inevitably leads to friction with local communities. In Kashmir, the tensions have been heightened by the failure of the government to sanction the prosecution of military personnel involved even in egregious human rights violations
In 1947, as Pakistani forces raced east in an audacious effort to take Srinagar, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru outlined the strategic challenge that has haunted every Indian Prime Minister since. The invasion of Kashmir, he observed pithily, is not an accidental affair resulting from the fanaticism or exuberance of the tribesmen, but a well-organised business with the backing of

the State [] We have in effect to deal with a State carrying out an informal war, but nevertheless a war. Earlier this month, the lawyer and Aam Aadmi Party leader Prashant Bhushan issued a radical proposal for the troops that Mr. Nehru despatched into Kashmirs towns and villages. People should be asked whether they want the Army to handle the internal security of Kashmir, Mr. Bhushan told the television station Aaj Tak. If people feel that the Army is violating human rights and they say they dont want the Army to be deployed for their security then the Army should be withdrawn from the hinterland. The proposal was assailed by political rivals, and mocked by critics. The AAP itself was soon scrambling to disassociate itself from the idea. Mr. Bhushans idea of law-enforcement-by-referendum might be eccentric, even dangerous but the idea of phasing out the Army from its counter-terrorism commitments in Kashmir deserves serious debate. Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has also long advocated a drawdown of troops from the States populated areas, a demand New Delhi has summarily rejected. The war Mr. Nehru so evocatively described is now entering a new and dangerous phase, fuelled by the meltdown of Pakistan and the looming crisis in Afghanistan. Yet, having fewer troops in Kashmir, rather than more, might just be the right thing to do. Even while maintaining a robust presence on the Line of Control (LoC) and retaliating hard against Pakistani military provocation, pulling out troops from counter-terrorism duties in inhabited areas could help address the resentments that long-term deployment of troops inevitably engenders. It could also breathe energy into J&Ks democratic system. Insurgency at a low The principal reason to consider scaling back the Armys counter-insurgency presence in Kashmir is simple: there isnt an insurgency to be fought. Ever since the 2001-2002 near-war between India and Pakistan, levels of violence in the State have fallen steadily. In 2001, as many as 1,067 civilians, 590 security forces personnel, and 2,850 terrorists were killed in fighting. The numbers fell in 2003 to 658 civilians, 338 security forces and 1,546 terrorists. Last years numbers, the authoritative South Asia Terrorism Portal records, were 20 civilians, 61 security forces and 100 terrorists. In population-adjusted terms, the insurgency in J&K cost 1.51 lives per 100,000 persons of its population, lower than the homicide rate in Delhi or Haryana. The States total firearms fatalities were well below those in Uttar Pradesh (1,575 in 2012) or Bihar (681) or even West Bengal (269). Even as violence levels have diminished, though, Indian force levels have actually risen. In 1996, when the then Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah took power after the first elections in a decade, the State government began an ambitious programme of police modernisation and expansion.

National Crime Records Bureau data shows that the J&K police had 41,322 police officers on its rolls in 1997: 446 for every 100,000 residents, and 40.8 per 100 square kilometres of territory, over twice as high as the levels reached in insurgency-hit States like, for instance, Punjab. These already-high figures have, according to Union Government figures for 2012, expanded to 76,980 an addition, in personnel terms, of some three Army divisions. J&K now has 646 police officers per 100,000 population, the highest in the country outside the north-east States. The Centre does not make public the Armys force levels in the J&K. In 2007, then-Northern Army commander, Lieutenant-General H.S. Panag, said a total of 3,37,000 troops were present in the State, about a third of these committed to counter-terrorism. There are five divisionstrength formations engaged in the task, Kilo in Kupwara, Victor in Awantipora, Romeo in Rajouri, Delta in Doda and Uniform in Udhampur the same as in the 2000s, even though violence levels have clearly come down. In the last two years, the Central Reserve Police Force moved out some of its forces from the State, scaling back from an estimated 78 battalions, each with about 1,000 personnel, to 60 battalions. This limited drawdown, though, has been more than compensated for by the enhanced police numbers. This isnt, of course, to say that all is well in J&K. Last year saw the first uptick in violence ever since a ceasefire was put in place along the LoC a decade ago. Force fatalities rose sharply, from just 17 in 2012. The killings of civilians and terrorists, too, rose. In some cases, the wounds were self-inflicted: internal military investigations into the killings of troops in Srinagars Hyderpora and at Tral showed that men died because of basic errors in combat procedures and preparedness. Nonetheless, terrorist groups are clearly sharpening their swords. Yet, augmenting the size of the troops wont fix this problem: the uptick in violence last year came about, after all, despite high troop levels. There are two fallacious arguments now used to justify continued force-saturation in J&K. First, proponents argue, the State remains vulnerable to large-scale street violence. In 2010, over 100 protestors were killed in pitched battles between mobs and the police; dozens died in communally-charged strife in 2008. Yet, the fact is the Armys counter-insurgency formations werent used to contain the violence in either case its presence is thus rendered irrelevant. The second argument for force-saturation is that the crisis in Pakistan is strengthening jihadist groups, with dangerous consequences for Kashmir. In 2011, XV corps commander LieutenantGeneral Syed Ata Hasnain even warned that secession might become inevitable if the Armed Forces Special Powers Act were withdrawn and troops pulled back. This prospect of regional crisis destabilising Kashmir isnt unreal; but keeping the State flooded with troops isnt the solution. From Northern Ireland to Vietnam, and from Iraq to Afghanistan, governments have learned that the long-term deployment of soldiers inevitably leads to friction with local communities. In Kashmir, the tensions has been heightened by the failure of the government to sanction the

prosecution of military personnel involved even in egregious human rights violations an abuse of the AFSPA that successive governments have failed to redress. Frances military in Algeria, the special forces officer Roger Trinquier wrote, reminds one of a pile driver attempting to crush a fly, indefatigably persisting in repeating its efforts. Thats just what India needs to stop doing and turn to politics instead. The challenge ahead Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put his all behind a secret diplomatic engagement on Kashmir a policy, he admitted at a rare press conference earlier this year, that came within a hairs breadth of succeeding. In 2003, military ruler General Pervez Musharraf famously dropped Pakistans calls for a plebiscite in Kashmir. If we want to resolve this issue, he said both sides need to talk to each other with flexibility, coming beyond stated positions, meeting halfway somewhere. Later, President Asif Ali Zardari said a solution to Kashmir could be left to coming generations. From unsigned notes The Hindu unearthed in 2009, it is known the two governments were contemplating a four-point deal: the transformation of the LoC into a border, free movement across the LoC, greater federal autonomy for both sides of J&K, and gradually-phased cutbacks of troops as jihadist violence declined. The Centre has since chosen to avoid ceding demands unilaterally, seeing them as parts of a final-status deal on J&K. Its becoming clear, though, that no deal will be forthcoming. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has reversed course on Kashmir, wary of pressure from both his adversaries in the military and his Islamist political allies. This makes it important for New Delhi to engage J&Ks elected politicians on these issues, instead of chasing a Pakistan pipe-dream. For years now, New Delhi has focussed on doing deals with Islamabad, or secessionist conflict-entrepreneurs inside Kashmir instead of addressing the demands of elected leaders. Engaging with J&Ks government on a programme for replacing troops with police in built-up areas could be a first step forward. praveen.swami@thehindu.co.in

How to debate Dishfire?

The latest revelation about the security services brings a new word to our growing vocabulary: Dishfire. A recent expos revealed that the NSA collected information contained in hundreds of millions of text messages every day. While messages from U.S. phone numbers are removed from the database, GCHQ used it to used to search the metadata of untargeted and unwarranted communications belonging to British citizens. We are not so much free citizens, innocent until proven guilty, but rather, as one of the Dishfire slides says: a rich data set awaiting exploitation. Is indiscriminate surveillance the best way to

protect democracy? Already, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are trying to salvage their reputations by fighting against their own governments to protect customer data. Vodafone has asked the governments of the 25 countries in which it operates for the right to publish the number of demands it receives for interceptions and customer data. In the US, the public often learn about the FBIs use of covert surveillance in court. Their methods and practices are examined as evidence brought to trial. In the UK, Ripa forbids the contents of interceptions from being used in court. That is problematic not only for justice but also for public accountability. In George Orwells 1984, Newspeak meant the dictionaries became smaller not bigger. Fewer fewer words meant fewer thoughts. What we have no language for we cannot discuss. For too long weve had no language to discuss the intelligence services. Now a dictionary is being written. It will be interesting to see what new words are added. Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014

Changing the rules of the game

Citizens protests in the last few years signal a consensus among all segments of society that the rules of the game of conducting politics in India need to change
India is yet again on the cusp of a battle for deeper democratisation. The data from nationwide surveys have repeatedly shown that Indians increasingly view their elected representatives and political parties as uncaring, unreachable, unresponsive, untrustworthy, and unrepresentative. This overarching anger against the functioning of legislative institutions (particularly Parliament), political parties, and elected representatives has led to massive protests by citizens and civil society activists in the last few years. The office of the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) and courts took cognisance of the matter and delivered a series of verdicts to deal with legislators with criminal records, free flow of black money during elections, needless competition among political parties to announce freebies, caste-based rallies, and massive corruption implicating many legislators. Similarly, the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) a non-party political movement is likely to force mainstream parties not to be brazen about the winnability factor in allocating ticket to candidates with criminal records and family ties. Several commentators in the past few months have criticised the overzealous attempts by courts to clean up Indias party politics, and expressed doubts about whether the AAP will survive long enough in its idealistic mode to have any influence on the rules of conducting politics in India. We disagree with this view. Our concern in this article is not whether the AAP will succeed in the electoral battlefield or if these rulings delivered by the CIC and courts are an exercise in judicial overreach. We believe that citizens protests in the last few years signal a widespread consensus among all segments of society that the rules of the game of conducting politics in

India need to change. We argue that even if political experiments (like the AAP) fail, they help substantially in moving the established norms to a new equilibrium. In our view, laws and rulings alone do not challenge established norms. However, the presence of a political party, mobilising voters on a similar platform, helps in doing so by significantly strengthening the legal process itself, by disarming those who would seek to scuttle such change. Legal decisions can never be permanent solutions for they are turned and overturned on the basis of interpretations of specific words/clauses of a statute or provision. Political parties and their leaders in India have few incentives to play by the rules. For instance, they are required to submit documents to the Election Commission (EC) about expenditures and contributions they receive. Many parties submit incomplete documents and others submit even more unbelievable documents. The BSP, for example, submitted a two-page affidavit to the Election Commission claiming that it had not received any donations above Rs. 20,000 the legal limit above which all contributions need to be disclosed. To clean up the muddy waters, courts and the EC have stepped in from time to time. BSP leader Mayawatis rupee garland was considered a campaign contribution by the EC and needed to be declared. However, such interventions and judgments have often fallen short of expectations and have been indicative of judicial overreach.
Anti-Defection Law

The Anti-Defection Law was passed in 1985 and strengthened in 2002. This law is a concrete example that substantiates a limited claim of unintended consequences. The law succeeded in checking the regular phenomenon of unstable governments and horse-trading due to floor crossing by legislators. However, it played a huge role in encouraging the centralisation of Indias political parties. Legislators in India now cannot take a stand against party leaders or defy the party whip, and use their conscience to vote on a Bill in the House due to fear of losing their seat under the provisions of the Anti-Defection law. The second unintended consequence of this law is that a legislator cannot question the party leader for flirting with a possible alliance with both the Congress and the BJP while toying with the idea of a third front. Sweet deals between top party leaders not ideological harmony, social constituency compatibility or organisational coherence determine political alliances in contemporary India. Parties thrive on how successfully they can divide electorates and seek support, and voters reward or punish the party its actions and inactions at the next given opportunity. The problem we seek to rectify does not stem immediately from parties in their mobilisational role but in their role as institutions that link the state with society. This distinction needs to be analytically separated. We may love to hate political parties but the truth is no one has shown how representative government could work without them. Political parties are necessary evils and in E.E. Schattschneiders words modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of political parties. The word party itself, as Giovanni Sartori emphasised many years ago, derives its meaning from the Latin verb meaning to part or divide. The role of political parties is to link the state and society by aggregating divergent interests. Politicians are not only office seekers, but also have interests and values stemming from various identities such as economic position,

gender, caste, religion, region, language, and so forth. Parties in their mobilisational role use such social faultiness because it is inherent in their definition of why they exist. Political parties are the torchbearers of the representative character of Indian democracy. No other institution NGO, the media, courts or the bureaucracy that claims to represent societal interests has completely succeeded in accommodating marginalised groups. Empirical research suggests that civil society organisations and NGOs are dominated by social elites, especially the upper castes and middle classes. Ironically, not a single media house has members belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in their top decision-making team. Similarly, among 88 Secretary-level posts in the Central government, there is not a single Dalit bureaucrat and in the last 60 years, only four judges belonging to the SC have become judges in the Supreme Court of India. This may give us a hint about why Dalit entrepreneurs have organised a separate forum (DICCI), rather than joining FICCI. We think that the AAP phenomenon needs to be understood in this broader context of changing norms of conducting electoral politics in India. Let us take, for instance, the experiment of Indias first national Dalit party, the Bahujan Samaj Party. The BSP started as a political experiment, initially had an electoral stronghold in Punjab, but subsequently emerged as one of the strongest players in Uttar Pradesh. Later, all the ills associated with political parties also afflicted the BSP. However, one cannot deny that it gave Dalits an organised political voice and a proper channel of representation in the electoral arena, so much so that now every politician has to cater to their demands for governance and it is virtually impossible to think in terms of national politics without thinking about the Dalit question. In turn, all types of institutions have displayed a greater willingness to incorporate Dalits and address their demands. While the situation still leaves much to be desired, the point we are trying to make is that if the Dalit question had not emerged through a mass politics of agitation, legislation alone could not have possibly guaranteed their incorporation into mainstream politics. Similarly, the entry of the AAP has deepened the possibility of renewal in Indias electoral arena. The party has successfully managed to alter the terms of debates and has even altered the rules of the game. It has shown that campaign finance can be collected transparently and declared even more transparently. It has shown that nothing beats people-to-people contact and that politicians should aim to serve the public and not the other way around. It has shown that nominations can be given democratically and has also demonstrated a willingness to comply with the norms of the Election Commission. In doing so, it has strengthened the reach of the Election Commission by paving the way for future legislation.
Incremental process

Now this is not to overstate the bright side of the AAP. It is also entirely possible that the AAP will be afflicted just like the BSP was with corrupt members, and perhaps in a decade or so we will no longer think of the party as a harbinger of institutional change. However, the argument we make is linked to the idea that it doesnt matter if the AAP fails its own public. What matters is what it sets in motion an incremental process of institutional change defined by the need to have a cleaner, corruption free politics. Because of the AAP, the standards of politics have changed and this is what we think is its greatest contribution. It may have moved institutional

mechanisms in India to a new equilibrium where corruption is not acceptable and cannot be lazily rationalised. The Indian state has been consistently hollowed out, stolen from and weakened in capacity over the years by people chosen by the public to safeguard the interest of the very same public. The rise of the AAP has been surprising and dramatic and the detractors are many. It is possible that in the coming months, the party may not be able to abide by the high standards it has set, but as the BSP example suggests, the battle for some severe institutional changes in the functioning of Indias electoral democracy has begun. Indias electoral politics is a decidedly murky process, and it is so by design. This route is not a quick-fix solution, but the true meaning of democracy can be realised only when democratic ideals are deeply embedded in the practice of democracy. (Vasundhara Sirnate is the Chief Coordinator of Research at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy. She and Rahul Verma are Ph.D candidates at the Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.)

Nagaland: descent into chaos

The absence of a credible state in Nagaland has created a power vacuum that is being filled by chaotic sub-nationalist forces often at war with one another
The reckless ceasefire between the Government of India and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN-IM), a militia predominantly of the Tangkhul tribe of Manipur, for the last 17 years is pushing the Nagas into a state of civil war. While the protagonists of the ceasefire, New Delhi and the NSCN (I-M), are in mutual comfort capering about the mulberry bush without a stopwatch, the process has landed the Nagas in an orbit of self-destruction. They are far more fragmented and fractious than before. The Naga society is seething with multiple tensions intermittently erupting into morbid fratricidal violence. The wars in Zunheboto between the local Sema Nagas and the NSCN (I-M) that left several dead and scores injured on both sides, the discovery of mass graves in and around Dimapur, and the closing of ranks by six tribes of eastern Nagaland Chang, Konyak, Phom, Khaimniungan, Yimchunger and Sangtan for a protracted fight for political and administrative separation from other tribes of Nagaland are some of the latest grim portents of their fraught predicament. Over 1,800 Nagas have been killed in some 3,000 fratricidal clashes since the beginning of the ceasefire (1997-2013). Contrast it with the violence during the 17 years preceding the ceasefire (1980-96) that took a toll of some 940 Naga lives in 1,125 clashes mostly with the security forces. The irony is underscored by the fact that while the security forces and the NSCN (I-M) have been at mutual peace during the ceasefire, twice as many Nagas have died, killing one another in some 300 per cent escalation in fratricidal violence. The vector of violence has turned inward with a vengeance, from between the security forces and the Naga militias to the one among the Nagas themselves. Some in New Delhi gleefully chuckle at their remarkable feat of trapping the belligerent Nagas in this vicious cycle of fratricidal killings.

The term Naga is a rubric for a host of over 25 distinct tribes inhabiting the Nagaland State and adjoining areas of north-eastern India and Myanmar. Their mutual differences far outnumber their commonness. Each tribe is culturally distinct and linguistically unintelligible to the others. In the not so distant past, contacts between two tribes were, more often than not, marred by bloodshed. Modern state, modern education and the Gospel have had a somewhat sobering influence on their world view.
Secession bid

The Naga National Council, the first credible political entity of the Nagas with pan-Naga political ambitions, born just before the British left India, sought to engender a shared political consciousness among the disparate tribes. Under the stewardship of A.Z. Phizo, an Angami Naga, it launched an armed campaign to secede the Nagas from India. The NNCs campaign for secession and the counter-campaign of the Indian state were much too violent. The NNCs enterprise to forge a politically conscious and socially united Naga society was largely anchored in its projection of a common enemy post-British India. It challenged the Indian state with the gun. The conflict was grossly asymmetric. The Indian state had far superior guns in far superior numbers. A gun-inspired political enterprise to forge a collective political identity on a disparate sociological base merely on the fiction of a common enemy was fraught and foredoomed. The Nagaland State created in December 1963 with enhanced autonomy on matters, including the customary laws of the tribes, administration of civil and criminal justice and ownership and transfer of land and its resources, offered unprecedented democratic space to the Nagas of Nagaland to fulfil their aspirations and allay their apprehensions. The Nagaland State as a democratic polity took the wind out of the NNCs sails and unleashed forces and interests that were incompatible with and antithetical to the kind of politics being prosecuted by the militant Nagas. The NNC got splintered and eventually faded into political irrelevance although, thanks to the failure of the Nagaland State to deliver on its promises, its motto still tugs at the Nagas hearts and minds. The dynamic of democratic politics within the special framework, howsoever imperfect in the eyes of the Nagas, guaranteed by the Constitution of India, created imperatives for peaceful coexistence and co-mingling of the Naga tribes. Several ultra radical Naga nationalists joined the new constitutional order and helped in weakening the centrifugal politics of their erstwhile colleagues. Although the weakened ultra radical strain did not die and sporadically asserted itself with a vengeance marked by mayhem and bloodshed, it increasingly ceased to be the mainstream politics. By the 1980s, ultra-radical nationalists were pushed to the margins of the Naga political space. Their capability to influence Naga politics was grossly eroded. Violence 105 killed in 10 years (1981-90) was the lowest in Nagalands history. The Naga issue began inching towards a sort of Chekhovian resolution. Unlike a Shakespearean tragedy where, at the end, the stage is splashed with blood and strewn with corpses, a tragedy by Anton Chekhov ends with the characters unhappy, disillusioned, even bitter but alive, bracing themselves for a new beginning.

The process of a slow yet steady political reconciliation and social assimilation of the Nagas got perverted with New Delhis cynical engagement with the NSCN (I-M) since August 1, 1997. The ceasefire with the outfit was in utter disregard for the logic of the prevailing situation. The crucial stakeholders the popularly elected State government, the traditional Naga bodies that wield wide and deep influence on their respective tribes and other active militias in the fray were excluded from the process. New Delhi missed the vital fact that the NSCN (I-M), notwithstanding its pan-Naga pretensions, is essentially a militia of the Tangkhul tribe of Manipur with little resonance with the broad Naga family. A deal cut with it would not be acceptable to the Naga society. Not only the deal itself was a nostrum ab initio, New Delhis emasculation of the institutions of the state such as stripping the police of their statutory obligations to enforce the laws and maintain the public order against unlawful activities of the NSCN (I-M) further worsened the situation. The NSCN (I-M) has been unrestrained in demonstrative use of brutal force. Dressed in battle fatigues and armed with sophisticated combat weapons, its cadres freely roam the streets of towns and villages. In the teeth of popular opposition, New Delhi allowed it to set up multiple garrisons, almost in every district to help expand its reach in the State. In the guise of giving the NSCN (I-M) a secure political space for building a workable consensus on the fractious Naga issues, New Delhi has given the militia a free military run of the Naga inhabited areas.
Fragmented society

The NSCN (I-M) leadership has, however, failed to grasp the fragility of the fiction of a Naga nation imagined on the base of an ethnically fragmented society riddled with historical contradictions. Instead of building a workable resonance with the Naga society, it used the ceasefire, under the tacit patronage of New Delhi, to augment its weapons inventories, its promiscuous killing-machine to terrorise people into submission and establish its military hegemony over all tribes. However, true to their martial character, the Naga tribes have refused to be subdued and they often strike back with a vengeance. The violent clashes in Zunheboto during the last Christmas week in which some 10,000 Sema Nagas from over 100 villages armed with traditional weapons attacked a local NSCN (I-M) garrison in a fight that lasted three days and claimed over a dozen lives are a pointer to the popular resistance to the outfit. The Semas, who were resentful of the NSCN (I-M)s garrison in their land, were provoked by molestation of their women by the armed cadres of the outfit some days earlier. They dismantled the garrison and chased away, at least temporarily, the armed NSCN (I-M) cadres. The ceasefire with the NSCN (I-M) has resulted in the retreat of the state from the crucial areas of governance and subversion of democratic politics. It is undoing the political and social gains achieved since the creation of the Nagaland State that has been rendered tentative in its aftermath. The absence of a credible state has created a power vacuum that is being filled in by chaotic sub-nationalist forces often at war with one another. The powerful traditional tribal bodies are alienated and, in their eagerness to flout New Delhis dalliance with the NSCN (I-M), are fostering the other Naga militias. The secessionist politics that was profoundly circumscribed by the politics of expanded democracy is seeking to regain centre stage.

Thanks to New Delhis cavalier policies, the Nagas are in a dystopia and the grapes of wrath against India are ripening for the vintage. (The writer is a retired Special Director, Intelligence Bureau.)

Two countries, two elections

The 2014 elections need to be watched in both India and Indonesia for their potential to change the tried-tested-and-failed politics of the entrenched political elite.
India is not the only populous and diverse Asian country to be gearing up for elections later this year. Its maritime neighbour, Indonesia, will also hold parliamentary elections in April, followed by presidential polls in July. Compared to India, Indonesia is a young democracy. The election this year will be the countrys fourth since the downfall of military dictator, Suharto, in 1998. Democracy has nonetheless taken firm root in this sprawling archipelago and elections here have the same chaotic and exuberant timbre that characterises polls in India. The parallels between the two countries do not end here. Elections in both nations look set to feature a political googly in the form of Arvind Kejriwal in India, and Joko Widodo in Indonesia. Both these leaders have stirred up the electoral pot, and represent a break from the standard establishment-politician, whom the public has grown increasingly disenchanted with. Both Mr. Kejriwal and Jokowi (as Mr. Widodo is universally called) are political outsiders, known for their personal integrity, and anti-corruption crusading zeal. They both represent a newly engaged electorate that senses in them the possibility of political renewal and a break from the tired, venal, dynastic politics of the past. Like Mr. Kejriwal, Jokowi is an aam aadmi. Son of a carpenter, Mr. Widodo is slightly-built and humble, and wildly popular as the Governor of Jakarta. He burst upon the political scene in 2005, when he was elected mayor of the mid-sized Javanese city of Solo. Formerly a furniture businessman, Jokowi successfully transformed what was then a crime-ridden city into a regional centre for arts and culture. He campaigned against corruption and went as far as to refuse a government salary for his job as mayor. He enacted several pro-poor policies, including ones that helped rehabilitate the citys street vendors, and earned a reputation for mediation. In 2009, Jokowi was re-elected as Solos mayor with an unprecedented 90 per cent vote share. His second tenure in Solo was cut short when he was asked by his party leader to stand for Jakarta Governor in 2012, a post he won easily. Although Jokowi is yet to hold any national office, all major polls show him as the frontrunner in the elections, were he to stand. And it is here that one of the crucial differences with Mr. Kejriwal becomes clear.

Unlike Mr. Kejriwal, Jokowi does not front his own political party, and is beholden to Indonesias grand-old nationalist party, the PDI-P (Partai Demokrasi IndonesiaPerjuangan). The PDI-P is embodied in its leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of nationalist leader Sukarno, the first President of independent Indonesia. The PDI-P has essentially functioned as the vessel for the Sukarno familys political ambitions. The identification between the family and the party is akin to the Gandhi/Nehru-Congress nexus. Therefore, despite the polls indicating that Ms. Megawati has virtually no hope of winning the upcoming elections (she lost in both 2004 and 2009), she remains loath to give up control and hand over the Presidential ticket to Jokowi. Her final decision is expected to be announced after the parliamentary elections in April, but it is widely reported that she might try and stand herself, again, with Jokowi on the vice-presidential ticket to boost her electability. While Mr. Kejriwal might also come to depend on outside support from the Congress, as he currently does in Delhi, the AAP leader is not subject in the same way to the whims and fancies of the Congresss leading family. But, on the other hand, unlike Jokowi, Mr. Kejriwal has no track record at all in politics. Nor has he shown the Indonesians ability to mediate and strike compromises between different political stakeholders, yet. Mr. Kejriwal and Jokowi are both potential party poopers for rival candidates who would have been clear frontrunners in their absence: Narendra Modi in the Indian case and Prabowo Subianto in the Indonesian. Mr. Modi and Mr. Prabowo have some commonalities as well. They stand accused of human rights abuses in the past. They are strongmen who appeal to voters desirous of the steady hand of authority at the centre, believing decisive leadership to hold the answers to the myriad woes faced by their nations. Until the Jokowi wild card cropped up, Mr. Prabowo, who leads his own political party, Gerindra, had been the favourite for President. This is despite the allegations levelled against him of human rights violations during his years, in the late 1990s, as the general in charge of the Indonesian militarys elite special forces unit, Kopassus, which is known to have kidnapped and tortured political dissidents at the time. Although never charged with wrongdoing, a military commission dismissed him from the army on the grounds of his having exceeded orders. And like Mr. Modi, Mr. Prabowo continues to face a travel ban to the United States. Asked last year how he would handle the travel restrictions if elected President, Mr. Prabowo wryly answered: I will send my Vice-President to Washington. I can always visit Beijing. One major difference between Mr. Modi and Mr. Prabowo lies in the latters overt commitment to religious and cultural plurality. He has been carefully cultivating the powerful IndonesianChinese vote, a diaspora that has been the subject of pogroms in the past. He is also avowedly

anti-Islamist, and has argued that only he has the ability to keep Islamic fundamentalists, in this Muslim majority country, in check. But, in fact, political parties with an explicit Islamic agenda have consistently underperformed in Indonesian politics. The combined vote share of all Islamist parties in Indonesia dropped to 29.2 per cent in the 2009 elections, down from 41 per cent in 2004. Most analysts do not see the Islamist parties improving their electoral fortunes this year, regardless of the outcome of the presidential race. Whats clear is that the 2014 elections need to be closely watched in both India and Indonesia for their potential to change the tried-tested-and-failed politics of the entrenched political elite. If Mr. Kejriwal pulls off a coup in India, it will signal to Indonesia the real possibility of an aam aadmi-led change from below; a phenomenon most Indonesians are hungry for. On the other hand, if Jokowi emerges the next Indonesian President, it should serve as a wake-up call to the Congress party about how to effect a transition from a dynastic fiefdom to a relatively democratic and egalitarian organisation. For the Congress, as for the PDI-P, this may well turn out to be an existential imperative.

Pope urges Davos notables to remember the less fortunate

Participants of the World Economic Forum, from corporate chieftains to government ministers, are expected encouraged, actually to spend their time amid the snowy hills of Davos networking and talking shop. But at the opening ceremony of the forum, a notable speaker urged those gathered to remember the needs of the less fortunate. Pope Francis offered an address to the notables in Davos that reiterated many of the themes that have defined his papacy thus far, including a focus on economic inequality. His speech, delivered by Cardinal Peter Turkson, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was careful to praise the work of business as a noble vocation. But capitalism can only rise to that highest level if it is animated by a higher purpose, the pontiff continued. And while business has been the spark for much progress in the world, it has also left many people behind. The successes which have been achieved, even if they have reduced poverty for a great number of people, often have led to a widespread social exclusion, Pope Francis wrote. The message came as a sober note at the beginning of one of the most prominent schmooze-fests around, where business leaders hope to do deals and government officials catch up with each

other. That gathering of wealth and talent, however, should be coupled with more humanistic impulses, the Pope said. I urge you to draw upon these great human and moral resources and to take up this challenge with determination and far-sightedness, he the Pope said. The Pope went on to add, Without ignoring, naturally, the specific scientific and professional requirements of every context, I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it. The message was amplified by the handing out of several Crystal Awards, recognitions of humanitarian work. Fitting in with the celebrity element of Davos, the first winner was actor Matt Damon, for his work in bringing clean water to impoverished communities through the non-profit group Water.org and his support of the ONE Campaign, an anti-poverty initiative.

Identity and inclusive governance

Only a party that combines governance with a welfare agenda that is inclusive of social identities such as Dalits, OBCs, minorities and women can surge ahead in the coming elections
One of the key issues that occupy voter imagination with regard to the coming elections is the tension between identity and governance in Indian democracy. Most of the political parties, especially national parties, are claiming to have moved to a governance paradigm as against the mobilisation of social groups on the basis of a narrow identity. The Congress claims to have introduced a new discourse on good governance with the introduction of economic reforms; the BJP under Narendra Modi is projecting governance to induce growth, prosperity and higher GDP as a solution to many evils plaguing the nation; and the newly formed Aam Aadmi Party says it has introduced a post-identity and post-ideology politics to strengthen democracy by way of foregrounding corruption as an issue concerning all castes, classes and regions. What exactly was the problem with identity politics? India has seen an exponential growth of identity politics in the last two decades. While it mobilised the marginalised, it ushered in piecemeal changes and introduced competitive mobilisation by different social groups leading to sectarianism and identity-fetishism. This has led to the creation of new social elites among the hitherto marginalised social groups such as Dalits and Muslims, leaving behind the bulk of the population in whose name the specific identity groups are mobilised. It is these elites who then make demands of their own such as the need for Dalit Capitalists, unmindful of the fact that such an economy would exploit Dalit labour more than anything else. Further, identity politics entrenches patron-client relations in between the social elites of the identity groups and the rest of the population belonging to those identities. The worst outcome of sustained identity mobilisation is the proliferation of intra-subaltern conflicts as we have witnessed among the various Dalit sub-castes in Andhra Pradesh, between Dalits and the Other Backward Classes in Khairlanji in Maharashtra, and between the OBCs and Muslims during the recent riots in Muzzafarnagar in Uttar Pradesh. These conflicts are not only replacing the conflict with elites, within and outside their respective groups, but are also making an alliance with social elites possible or rather a necessity to win elections, as is clear from the

shift in the BSPs language from Bahujan to Sarvajan making an uncanny alliance between Dalits and Brahmins a viable strategy in Uttar Pradesh. Finally, identity politics has failed to deliver material benefits and open up widescale economic opportunities.
Symbolic mobility

Instead, it has propelled symbolic mobility and psychological empowerment, of the kind displayed by the symbolism of Mayawati, (who installed statues of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar) and Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal. While they contribute to ideas of dignity, respect and a sense of the self, and remain important achievements in themselves, cultural mobility invariably leads to demands for a share in the economic resources. This can clearly be observed in the case of Muslims who, especially after the Sachar Committee report, are demanding better educational and employment opportunities. In India, we are strangely witnessing a simultaneous rise of cultural assertion, and economic dispossession, which is what makes our democracy look chaotic and, for some, even unruly. It is for these reasons that there is a new consensus of sorts against the adverse impact of identity politics on Indian democracy among the upwardly mobile professional/urban classes, as well as the rural and urban poor. While one understands why the new language of Narendra Modi or the AAP has come as a relief for many, we need to ask two follow-up questions. Have political parties and their mobilisations in fact moved beyond identity mobilisation? Is the alternative to identity politics to be found in the language of governance? First, it is a grave exaggeration if one were to believe that political mobilisation has un-problematically moved to a more universal governance paradigm from sectarian identity politics. Even a cursory look at all those political leaders who have come to symbolise the discourse of governance will make it evident that it is laced with a liberal dose of identity mobilisation. For instance, Nitish Kumars governance is combined with sub-categorisation of the OBCs into the EBCs and the MBCs. Mr. Modis corporate governance and growth-centric rhetoric are combined with a deeply polarising discourse against the minorities that he returns to when he alludes to the burqa of secularism or claims to being a Hindu nationalist, or deliberately compares the minorities to puppies that have come under the wheels. It is therefore untenable to imagine that the Modi of 2002 is very different from the Modi of 2012. It is not explicit identity versus governance, as popular discourse has come to perceive, but more of a certain combination of identity with the rhetoric of efficient governance. Similar is the case with the AAP. It has made a pitch for a similar shift to a more identity-blind, transparent and accountable governance, and also cited this as its mobilisational strategy for the elections in Delhi; the most cited case being Shazia Ilmi, a Muslim, contesting from a Hindu dominated constituency (though it is a different matter that it was a one-off case of a prominent face of the AAP losing the elections). Whether it is the composition of the AAP Ministry or the nature of polling where many surveys found Muslims voting in much smaller numbers for the party than others because there werent too many Muslim faces in it, identities have not really died out. Identity claims have only moved from claiming exclusive cultural dignity to attempts to combine them with new types of economic opportunities. It is evident in the case of Gujjars demanding

the status of STs, or Rajputs wanting to be listed as OBCs. The issue here is not mobility in ritual hierarchy but a share (legitimate or otherwise) in state resources. Finally, is the alternative to the ills of identity politics to be sought in governance, if it means an exclusive growth-centric strategy that India began with during the phase of liberalisation in the 1990s, which prompted Rob Jenkins to refer to it as reforms by stealth? It has since moved to a judicious or otherwise combination of reforms and social welfare policies, such as the Right to Food security, the Land Acquisition Bill, and the Street Vendors Bill, apart from the MGNREGA, riding on which the Congress came back to power in 2009. Or, for that matter, the governments of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh have been voted back in the recent elections in 2013 in recognition of the spate of welfare policies that were put in place. Governance as growth has very marginally translated into a trickle-down for the poor, and therefore the need to have more pronounced social welfare policies in place.
Participatory democracy

Having said this, it must be recognised that in spite of ushering in a spate of welfare policies, the prospects for the Congress are rather bleak, precisely because it seems to have failed in delivering and implementing them through effective governance strategies. It lacked transparency and accountability and got caught in a series of high-level scams. This not only makes the government inefficient but also look arrogant in a mood of participatory democracy that we are witnessing. Strangely similar is the case with the Left-of Centre parties such as the CPI and the CPI(M) that have continued to raise issues of poverty, ill-effects of FDI on the marginalised, landlessness and displacement, but could neither creatively plug into identity mobilisation nor particularly look accountable and open to dialogue and participatory ethos, which partly explains their declining presence in electoral calculations. This, however, does not mean we move back to an exclusive growth-centric governance paradigm. Rather, the road ahead is a choice between governance combined with a polarised polity and governance combined with a social-democratic welfare agenda that is inclusive of all social identities such as Dalits, the OBCs, the minorities and women. Identities cannot be undermined or brushed aside, nor can they simply be mobilised for cultural assertion any more without including a concrete and tangible programme of economic empowerment, while governance cannot simply mean growth any more but means the way it contributes through a discourse of accountability, institutional procedures and transparency to widening economic opportunities and a more inclusive democratic order. The chances are wide open, and the party or parties that can effectively combine the two and their new meaning that is taking shape in Indian democracy will, in all probability, surge ahead in the coming elections.

Selling womens rights short

Gains on womens rights should not be sacrificed at the altar of the Aam Aadmi Partys expediency
Protest dharnas in Delhi after 1989 became an oxymoron agitations against the state in accordance with State-made rules. Contained within a half km-stretch at Jantar Mantar, inconveniencing nobody. So, disruptive dharnas should be welcomed if we are serious about shaking up the status quo. Its the rhetoric around the Aam Aadmi Partys dharna that disturbs. One, it demands accountability of the Delhi Police to a Minister rather than to citizens. Two, it defends prejudice. And, its selling womens rights short. Days after leading an illegal raid on Ugandan women at Khirki Extension, Somnath Bharti, Delhis Law Minister, said: If there are good people they will be welcomed. However, if they dance naked, sell drugs and run sex rackets, then there wont be anyone worse than us... Without proof or due process, he threatened hellfire for these people (Africans) for allegedly doing all the above drugs, sex work and, apparently, a naked dance. Then, demanding suspension of policemen who failed, for a change, to violate the CrPC, the Chief Minister went on a dharna. In the name of womens rights. Taking on the Delhi Police should be a dream come true for womens rights activists. Time and again, weve called it a rogue police, and asked for police reform. New sexual assault laws brought in Section 166 A (public servant disobeying direction under the law), strengthening police accountability. Over nine months since the notification (April 2, 2013), the provision gathers dust. These and other legal routes to police accountability are available to the AAP. Use them. On January 14, a Danish tourist was gang-raped. The police caught some rapists, but not before rounding up our most disempowered citizens over 100 homeless people. One newspaper said, a new band of faceless, nameless criminals and the Delhi Police said, vagabond rape playing into xenophobic fears of the stranger in the city preying on our women. The AAP could have stood up against the police for failing to patrol the area, and protected the rights of the aam homeless. And yes, done that in the name of womens rights, reminding citizens that over 90 per cent of rapes are committed by people known to women. Last years anti-rape agitations and the Anna movement have both led to change. On both fronts, it will be a long haul. But gains on womens rights, spreading a deeper understanding of womens freedoms and sexual violence, should not be sacrificed at the altar of the AAPs expediency. In the run-up to Delhis election, the AAP plastered the city with posters: Bhrashtachaariyon ko vote dete rahoge, toh auraton ka balatkaar hota rahega (keep voting for the corrupt, women will keep getting raped). This instrumentalised the issue of rape to push an anti-corruption agenda; cashing in on anger over sexual violence, but betraying little understanding of it. To say rape will continue because politicians are too corrupt to end it trivialises real structural patriarchy in which gender inequality, sexism and sexual violence are part of a continuum. Posters promoting womens equality would have been more appropriate. And when, defending Mr. Bharti, Delhis

Chief Minister says rape tendencies begin with sex and drug rackets, he damages the progress made on the understanding of sexual violence. The tenor of Mr. Bhartis own stirring Sunday speech to cheering locals, on keeping ma, behen, betis of Khirki safe from these people echoed the language of khap leaders in the run-up to the Muzaffarnagar riots. It was us versus them, hamari auratein versus corrupting outsiders paternal protectionism in the name of womens safety. Paternal protectionism is always patriarchys first response to violence against women rolling back womens freedoms, curbing mobility, and fanning the moral police. The AAPs mohalla democracy, citizen policing and neighbourhood watch may seem like fine ideas in the context of a call for greater devolution of power in India. But for women, the minorities (ethnic, religious or sexual), or anyone not living by neighbourhood norms, it is a fearsome prospect. Today, its racism. Tomorrow, caste or communal prejudice with young Muslims accused of running a terror cell. The day after, homophobia with Section 377 back, sexual minorities may be accused of criminality against the order of nature by paternal uncle-ji next door. And, of course, ubiquitous sexism a thousand watchful eyes of mohalla patriarchs frowning at single women who dont get home by mohalla bedtime. Long ago, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar warned of eulogising the local, when in response to the Village Panchayats Bill, which sought powers for Panchas, he said: A population which is hidebound by caste; a population which is infected by ancient prejudices; a population which flouts equality of status and is dominated by notions of gradations in life; a population which thinks that some are high and some are low can it be expected to have the right notions even to discharge bare justice? Sir, I deny that proposition, and I submit that it is not proper to expect us to submit our life, and our liberty, and our property to the hands of these Panchas. (Bombay Legislative Council debates, October 6, 1932) We are told: Give the AAP time. Your turn will come. Think of the big picture. Hold on. Crying foul over small mistakes plays into the hands of entrenched political parties. By all means, rock this rotten system. Women gain from shaking up the intransigent, patriarchal politics of patronage and criminality. But women too are impatient from years of being second-class citizens, being told to wait in the democratic line while the nation sorted out more important problems. And women will not hold on, while their hard won gains are frittered away today, with little evidence thus far of a more feminist AAP tomorrow. Some say, raising feminist concerns in this democratic moment is like shooting for the Moon. Well, if they had heard the sexism on display in the Lok Sabha debates on March 19, 2013 during passage of our new sexual assault laws, they might realise that determined women forced blind men to sight a moon that historic day. So, if this is truly a moment of striking new discordant notes towards a better national anthem, then womens voices must add to the cacophony. And shout foul when our issues are sold like cheap ware in a populist marketplace of aam xenophobia, racism, and protective paternalism of the mohalla masquerading as womens rights.

A broken army lies at the heart of conflict in South Sudan

South Sudans problems are political but the military must be fixed to ensure enduring stability
Seen from the air, the capital of South Sudan appears a cluster of reflective, tin-sheeted roofs amid a vast expanse of scrubland riven by the White Nile. When he returned to Juba from Kampala last month, the policeman found his city fearful, his brother dead, his home abandoned and his three wives and 13 children in a United Nations camp. He gathered his family, took a flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and left them with a relative. Now, on the flight back home, he looks out at Juba, outwardly calm but restive. My younger brother was a policeman too, he says. He was wearing his uniform but the army killed him. I filed a complaint in my police station. But there is no investigation. He is not surprised; he joined the police after years in the army. The violence sweeping through eastern South Sudan has claimed thousands of lives and displaced more than 4,50,000 civilians. A political dispute between President Salva Kiir Mayardit and his former Deputy Riek Machar has escalated into an ethnically charged conflict between President Kiirs Dinka community and Mr. Machars Nuer group, and has split the national force the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) into warring factions that have turned on their former comrades and brought the worlds newest nation to the brink of civil war. The violence began on December 15 last year as a gunfight between the Dinka and Nuer fighters in the presidential guard. For two days after the fight, the Dinka majority swept through Juba, killing untold numbers of Nuers, including the policemans brother. Peace talks aimed at political resolution are under way, but the weight of recent history and particularities of this current outbreak suggest that the fate of the South Sudan will, for the near term, remain linked to the fate of the 300,000 armed men who make up its fractured forces. What happens when the fighting is over? Can South Sudans broken army transform into a national force? The flight from Addis lowers its landing gear; the policeman unzips a small pouch hanging from his neck, takes out a camera and presses it to the window. There, he says, pointing through th e thickened glass at a row of identical roofs, that is my home. *** In 1992, Brigadier General Lul Ruai Koang and 150 of his fellow Nuer fighters defected from the 5th Brigade of the SPLA deployed outside Juba, and trekked north in search of another Nuer unit to link up with.

Sudans seemingly interminable civil war between the north and the south was ongoing. The SPLA, then a guerrilla force led by John Garang, a Dinka, had besieged Juba as a step towards controlling all of Sudan. A few months prior to the siege, Garangs Nuer deputy, Riek Machar, defected from the SPLA to set up his own splinter faction, triggering a wave of ethnic bloodletting within the party. What happened then, and is repeating itself now, was the first killing of soldiers in active service along ethnic lines, Brig. Koang said, explaining his Dinka comrades turned on the Nuers. We walked through pouring rain for three months, he said, We sold some of our guns and bought cows and grain. We slaughtered the cows three days after we started, the grains took another week and then we survived on leaves, and fruits, and birds. Brig. Koang subsequently left for Kenya to pursue his studies. Meanwhile, internecine battles amongst the guerillas claimed more lives than war with the north. Their differences were not ethnic, but played out along ethnic lines: Mr. Machar wanted full secession from the north, while Garang wanted to control a unified Sudan by toppling the government in Khartoum. Khartoum signed a deal with Mr. Machar, leading to the ideological paradox of South Sudans liberation struggle: Mr. Machar the secessionist, was backed by the government, to fight Garang the unionist. When Brig. Koang returned to Sudan in 2002, Mr. Machar and Garangs forces had reunited after a decade of war and aimed their guns at Khartoum. In 2005, the united SPLA signed an agreement with Khartoum to end the civil war and hold a referendum on South Sudans independence in 2011. Garang died in 2005, and was replaced by Salva Kiir, another Dinka, who became the President of the newly minted Republic of South Sudan in 2011, with Mr. Machar as his deputy. Three years after the referendum, the compact between Mr. Machar and Mr. Kiir is in tatters, the army has broken roughly along lines that were drawn in 1991 but blurred by the 2002 peace agreement. Brig. Koang was in Addis Ababa when the fighting erupted. He defected, in absentia, to Mr. Machars faction and is now the rebel armys spokesperson in exile. Even after integration, those who deserted in 1991 were still being marked, said Brig. Koang, There was a deliberate, persistent marginalisation. On December 15, there were grievances that were boiling, there was a spark that just ignited. *** The defectors are from forces loyal to Mr. Machar. The SPLA has Nuers, Dinka and other tribes like Shilluks, our Army Chief of Staff is a Nuer, said Colonel Phillip Aguer, military

spokesperson for the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army, Machars forces are completely Nuer, and that is his mistake. He cannot mobilise one community against everyone. Col. Aguer estimates that about 10,000 regular soldiers and an unknown number of Nuer militias have joined Machars forces. In recent days, the SPLA has regained control of all major urban centres in the greater Upper Nile region, but the rebels have retreated into the countryside and remain a persistent threat. On the cusp of independence in 2011, about 300,000 citizens, or three per cent of South Sudans 10 million population, were enrolled in the security forces with access to 318,000 guns, according to a brief by the Small Arms Journal. Non-state militias accounted for another 10,150 fighters armed with automatic rifles, landmines, and rocket propelled grenades. This week, President Kiir said presidential pardons and general amnesties shall be part of peace efforts but his government needs to find a way to rebuild the army even as it demobilises the many militias fighting on either side. There are financial constraints on the number of salaries that the cash-strapped treasury can provide, and integration is an expensive process. Political solutions dictate the success or failure of integrations, said Matthew LeRiche, coauthor of South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence, in the Sudan-South Sudan case, I found however that the history of attempts to integrate forces after peace deals has been a catalyst to renewed violence. In the past, failed integration of South Sudans armed groups, Dr. LeRiche said, was a key reason for a return to war. Upon integration, he explained, small groups want to remain in control of their area and use the threat of mutiny and actual mutiny to extract very costly concessions from the central and state governments. The cyclical nature of South Sudans conflict offers cause for both hope and cynicism: that the SPLA has fractured and healed before suggests a way back for Riek Machars defectors. Yet, the recent violence also illustrates the tragic human costs of an army prone to disintegration. One way is for the army to be disbanded and reconstituted so it reflects our ethnic diversity. We have 64 tribes, said Brig. Koang, the rebel spokesperson. Col. Aguer, the SPLA spokesperson was less forthcoming. Reintegration is a matter for our political leaders, he said, We are implementers. We do what our leaders tell us. The flight from Addis has landed in Juba. The policeman pulls his bag from the overhead compartment. As a captain in the police, he said, he has guards protecting him; some Dinka, some Nuer. You have to be careful and measure things. The army killed my brother, but I cant just go out and join Riek Machar.

Obama creates panel to combat sexual assaults on campuses

U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday renewed pressure on colleges and universities to prevent and police sexual assaults on their campuses, creating a task force of senior administration officials to coordinate federal enforcement efforts. Acting a month after he gave the Pentagon a year to show it had cut down on the number of sexual assaults within the military, Mr. Obama summoned Cabinet officials and senior advisers to a White House meeting to review progress more broadly against rape and other sexual attacks, with the focus being on problems at college campuses. He then signed a presidential memorandum creating the task force, surrounded by advisers on his White House Council of Women and Girls. On Wednesday,it released a rundown of past and prospective administration actions titled Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action. The issue is a priority of womens groups, which have been crucial to Mr. Obamas election victories. Although episodes of sexual assaults within the military have received more attention recently, rape is most common on campuses, the report said. One in five students has been assaulted, it said, but just 12 per cent of them report the violence. Because many of the attacks occur at parties, victims are often abused while theyre drunk, under the influence of drugs, passed out or otherwise incapacitated, the report said. Assailants are commonly serial offenders, it added, citing one study that found seven per cent of male students had admitted to committing or attempting rape, and nearly two-thirds of them said they had done so multiple times six on average. Few of them are arrested or prosecuted, the report said, because victims do not report the crimes and because of police biases when reports are filed. Against this backdrop, Mr. Obama gave his task force 90 days to recommend best practices for colleges to prevent or respond to assaults, and to check that they are complying with existing legal obligations. The task force which includes the attorney general and the secretaries of the Education, Health and Human Services and Interior departments was also asked for proposals to raise public awareness of colleges records regarding assaults and officials responses, and to see that federal agencies get involved when officials do not confront problems on their campuses. The President said a priority was to find ways to encourage more men to intervene when they see an attack or to report assaults. I want every young man in America to feel some strong peer pressure in terms of how they are supposed to behave and treat women, Mr. Obama said. At his side was Vice-President Joe Biden, who 20 years ago won passage of the Violence Against Women Act, which provided federal assistance for victims, health care professionals and law enforcement. Last year, the President signed a reauthorisation and an expansion of the law. Our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our mothers, our grandmothers have every single right to expect to be free from violence and sexual abuse, Mr. Biden said. No matter what shes wearing, no matter whether shes in a bar, in a dormitory, in the back seat of a car, on a street,

drunk or sober no man has a right to go beyond the word no. And if she cant consent, it also means no. Men have to take more responsibility. Men have to intervene, he added. The measure of manhood is willingness to speak up and speak out, and begin to change the culture. New York Times News Service

The indefensible statute

The time has come for a national debate on the death penalty, a punishment that is arbitrary and pointless
Hed been just 50 hours away from execution, the man the trial judge had called a perverse shark for shooting dead teenager Marilyn Green and her fianc Jerry Hillard in cold blood one summer day in 1982. Except, Anthony Porter hadnt killed them: drug-dealer and gangster he might have been, but he was no murderer. In 1998, students at Northwestern University reinvestigated Mr. Davis case as part of a project, securing a dramatic videotaped confession from the real killer. Investigators, it turned out, had never explored evidence on the perpetrator, Alstory Simon; Mr. Porter was arrested and charged after he visited the police station to clear his name. The fact that it took 12-and-a-half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room, said Anthony Randall, who also spent years on death row for a murder he did not commit, and, if it doesnt, then that scares the hell out of me. Last week, the Supreme Court commuted the sentences of a woman and 14 men on death row, saying that long delays in ruling on their mercy petitions justified clemency. It laid down new procedures for handling the process of capital punishment. The court also mandated humane treatment if that phrase has any meaning in this context of prisoners of death row. The judgment doesnt, however, go far enough: it is time for Indians to understand the costs of capital punishment, and its utter uselessness as a means of deterring crime. The pro-death crescendo: Ever since the hideous rape-murder of a Delhi woman in December 2012, there has been a crescendo in support of capital punishment: politicians, victims kin, and protesters in all applauded the death sentences handed out to the perpetrators last year. It isnt hard, perhaps, to grasp the visceral rage which underpins these sentences. Gurmeet Singh wiped out his entire family, on the suspicion that his wife was having an affair. Maganlal Barela, whose sentence was commuted by the Supreme Court, beheaded his five daughters with an axe sparing his sons. Sonia Choudhary and her husband, Sanjiv Choudhary, killed six including infants aged four years two years, and just 45 days. Judicial confusion

Part of the problem is also that Supreme Court hasnt laid down consistent criteria for the death penalty. Rabindra Pal, who burned alive Graham Staines and his two infant sons, was given a life sentence after judges held that the missionarys proselytising were a mitigating circumstance. Former judges like Ajit Shah have argued that the Supreme Court has applied inconsistent criteria in its delivery of the death sentence, and often erred in its understanding of precedent. The judicial confusion masks a larger social problem: the absence of an informed public debate on capital punishment. It is important, up front, to acknowledge that social science cant settle this debate. The United States National Academy of Sciences concluded, in the most thoroughgoing meta-study to date, that there is no way to judge whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates. There are simple social-science research reasons for this: the sample sizes are inadequate, for example, and its obviously impossible to test two identical populations of criminals to see how their behaviours are impacted upon by varying kinds of sentencing. Key among what science does tell us, though, is that there is no correlation between capital punishment and violent crime. Homicide rates in different States of the U.S., and in Canada, moved in lockstep even as they experimented with very different death penalty regimes. This much is clear: death sentences alone dont deter murder. Its also important to rid ourselves of other preconceptions, like the idea that nations beset by crimes like terrorism necessarily need the death penalty. Israel hasnt executed anyone since 1962, when it hanged the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Its only other application of the sentence was in the case of Meir Tobianski, a soldier executed on treason charges in 1948. He was established, a year later, to have been innocent. Each society has made very different kinds of choices on executions. Russia has a death penalty moratorium in place; Japan seems headed the other way. Though the global trend is against the death penalty 58 countries retain it, against 140 which dont its still on the statute in most major nations, including China and the United States. None of this, of course, settles the question whether the death penalty is just. In its study, the Academy of Sciences emphasised that data should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment. Ethical questions Each of the at least 143 prisoners who have been released from death row in the U.S. since 1939, after fresh evidence emerged on their innocence as well as at least 10 demonstrable cases of the execution of innocents shows that the debate isnt about social science abstractions. The tide of acquittals of prisoners on death row has swelled as genetic science improves, yielding evidence that convicts simply could not have committed the crimes they are charged with. This is, of course, in a criminal justice system far more robust and well-resourced than Indias.

In many cases, it would appear that there can be no reasonable doubt at all among them, the Delhi rape-murder or Muhammad Ajmal Kasabs murderous journey through Mumbai on 26/11. Yet, we know almost no evidence is utterly unimpeachable especially the evidence of our eyes, on which so many convictions are based. Forensic psychiatrists and psychologists have been telling us for years that our minds deceive us routinely. Experts Gary Wells and Elizabeth Olsen have, among others, shown that a welter of factors, from age and race to lighting conditions can lead to false results. They note that double-blind tests the gold-standard in science are unknown in eyewitness credibility studies. Every kind of justice leaves open the prospect of a wrong being corrected except the final verdict of the hangman. It isnt, of course, that the decision not to kill is without moral hazard. The harm caused to the rights of individuals by executing them, for example, must be weighed against the possible risk to innocent citizens if killers are released back into the population. No reasonable person, after all, would want his or her children to be at risk of a late-night encounter with the Delhi juvenile perpetrator who will be released in the not-distant future. Theres no reason, either, other than arbitrary value judgments, why vengeance is, a priori, a bad thing. Few would doubt, either, that punishment ought to be proportional to the crime in other words, that criminals should get what they deserve. Few, though, would also disagree that theres no non-arbitrary norm to decide what a just-desert actually is. In some societies, it might seem that witches deserve to burned; in our cultures, this probably isnt a view that will gain widespread acceptance. However, all these reasons frequently advocated in defence of capital punishment are just as easily met by life sentences. Put bluntly, the questions we ought to be asking ourselves are these: how do we decide that we should jail thieves, rather than cut off their hands; how do we decide we ought to hang people instead of burning them alive? How much suffering are we willing to inflict in seeking retribution? How far are we willing to accept harm to innocents in our quest for vengeance? For centuries now, philosophers have debated these questions as, indeed, they have the idea of punishment itself. In crude terms, there are two positions. There are consequentialists, who argue that punishment is justified by the ends it serves. Then, theres the deontological view, which proposes that punishment must be seen as a good thing in itself, serving to foster our common allegiance to law. The consequentialist argument was stated thus by the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas: if any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting it by some sin, the treatment to be commended is his execution in order to preserve the common good.

Mosheh ben Maimon, Aquinas near-contemporary, disagreed: to execute anyone on less than complete certainly of their guilt, he wrote, would reduce justice to the judge's caprice. That complete certainty he knew, as we know, to be an illusion. Every judge, and every society, confronts ben Maimons dilemma. We have been sadly casual about this most important of choices and that demeans us all.

Food for thought on the family meal

These days, the idea of gathering the family together in the same place at the same time may seem impossible, but it can be done. Having a meal together as a family may not look like Sunday dinners of a generation ago. However, the goal can still be the same. Family mealtime provides an opportunity to spend time with family members and talk. Eating together can help families feel closer and provide better nutrition two ingredients for happy, healthy families. Family members today often have varied schedules which can make it challenging to eat dinner together. Have you ever felt that the communication in your family consists of hello, goodbye, and notes left to one another? This happens a great deal in families today with busy work and activity schedules. Family mealtime can provide an opportunity for all family members to be together and share what is happening. Use family mealtime as a chance to have pleasant conversations. Save those tough conversations for another time. Have a rule that if disagreements start during a family meal, the family members will set aside another time to deal with the issue. Every family develops patterns of how they operate as a group. These patterns are passed down from generation to generation. They are based on our culture and what we value. Knowing about our heritage helps us understand our family. Our cultural and ethnic background contributes to the uniqueness of our family. Mealtime can provide a setting to teach your children about their heritage. Parents are the first teachers. Children learn a great deal from their parents about social manners, how to communicate, and healthy eating habits. Family mealtime can be an opportunity for parents to model appropriate table manners, healthy food choices and listening skills. Children get the opportunity to practise these skills, which will be important throughout their lives. If schedules do not coincide for an evening meal, maybe the family would enjoy gathering for dessert or a bedtime snack. Compare schedules, and then pick a night at a specific time. Make it clear you expect everyone to keep his or her schedule clear for at least an hour that night. Turn off the TV. (May not be possible as serial killers rule the roost from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.) Although the dinner hour once represented a calm oasis from the days storm, experts say today its often anything but relaxing. With blaring TVs, ringing cell phones and e-mail alerts chiming in the background, in some homes, the dinner hour is every bit as stressful as the rest of the day.

Families that eat together more often probably also communicate more often. Family mealtimes are a way to increase the time you spend talking and it is the best time to de-stress.

The case for a land value tax

The real estate bubble will not burst anytime soon, but capital is being hit as nothing new is created
In a feudal society like India, land ownership has always been a source of wealth and power. While the traditional feudal class has largely faded out, post-Independence, especially in the last decade, real estate prices have soared to vertiginous heights, bringing realty back to the centre stage of the Indian economy. The fall in property prices in 11 out of 15 major Indian cities in 2013 as compared to 2012, has created a feeling that the overheated real estate sector is showing signs of correction. Some have gone on to speculate that this might be the sign of an impending real estate bubble- burst. But bankers see no reason to be worried as the Indian realty sector differs from that of developed world in many ways. First, the mortgaged propertys market value is more than its book value as up to 50 per cent of the value of a property is paid by the buyer in black, and banks lend only by book value. So the sector can absorb considerable downward correction. Secondly, a major share of the investment in real estate is in undeveloped land, which is not financed by banks. Finally, money is parked in this sector usually to evade taxes, and this flow of unaccounted funds is not likely to slow down anytime soon. It is a tragedy that the same factors which make this sector immune to a meltdown, are bleeding our economy. Black money, whether earned legitimately or siphoned off from governmentspending, is getting sucked into a vortex of shady land deals, which provide not only anonymity but assured returns. It creates artificial scarcity, jacking up land prices for end-users. Moreover, it creates an incentive for the builder-politician nexus to delay clearances to residential or commercial building projects of individuals or communities without political patronage, leading to a mushrooming of irregular colonies, with non-existent infrastructure such as water lines and sewerage. It has created a new feudal class of landowners which extracts a rentiers income from the economy without adding any value. The overdeveloped real estate sector is worthless for Indias balance of trade, as construction projects, even if world-class, cannot be exported. Even if the real estate bubble does not burst, capital is still being destroyed and nothing new is created. This is the neo-liberal blind spot which fails to see the Physiocrats wisdom of recognising that productive work is the only source of national wealth.

However, the productive work, the value added to the economy, is all that most modern economies tax. Real estate, on the other hand, gets its value from location, mostly a result of public utilities like transportation, water, electricity and drainage tending it, and jobs, schools and hospitals in its vicinity. All of this is financed by the community, either as taxes if built by the state, or as user-fees if built privately. So modern taxation is a clear case of taxing private wealth while doling out public wealth to a select few those who are first-comers, inheritors, cronies or plain lucky. The logical solution to this aberration would be to tax land at its value. The so-called land value tax was an idea considered by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, but most famously and fervently advocated by George Smith. Ever since the 1868 Meiji restoration in Japan, it has been used in many parts of the world, as in the U.S., Australia and Hong Kong. It has been dubbed the least bad tax by Milton Friedman as it does not lead to allocative inefficiency. From Paul Samuelson to Joseph Stiglitz, it has many supporters in the economists fraternity. Michael Hudson is a vocal proponent and he has suggested it for China as a way to avoid the fate of debtridden Western economies. Land value tax, when applied to non-agricutural land, might turn out to be the game-changer. It will end speculative land hoarding and bring down prices for the end-user. The money saved thus will be spent on other commodities, increasing consumption and give the economy a boost. It will free a lot of undeveloped land close to cities, which can be developed by state or private players. These developed colonies will be affordable to lower income families which have been spending considerable sums for unapproved land till now. This will provide the government revenues to develop urban infrastructure. Mining companies, which find it more profitable to squat on natural reserves sensing a rise in mineral prices, will not do that once they have to pay annual tax on the value of the mines. They will have to mine it to earn revenue to pay tax, or choose to return it to the government. Unused prime urban land, of closed mills for example, will be promptly returned to the government for the same reason.

Keeping India at bay

Indias support for devolution of power and substantive demilitarisation are all overshadowed by the Palk Bay fishing conflict between Tamil Nadu fishers and Northern Sri Lankan fishers
Fish move over the Indian Ocean knowing no borders, while marine resources including corals on the continental shelf are important for the seasonal migration and reproduction of fish. Similarly, for centuries past, fishers and traders travelled freely over the ocean, fishing and accumulating wealth needed to build coastal economies. Eventually, colonial empires and postcolonial states drew borders and boundaries across land and sea as capitalist forms of fishing and coastal industries steadily ravaged marine resources. The backdrop to the discussions and the upcoming India-Sri Lanka negotiations on the Palk Bay fishing conflict is the tension between a history of coexistence in the Indian Ocean and the contemporary predicament of exploitative fishing that destroys livelihoods and the environment.

During the decades of war, the Northern fishers in Sri Lanka were restricted from the seas. Their livelihoods were devastated as they confronted repeated displacement. They lost many of their kith and kin to the unceasing firing and bombs, but struggled to keep their communities together through the years. Today they recall the decades before the war as a golden age of prosperity when the North contributed to over a third of the fish catch of the country. With such prosperity came social mobility and the consolidation of fishers cooperative unions. Although it was a herculean task for the fishers to keep their cooperatives running, these unions remained intact through the war. With the end of the war came hope that fishing would be revitalised in the North. There was an expectation of relief and return to sustenance on fishing, which about two hundred thousand people in the Northern Province depend on for livelihoods. Almost five years after the war, the reconstruction of the war-torn North and East has failed due to flawed neoliberal policies which banked on infrastructure development, financialisation and the market, with little serious attention given to local livelihoods. For the Northern fisherfolk, the problem is compounded by an armada of some two thousand Indian trawlers mercilessly poaching in their seas. On the three nights of a week when the Indian trawlers relentlessly invaded the seas, the local fishers smaller boats were run over and their costly nets destroyed. Having lost millions of rupees in damaged equipment, they now mostly stay at home on those three trawling days. Their catch is greatly reduced exacerbating their plight. With decreasing incomes, waning political and economic power and the politicisation of rural development by the regime in Colombo, the cooperatives, which managed to survive the war, are weakening and face the danger of collapse. While the Sri Lankan fishers also compete with Indian small-scale fishers on non-trawling days, it is the more high-powered trawlers that are the cause for rage in the coastal North. The humming and the lights of the larger trawlers venturing close to the shores are the disquieting reality of the Sri Lankan fishers stolen future. With crippling indebtedness, some fishers are abandoning their way of life and resorting to day wage labour as masons or seeking work as migrants.
Deep-sea trawling

On the environmental front, years of trawling have led to the depletion of fish stocks. There is ample evidence of ecological damage by trawling, which scrapes the seabed, destroying biodiversity. Indeed, trawling is banned in many countries. In Sri Lanka, fishery policies in recent decades opposed trawling, which culminated in a ban in 2010. Research by marine scientists is now beginning to map the environmental damage due to Indian trawlers on the ocean bed. Why has this dire situation arisen? It is not that fishers in the past or elsewhere did not face such conflicts. When such conflicts did arise, there were struggles, negotiations and agreements reached. Indeed, that is how the trawling from the Tamil Nadu side came to be restricted to three days a week, as small-scale fishers hit back at trawlers. The problem with the Palk Bay fishing conflict is precisely its interstate character. Indian trawlers ravage Northern fishers livelihoods, but cannot be confronted and negotiated with on the shore as they live in two different countries.

In this context, there have been two significant rounds of talks between Tamil Nadu and Northern fishers in 2004 and then again in 2010. The agreement reached in 2010 called for a complete end to trawling in Sri Lankan waters within a year, giving Indian trawl fishers time to shift to other forms of fishing. The agreement has not been implemented by either country across the Palk Straits, and three and a half years later, the situation has reached crisis proportions. The irony of the tragedy facing the Northern fishers is that the Tamil Nadu polity, which claims to champion the rights of the Sri Lankan Tamils, has been complicit in the dispossession of the Sri Lankan Tamil fishers. This hypocrisy also extends to the Sri Lankan Tamil middle class, the Sri Lankan Tamil media and the Tamil National Alliance. With the singular exception of the recently elected Chief Minister Wigneswaran, who recently called for a principled cessation of trawling, the Sri Lankan Tamil polity has been, for the most part, silent, reflecting its class and caste bias towards fishers. The Sri Lankan state, in turn, has used the issue as a leverage in a difficult relationship with its bigger neighbour on issues ranging from a constitutional political settlement, continuing militarisation and the acrimonious human rights debates in UN forums. It is in this context that multi-level talks and negotiations seem to be the only way forward. It is critical that the affected fishers and their interests are placed at the centre, but the governments will have to arrive at agreements. While confidence building measures such as releasing Indian and Sri Lankan fishers arrested on both sides of the maritime boundary are welcome, there is specificity to those releases. The Sri Lankan fishers arrested in India are mainly from the South involved in deep-sea fishing and a different constituency from the war-affected small scale fishers of the North. It is therefore critical that the negotiations are inclusive of the representatives of Northern fishers cooperatives.
Introspection needed

For now, the vision and initiative has to come from the Indian side; New Delhi, the Tamil Nadu polity and the trawl fishing communities have to engage in some serious introspection. Otherwise, the mounting anger among the Northern fishers may place a wedge between the postwar North and India. Indeed, Indias support for devolution of power, substantive demilitarisation, the massive fifty thousand housing scheme for the war-affected and building of the Northern railroad are all now overshadowed by the Palk Bay fishing conflict. Addressing the Indian trawling problem is fast becoming the litmus test for Indian solidarity; not only towards the fisherfolk but the war affected North and East as a whole. Negotiations are not about demonising the Tamil Nadu trawlers, but rather about calling on them to take responsibility. On the Indian side, while a ban on trawling would be welcome given the ecological damage, it may, in reality require a process of buyback of trawlers by the government to reduce capacity and, over a period of time, complete decommissioning. On the Sri Lankan side, while an end to poaching by Indian trawlers will give some relief to the Northern fishers, their devastating past means there needs to be much support for their revival. There are calls by fishers for compensation for their loss of equipment and catch over the years. There is a need to rebuild fisheries infrastructure such as jetties and harbours. Next, training and investment in multi-day boats capable of deep-sea fishing for at least some sections of the

Northern fishers are needed. It is such investment that can ensure that the fishers affected by the war for decades can catch up with fishers in Southern Sri Lanka. India can support such efforts to revitalise fisheries in the North and thus address the damage done by Indian trawlers and rebuild goodwill across the Palk Bay. The Government of Sri Lanka and the Northern Provincial Council must realise that the revitalisation of fisheries in the North is inextricably linked to credible reconstruction policies by an engaged civil administration and to democratisation that strengthens institutions such as the fisher co-operatives. The vast Indian Ocean has both a history of coexistence and the resources to accommodate the peoples of the subcontinent. It is our modern predicament, shaped by muscular nation-states and avarice of capitalist institutions, that exploitation for profits and destruction of natural resources have created crises, be it be armed confrontations or fishing conflicts. It is now time to reclaim the Palk Bay to rebuild these fractured social relations. There is an urgent need for dialogue and cooperation between Northern and Tamil Nadu fishers to end destructive trawling. At the same time, we must imagine a future where Sri Lankan and Indian fishers collaborate and traverse the Indian Ocean on deep-sea vessels, while fishing for the sustenance of the subcontinent. And closer to the coast, the socially-excluded and dispossessed fisherfolk should be given respite to revive their livelihoods in their fishing villages and re-imagine a future that can be prosperous. (Ahilan Kadirgamar is a researcher and political economist based in Jaffna. This article draws on discussions at a recent conference on the Palk Bay fishing conflict held at the University of Colombo)

Redeeming the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has taken the position that it cannot be expected to abandon its role of being the guardian of the fundamental rights of all persons within the territory of India
In a span of about 45 days, the Supreme Court of India has delivered two judgments that have received diametrically opposite reactions one will count among the Courts most poorly reasoned judgments while the other is likely to be heralded as one of its finest for its clarity and fidelity to earlier decisions. The contrast between Justice Singhvis judgment upholding the criminalisation of homosexuality and that of Chief Justice Sathasivam affirming the rights of mercy-rejected death row prisoners could not be starker. After Justices Singhvi and Mukhopadhaya upheld the constitutionality of Section 377 of the IPC in Suresh Kumar Koushal, the credibility of the Court as a counter-majoritarian institution had suffered a serious setback. However, the Chief Justice, along with Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Shiva Kirti Singh, has done a remarkable job in partly restoring the credibility of the Court through a thoroughly reasoned judgment in Shatrughan Chauhan v Union of India. In Chauhan, the Court has concluded that inordinate delay in the rejection of mercy petitions of death row convicts amounted to torture and that it is a sufficient basis, in and of itself, to commute a sentence of death to life imprisonment.

It is not just about the contrast in outcomes in these two cases but the processes adopted by these two judgments will go a long way in determining the position they will occupy in the judicial history of this country. The similarities Any comparison between the two judgments must begin by acknowledging complexities involved in both cases. The legal response to homosexuality in India through Section 377 has been on the statute books for over 150 years. Though attitudes towards homosexuality have undergone significant changes, it would only be fair to acknowledge that it is nonetheless a deeply divisive issue in India. It would also be a fair assessment that the death penalty and treatment that must be accorded to those sentenced to death are extremely polarising issues. The case before the Supreme Court in Chauhan was particularly delicate because the President had rejected mercy to all 15 prisoners before the Court. However, all 15 prisoners had returned to the Supreme Court seeking enforcement of their right to life on the ground that their suffering on death row due to the inordinate delay by the executive (ranging between 11 to 1.5 years) entitled them to commutation of their death sentence. It must also be noted that the Supreme Court in both cases was being asked to intervene in situations where other organs of the state had already made certain determinations. In Koushal, the legislature had made the political determination that homosexuality would be criminalised by not repealing Section 377. Similarly, in Chauhan, the executive, through the President of India, had rejected all the mercy petitions. Differences Though the challenges were similar in many ways, there is an unbelievable contrast in the manner in which the Supreme Court responded. In Koushal, the judgment authored by Justice Singhvi does not address the legal issues that were at the heart of the constitutional challenges to Section 377. There are the poorly argued sections on equality under Article 14 and the right to life under Article 21 while completely ignoring the arguments on the protection against discrimination under Article 15. The shortcomings of Koushal are evident when it is compared to the judgment of the Delhi High Court on Section 377 in Naz Foundation. There are established constitutional doctrines to test whether a provision of law is discriminatory and violates the right to equality under Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution, none of which finds any serious engagement in Koushal. None of this is about whether one supports Section 377 or not. It is about adopting a sound judicial technique it is about identifying precise and relevant questions; it is about applying constitutional doctrines to those questions in a rigorous manner; it is about reasoned conclusions. Rights adjudication is not about judges merely taking a decision and that is what distinguishes them from politicians. Unfortunately, the judgment in Koushal fails on all these grounds. More than the unacceptable outcome, what must worry us more is that the judgment in Koushal reads like a thinly veiled political decision. However, the judgment in Chauhan articulates a very difficult legal issue precisely and clarifies the decision of a five-judge bench in Triveniben (1989) on it. While clarifying and relying on Triveniben, there is thorough constitutional reasoning in Chauhan that led the Court to come to the conclusion that inordinate delay in disposing of mercy petitions amounts to torture and that the nature of the crime must have no relevance in that determination. The issue about the nature

of the crime was particularly important in the context of the Supreme Courts decision in Bhullar. In Bhullar, the Supreme Court had concluded that those sentenced to death for terrorist offences could not invoke the argument about inordinate delay in disposing of mercy petitions due to the nature of crimes. While relying on Triveniben to come to the conclusion that the classification of terrorist and non-terrorist offences in the context of inordinate delay in disposing of mercy petitions is constitutionally invalid, the judges, in Chauhan,have not created new jurisprudence and have only clarified the content and application of earlier judgments. There is tremendous judicial skill in the manner in which they have analysed earlier judgments and applied constitutional doctrines. Challenges and responses The most obvious difference in the two judgments is the approach to the target groups concerned. In Koushal, the perception that only very few homosexuals have been prosecuted under Section 377 was of tremendous significance to the judges. A numerical approach to rights enforcement is rather baffling and quite alien to the jurisprudence developed by the Indian Supreme Court. In Chauhan, despite dealing with a very small group of individuals (those death row prisoners whose mercy petitions have been rejected) and in particular a group which is often hated and reviled, the judges emphatically held that the protections in the Constitution are available to every individual, without exception. Perhaps the greatest merit of the decision in Chauhan is the rejection of the argument that retribution or strong moral disapproval of actions by death row prisoners can be used to deny them constitutionally protected rights. As far as institutional relations between different organs of the State are concerned, the Supreme Court, in Koushal, ruled that Parliament was free to amend Section 377 and decriminalise homosexuality. However, if the law were to stand, the judges felt there was no constitutional infirmity. There is a palpable reluctance to meaningfully scrutinise a law on a divisive issue where the political class has made a choice. However, in Chauhan, the Supreme Court squarely addresses the warning that the Court might be overstepping its jurisdiction because the President had already rejected the mercy petitions of all 15 prisoners. The Court is clear that it is not questioning the power of the President to reject mercy petitions but is rather interested and competent to go into the issue of whether the executive violated the rights of the death row convicts due to the inordinate delay. The Supreme Court has taken the position that it cannot be expected to abandon its role of being the guardian of the fundamental rights of all persons within the territory of India, whoever they might be. The Supreme Court, in Chauhan, had the courage to undertake significant course correction by clarifying the ruling in Triveniben. As efforts to decriminalise homosexuality gather pace again with the scheduled review of Koushal this week, the Supreme Court must see the fact that critical questions about the constitutionality of Section 377 have not been addressed in Koushal. If the review petition does not result in correction of the errors in Koushal, the Chief Justice of India (due to retire in April 2014) will find himself in an interesting position. After having delivered a judgment that has gone a long way to restore the credibility of the Court after Koushal, the Chief Justice will have to decide if he wants to refer the constitutionality of Section 377 to a larger bench. Given the intensity of his commitment to the rule of law as displayed in Chauhan, it would be surprising if Chief Justice Sathasivam lets the poorly reasoned judgment in Koushal be

a blot on his tenure as Chief Justice of India. He only needs to look as far as the Delhi High Courts judgment on Section 377 in Naz Foundation to realise what an alternative legacy could look like.

Indias Syria venture

India must determine what the Syrian conflict would mean to it
After three years of a brutal civil war in Syria, the world is watching the Geneva-II talks, where for the first time, the regime and the opposition are to negotiate. Also, for the first time, India has been invited to this important forum to deliberate on Syrias future. In popular debate, India is cursorily grouped with either the American or Russian camps, but Indias own assessment of the conflict is little discussed. While India has an official position for the negotiations, it has largely viewed the conflict from a global perspective. However, the negotiations and the conflict will continue for a while as both are stalemated. It might now be time for India, as one of the players on the table, to look closely at the conflict, to determine where the tide is turning and what it would mean for the country. The narratives of the conflict are many and muddled. However, this is no simple fight for democracy; the problem is religious, ethnic and economic as much as it is political. The democracy narrative traces the roots of the conflict to the March 2011 military crackdown of pro-democracy protesters in Daraa which triggered widespread rebellion in Syria. However, the demands for political reform were limited; instead, what drove many was economic frustration. Syria had faced a four-year drought which reduced two-million people to extreme poverty, unemployment and starvation. Overlaid was the long-simmering tension of religious and national identity; many in Syrias Sunni majority could not accept the rule of Bashar al-Assad with his Alawite, Shiite and Christian associations. Over two years, all these motivations have spawned a large opposition to the Assad regime, which is in reality a tremendously fragmented entity comprising multiple, mutually hostile groups. The opposition also carries out brutal, armed attacks on civilians and rival groups, meaning they are not quite the good guys. For the United States, bringing down Mr. Assad would champion its pro-democracy record, dispose of an anti-U.S. regime and constrict Iranian and Russian influence in the Middle East. It would also appease its ally, Israel. For Russia and Iran, Syria is the last foothold in the Middle East; almost every other regime supports America. In joining the diplomacy on this issue, India faced an impossible balancing act, given its friendly relations with every rival the U.S., Russia, Iran, Israel, Syria a fact that amazes observers. Adroitly manoeuvring out of the tight spot of having to pick a side, India took a position in alliance with BRICS which eventually sided with Russia, an apt choice given Indian priorities.

Syria is home to few Indian expatriates, nor does India source any oil from Syria; the impact of the war on those issues is indirect. An important Indian priority that is commonly discussed is the opportunity for India to conduct itself as a responsible global power, fit for a seat at the U.N. Security Council. Ironically, what should be a chief concern, but remains undiscussed, is the fact that Syria is coming close to shifting from an India-friendly regime to a possibly hostile, Islamist regime. For all his flaws, Bashar al-Assad runs one of the few secular regimes in the Middle East. India supports Syrias right to the Golan Heights, and in exchange, Syria endorses Indias position that Kashmir is a bilateral issue. Such support is rare in the Arab world; while officially the Arab League does not take a stance on Kashmir, it tends to empathise with Pakistan. Mr. Assad also supports Indias bid for a Security Council seat. Islamic fundamentalism has grown rapidly among the rebels over the last two years. Fuelled by international support, al-Qaeda offshoots Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIL grew in rank and were joined by several others the Islamist Front, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front and Al-Mujahideen. While moderate forces like the Free Syrian Army exist, the conflict has quite definitively become about religion for the rebels. Some experts estimate that if the status quo continues, rebels will control about two-thirds of territory and oil resources. Syrias slide into a religiously driven conflict and a possibly radical regime is not good news for India. The atrocities and destruction from the war must stop, and India has to do its part. However, can it afford to let Bashar al-Assad go?

Anarchist or activist?
When streets erupt in a democracy, it is nearly always because institutions are not delivering as they had promised to. It is never a good idea to barricade popular voices by institutional walls
Like it or hate it, but hand it to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for forcing us to think democracy. Contrast this moment with the Emergency and one thing stands out clearly; we need both order and dissent to stay alive. Take one of them out of the equation and democracy has a hard time hanging in: it first flips and then flops. From every angle, the Emergency was all about control; but then is today all about protests, no holds barred? From Annas rally to the anti-rape agitations to Chief Minister Kejriwals sit in and sleep-in earlier this month, discussions on this subject are only getting louder. Even the President of India sounded the bugle in his speech on the eve of Republic Day when he warned against anarchy taking over constitutionalism.
Across time

If a Chief Minister is anarchist because he took to the streets, how then would we label the late French President Franois Mitterrand? After all, in 1983 he gave a heros welcome in the lyse Palace, no less, to anti-racist protesters who were angry with his own government. In fact, in 1980, as leader of the Socialist Party, he joined a widely popularised street march against attacks on Jewish people, along with Pierre Chevnement and Michel Rocard. Were they all anarchists? Or think of Bertrand Russell and his activism against nuclear bombs. Another anarchist or a well-meaning democrat? Clearly one persons anarchist could well be another persons activist. Go back a little in time and consider the demonstrations that brought in universal franchise or racial equality or the establishment of gay rights. Had these movements been banned, or dubbed as anarchist, our democracies would have been that much poorer. It is with the help of these protests that democracy grew and grew to give us this splendid shade under which most of us sit. It took decades of activism before women got the right to vote and before Blacks became legally equal to the rest in America; but who is complaining today? Or, consider what is going on right now in Bangkok. The Thais want their government to go, but the leader refuses to budge till her corrupt brother is reinstated with full honours. Is the protest then anarchic? Or take Kiev, Ukraine another real time uprising. This one is against the governments anti-protest laws [which the Ukrainian President has now agreed to scrap] and its inexplicable decision to pull out of the race for an EU membership. Should the democratic opposition leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, be called an anarchist for turning down the position of Prime Minister that might have brought peace to the country? Instead, he prefers to be with the agitators in the bitter cold, with not much more than a muffler for comfort. Was Tahrir Square a waste of time and another anarchic explosion? What indeed of Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began? We have not mentioned Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, or any of the other freedom fighters of the past who were also once called anarchists. This is because times have changed and we are no longer battling colonialism, dictatorships or apartheid. Today, democracies are troubled because their leaders wear earplugs and citizens shout in vain. The singular thing about democracy is that political rulers must earn their respect and not demand it, just because they are in office. This is what separates this form of governance from monarchy, racism and fascism. When streets erupt in a democracy it is nearly always because institutions are not delivering as they had promised to. It is never a good idea to barricade popular voices by institutional walls. Is this why our President in his latest speech on the eve of Republic Day warned politicians not to make false promises for that would generate both heat and noise? Was he lamenting both the United Progressive Alliances performance as much as cautioning politicians about their immediate future?
Disdain for democratic procedure

It is not as if democracies have never been challenged by genuine anarchism in the past, nor is it that they can easily protect themselves from such assaults in the future. The ones who stormed the Babri Masjid were anarchists, and so are the Maoists and religious/ethnic activists of today.

What unites them all is their disdain for democratic procedure whose hallmark is non-violence. Anarchism, be warned, is not just about physical violence; it is as much about verbal violence as well. People tend to forget this, but that is how Gandhiji understood non-violence; it had to be both in word and in deed. Gandhiji argued, as did Bertrand Russell, and scores of other believers of liberal democracy, that the moment voices are raised it is clear that violence has struck. Anger reveals a weak hand, for if the argument is a winning one, why be abusive? Supporters of the AAP demonstrated this spirit through the 2013 election in Delhi. Since then, it has compromised and condoned, at least, verbal instances of anarchy. Mr. Somnath Bharti, Delhis Law Minister, may be in over his head with his new assignment, but that does not excuse his disgraceful choice of language. He has not just let the side down repeatedly, but has also given credence to the charge that the AAP borders on anarchism. Perhaps Mr. Kejriwal should hold a night school in good manners for his band. Neither street demonstrations nor working from a makeshift office under a tent amounts to anarchism. It is violence, both physical and verbal, that invites anarchy more than anything else, whether or not such acts happen in the killing fields or in parliaments. Remember also, some of the most ruthless leaders in modern times were elected to power. This is why liberal democracy is not just about votes, but more about non-violence. If there is a striking family resemblance between anarchists and dictators it is because violence was mothers milk for both of them. Nor is it anarchy to change ones political opinion. Liberal democracy would hardly be worth upholding if the freedom to absorb new information is not accompanied by the freedom to alter ones position. To bind people to a point of view in perpetuity can only happen when knowledge flow is restricted and when political opposition is banned. In a liberal democracy, people must have the option to move and grow, but under one condition. They must, on each occasion, publicly justify the reasons for the switch. Once that is done, freely and openly, liberal democracy has nothing to complain about. True, Mr. Kumar Vishwas was wrong in his remarks on Keralas nurses, but that was done in his pre-AAP days and for which he has apologised anyway. Why should then his past haunt him now? Much worse things have happened. For example, Mr. Sanjay Nirupam and Mr. Chhagan Bhujbal left the Shiv Sena and joined the Congress/NCP without explaining what they found wrong with their earlier affiliations. Only Rangarajan Kumaramangalam attempted to provide a rationale for his move away from the Congress to the Bharatiya Janata Party, but not Ms Najma Heptullah. What also of Ms Renuka Chowdhury who has travelled from party to party before settling down in the Congress? Nobody has ever heard her explain why she first chose and then dumped the Telugu Desam Party. Liberal democracy is violated by opportunistic alliances of this kind and not when people give reasons for changing their minds. The AAP has forced us to discuss all these issues again and that can only be good for democracy. In the fitness of things, Mr. Kejriwal and his followers must know that it is hard to be just a little bit anarchic. It is like catching the flu in the hallway. Once this strain enters the system it spreads itself all over. As bad practices push out the good, not only should the AAP sit up and take notice of anarchic elements within, but we too should acknowledge how non-violent protests enrich democracies.

A little anarchy is a dangerous thing, but a good protest is a joy forever!

Anarchist or activist?
When streets erupt in a democracy, it is nearly always because institutions are not delivering as they had promised to. It is never a good idea to barricade popular voices by institutional walls
Like it or hate it, but hand it to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for forcing us to think democracy. Contrast this moment with the Emergency and one thing stands out clearly; we need both order and dissent to stay alive. Take one of them out of the equation and democracy has a hard time hanging in: it first flips and then flops. From every angle, the Emergency was all about control; but then is today all about protests, no holds barred? From Annas rally to the anti-rape agitations to Chief Minister Kejriwals sit in and sleep-in earlier this month, discussions on this subject are only getting louder. Even the President of India sounded the bugle in his speech on the eve of Republic Day when he warned against anarchy taking over constitutionalism.
Across time

If a Chief Minister is anarchist because he took to the streets, how then would we label the late French President Franois Mitterrand? After all, in 1983 he gave a heros welcome in the lyse Palace, no less, to anti-racist protesters who were angry with his own government. In fact, in 1980, as leader of the Socialist Party, he joined a widely popularised street march against attacks on Jewish people, along with Pierre Chevnement and Michel Rocard. Were they all anarchists? Or think of Bertrand Russell and his activism against nuclear bombs. Another anarchist or a well-meaning democrat? Clearly one persons anarchist could well be another persons activist. Go back a little in time and consider the demonstrations that brought in universal franchise or racial equality or the establishment of gay rights. Had these movements been banned, or dubbed as anarchist, our democracies would have been that much poorer. It is with the help of these protests that democracy grew and grew to give us this splendid shade under which most of us sit. It took decades of activism before women got the right to vote and before Blacks became legally equal to the rest in America; but who is complaining today? Or, consider what is going on right now in Bangkok. The Thais want their government to go, but the leader refuses to budge till her corrupt brother is reinstated with full honours. Is the protest then anarchic? Or take Kiev, Ukraine another real time uprising. This one is against the governments anti-protest laws [which the Ukrainian President has now agreed to scrap] and its

inexplicable decision to pull out of the race for an EU membership. Should the democratic opposition leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, be called an anarchist for turning down the position of Prime Minister that might have brought peace to the country? Instead, he prefers to be with the agitators in the bitter cold, with not much more than a muffler for comfort. Was Tahrir Square a waste of time and another anarchic explosion? What indeed of Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began? We have not mentioned Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, or any of the other freedom fighters of the past who were also once called anarchists. This is because times have changed and we are no longer battling colonialism, dictatorships or apartheid. Today, democracies are troubled because their leaders wear earplugs and citizens shout in vain. The singular thing about democracy is that political rulers must earn their respect and not demand it, just because they are in office. This is what separates this form of governance from monarchy, racism and fascism. When streets erupt in a democracy it is nearly always because institutions are not delivering as they had promised to. It is never a good idea to barricade popular voices by institutional walls. Is this why our President in his latest speech on the eve of Republic Day warned politicians not to make false promises for that would generate both heat and noise? Was he lamenting both the United Progressive Alliances performance as much as cautioning politicians about their immediate future?
Disdain for democratic procedure

It is not as if democracies have never been challenged by genuine anarchism in the past, nor is it that they can easily protect themselves from such assaults in the future. The ones who stormed the Babri Masjid were anarchists, and so are the Maoists and religious/ethnic activists of today. What unites them all is their disdain for democratic procedure whose hallmark is non-violence. Anarchism, be warned, is not just about physical violence; it is as much about verbal violence as well. People tend to forget this, but that is how Gandhiji understood non-violence; it had to be both in word and in deed. Gandhiji argued, as did Bertrand Russell, and scores of other believers of liberal democracy, that the moment voices are raised it is clear that violence has struck. Anger reveals a weak hand, for if the argument is a winning one, why be abusive? Supporters of the AAP demonstrated this spirit through the 2013 election in Delhi. Since then, it has compromised and condoned, at least, verbal instances of anarchy. Mr. Somnath Bharti, Delhis Law Minister, may be in over his head with his new assignment, but that does not excuse his disgraceful choice of language. He has not just let the side down repeatedly, but has also given credence to the charge that the AAP borders on anarchism. Perhaps Mr. Kejriwal should hold a night school in good manners for his band. Neither street demonstrations nor working from a makeshift office under a tent amounts to anarchism. It is violence, both physical and verbal, that invites anarchy more than anything else, whether or not such acts happen in the killing fields or in parliaments. Remember also, some of the most ruthless leaders in modern times were elected to power. This is why liberal democracy is not just about votes, but more about non-violence. If there is a striking family resemblance between anarchists and dictators it is because violence was mothers milk for both of them.

Nor is it anarchy to change ones political opinion. Liberal democracy would hardly be worth upholding if the freedom to absorb new information is not accompanied by the freedom to alter ones position. To bind people to a point of view in perpetuity can only happen when knowledge flow is restricted and when political opposition is banned. In a liberal democracy, people must have the option to move and grow, but under one condition. They must, on each occasion, publicly justify the reasons for the switch. Once that is done, freely and openly, liberal democracy has nothing to complain about. True, Mr. Kumar Vishwas was wrong in his remarks on Keralas nurses, but that was done in his pre-AAP days and for which he has apologised anyway. Why should then his past haunt him now? Much worse things have happened. For example, Mr. Sanjay Nirupam and Mr. Chhagan Bhujbal left the Shiv Sena and joined the Congress/NCP without explaining what they found wrong with their earlier affiliations. Only Rangarajan Kumaramangalam attempted to provide a rationale for his move away from the Congress to the Bharatiya Janata Party, but not Ms Najma Heptullah. What also of Ms Renuka Chowdhury who has travelled from party to party before settling down in the Congress? Nobody has ever heard her explain why she first chose and then dumped the Telugu Desam Party. Liberal democracy is violated by opportunistic alliances of this kind and not when people give reasons for changing their minds. The AAP has forced us to discuss all these issues again and that can only be good for democracy. In the fitness of things, Mr. Kejriwal and his followers must know that it is hard to be just a little bit anarchic. It is like catching the flu in the hallway. Once this strain enters the system it spreads itself all over. As bad practices push out the good, not only should the AAP sit up and take notice of anarchic elements within, but we too should acknowledge how non-violent protests enrich democracies. A little anarchy is a dangerous thing, but a good protest is a joy forever!

The agony of awaiting death

A convict sentenced to death has a constitutional right to petition the President for relief against his sentence, and the consideration of his petition is not an act of grace or mercy by the President but a necessary relief provided by the Constitution
On January 21, 2014 the Supreme Court of India pronounced a momentous judgment relieving the agony of convicts in India sentenced to death awaiting their execution for prolonged periods of time. A bench of Chief Justice P. Sathasivam and Justice R. Gogoi and Justice Shiva Kirti Singh held that inordinate delay in deciding a petition of a convict sentenced to death by the President can be torture and inhumane punishment to the convict. In such circumstances, if the convict approaches the Court, the Court will hold that his fundamental right to protection of life and personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution is violated and the Court will commute his sentence to life imprisonment.

The Court has held that a convict sentenced to death has a Constitutional right to petition the President for relief against his sentence, and the consideration of his petition is not an act of grace or mercy by the President but a necessary relief provided by the Constitution, and the Court will judicially review the decision to execute the convict after inordinate delay. In the 15 cases of convicts facing imminent hanging after the rejection of their petitions by the President, the Court found that there was inexplicable delay, from seven to 12 years, in deciding their petitions by the President and communicating the decision to the convicts. The Court held that keeping such a convict in suspense while his petition was not decided by the President for many years was an agony for him which creates adverse physical conditions and psychological stresses on him and was a trauma not only on him but also his family awaiting his execution. The Court has also held that a Court cannot excuse the agonising delay caused to the convict merely because of the gravity of the crime for which the death penalty was imposed on him. With this judgment, any uncertainty in the law on execution of death sentence is now cleared. This is not for the first time that the Supreme Court has found that a convict sentenced to death has a right to be treated humanely and not put to the agony of awaiting his execution. The Court had been in fact a pioneer in deciding cases of delay in execution of a death sentence. As early as 1974, Justice Krishna Iyer had written of the brooding horror of haunting the prisoner in the condemned cell for years. In 1983 and 1989, the Court delivered judgments which held that a prolonged delay in carrying out the death sentence would be inhumane and degrading treatment to the convict. These Supreme Court judgments were cited with approval by the Privy Council in 1994. Despite these pronouncements of the Supreme Court, the President of India and the government kept the petitions of death row convicts in suspense for prolonged periods of time, sometimes as much as 15 years in disregard of the plight of the convict and his family.
Uncertainty

The law was brought into uncertainty in 2012, when the Supreme Court was moved to commute the death sentence on Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar who had been kept in suspense for seven years without a decision on his petition to the President. After a prolonged hearing in which the Court called for the records of all petitions pending consideration by the President, a bench of two judges (Justice G.S. Singhvi and S.J. Mukhopadhaya) held that as Bhullar was convicted under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, delay in his execution was irrelevant and refused to commute his sentence to life imprisonment. Bhullar was to be executed after pronouncing the judgment in his case on April 12, 2013 but because of his physical and mental condition the execution has been postponed. Fortunately for Bhullar in the meantime the present larger bench of three judges was called to consider the correctness of the Bhullar judgment in the case of the 15 convicts due to be executed after an inordinate delay of many years. The larger bench of the Supreme Court has now differed from the view taken in Bhullars case and held that the gravity of the crime was irrelevant in considering the commutation of the sentence as this is always considered by the convicting Court sentencing him to death. While the judgment in Bhullars case was reconsidered by the Supreme Court by a larger bench to be wrong, the case of Afzal Guru could not be considered by the Court as he had been

executed by then. If ever an execution of a death convict was carried out in the most inhumane way it was that of Afzal Guru who was convicted and sentenced to death for the crime of attacking Parliament. Afzal Guru was hanged on February 9, 2013 over seven years after the Supreme Courts pronouncement of the death sentence on him on August 4, 2005 and over six years after his clemency petition was made to the President of India on November 8, 2006. During this period, he and his family remained in a day-to-day agonising suspense. Apart from this delay, the rejection of his petition by the President was kept a secret and deliberately not communicated to his family, lest it become the subject of judicial consideration as had been done in other cases of delayed execution. Within a few days after the rejection of his mercy petition, Afzal Guru was hanged in morbid secrecy without informing his family and his body was buried in equal secrecy in the confines of Tihar Jail in New Delhi. The disposal of Afzal Gurus petition to the President had become a political matter, with the Bharatiya Janata Party unseemingly demanding his execution and making it an issue in the elections, and with the government for its own political considerations not deciding on the petition. In fact, between 2006 to 2008 the then Home Minister deliberately instructed the government of Delhi to delay responding to the file on Afzal Guru sent to it. In 2008, in one of the most pathetic statements revealing his mental distress, Afzal Guru during his incarceration pending his mercy petition said in an interview: I really wish L.K. Advani becomes Indias next PM as he is the only one who can take a decision and hang me. At least my pain and daily suffering will ease then.
Reconsidering its legality

Though the Court in its present judgment has not expressly referred to the inhumane execution of Afzal Guru, during the hearing as amicus curiae I had drawn the Courts attention to the case of Afzal Guru. The Court was therefore conscious of the manner in which a convict can be secretly executed without giving him a right to approach the Court after the rejection of his mercy petition and without even informing his family. The Supreme Court in the present case has therefore held that there should be a minimum period of 14 days between the receipt of a written communication rejecting the mercy petition by the convict and the scheduled date of execution. Such a period would enable the prisoner to have a last and final meeting with his family members and permit him to avail of a judicial remedy if necessary against the manner of his execution. The Court has also held that a convict cannot be subjected to solitary confinement during the period his petition was being considered by the government and no convict can be executed if he was suffering from a mental illness like schizophrenia. Overall, the judgment of the Supreme Court is a landmark decision in cases of carrying out of the death penalty. It is in keeping with the judgments in other courts in the world which have held that trifling with the carrying out of a death sentence is agonising torture for the prisoner which a court would not permit. The death penalty itself has been abolished in 140 countries as a cruel punishment as against 58 countries which retain it. India has retained it with the dubious and unpredictable formula evolved by the Supreme Court of imposing it in the rarest of rare cases. At some stage, the Supreme Court may have to reconsider the legality of the death penalty itself. In the meantime, it is some consolation that the Court has now firmly declared the illegality of

the practice in India of execution of death penalty after prolonged agonising suspense to the convict and his family.

When caring less may actually help

Conservationists should be concerned about saving the species, rather than every individual tiger
The shooting of a man-eating tiger, as it happened recently in the Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu barely two weeks after two other tigers preyed on four people in neighbouring Karnataka invariably polarises public opinion. Locals, whose lives are at risk, want maneaters shot. Animal lovers, on the other hand, demand their safe capture. Caught in the middle, officials have to confront increasingly angry mobs, while authorities in Delhi insist on elaborate operating procedures. In Bandipur, Karnataka, after dozens of attempts at darting a tiger with a tranquillizing gun had failed, and after the big cat killed its third victim, angry locals burnt the forest office, forcing forest staff to abandon the scene. A posse of armed police had to control the situation, until the 12-year-old infirm male tiger was finally darted. Science and practical experience clearly show that we cannot care for every individual wild tiger. Animal lovers and conservationists should therefore focus on saving the species as a whole, rather than worry about saving every individual. Conservation interventions must therefore be guided by scientific evidence and social practicality, rather than emotion.
Understanding tigers

My tiger research and conservation of three decades focusses on the central Western Ghats, which consists of forests in Karnataka and adjacent parts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. This landscape now harbours the largest tiger population globally. However, the 400 or so big cats in my study area are restricted to reserves comprising less than 10 per cent of the total area. With the overall landscape populated by 15 million people, public support for conservation is critical to tiger survival in the long term. Studies show that tiger populations in some well-protected reserves, such as Nagarahole and Bandipur, in Karnataka, have dramatically rebounded, with their numbers attaining near saturation densities of 10-15 tigers per 100 sq.km. A substantial part of the credit for this must go to the forest departments of these three States. With the control of hunting and cattle grazing, deer, gaur and wild pigs have attained optimum densities of 20 or more animals per square kilometre, which is crucial for a healthy tiger population. Every wild tiger requires a prey base of 500 animals to sustain it. When prey becomes abundant, individual tiger territories shrink and breeding increases. A single female may produce 10-15 cubs in her lifetime, an average of one cub a year. Consequently, thriving tiger populations produce annual surpluses, pushing dispersing sub-adults and old tigers to the edges of reserves.

These are the animals that prey on livestock and, more rarely, on humans, becoming problem tigers.
Tiger-human conflict

On rare occasions, tigers may accidentally attack persons moving in dense cover, mistaking them for prey, or in self-defence, when surprised. Sometimes they may even consume the victim. But if they do not subsequently prey on humans, these tigers also cannot be called maneaters. However, attacks occur when uncontrollable mobs surround and harry problem tigers when they venture out of reserves. Such tigers are not maneaters. True maneaters are individual animals that persistently stalk and hunt human beings, after losing their instinctive fear. They pose a serious risk to local people and must be swiftly removed. By my reckoning there have been less than half-a-dozen such cases in the last decade in this region, three instances in the last two months. In all these cases, the tigers were injured, aged or infirm. Even so, maneaters do not prey exclusively on humans. They also kill livestock or wild prey opportunistically. There is no evidence at all that tigers get addicted to human flesh as common lore has it. The critical point is that recent cases of conflict in the Western Ghats, central India and the Terai are a consequence of rebounding tiger numbers. In some sense, these rare instances of conflict we are witnessing are the price of conservation successes. In contrast, in the extensive but overhunted forests of the tribal belts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and the North Eastern Hill States, tigers have been either extirpated totally, or occur at low densities. In these regions, where tiger conservation has clearly failed, tiger-human conflict is virtually non-existent. This is not good news for tigers. Research shows that in my study area, 20 per cent of the tiger population is lost every year due to several causes: fights between rivals, injuries, starvation, poaching and official removals by shooting or capture, following conflict incidents. I estimate that at least 50-75 tigers are being lost this way annually, although only a fraction of these mortalities are detected. However, such loss is not a cause for worry in itself as the birth of new tigers makes up for it.
To kill or not to kill?

Given this inevitable annual loss of 20 per cent in thriving populations, trying to rescue a few man-eating tigers is irrelevant to accomplishing the conservation objective of expanding and stabilising wild tiger populations. Tigers involved in conflict incidents are often seriously injured, infirm or old. If captured and removed to a zoo, they suffer a life of perpetual stress from years in captivity. Caring for these doomed tigers misdirects scarce resources that could be used for conserving their wild relatives. Sadly, for old and injured conflict tigers, a humane and quick death may be the best option. Well-meaning animal lovers often do not understand that in high-pressure conflict situations, safe chemical capture of a free-ranging tiger is difficult or even impossible. Darting a stressed

out animal playing hide-and-seek is an extremely difficult task. On the other hand, shooting the animal with a gun is often far easier, and saves human lives. When precious days are spent in clumsy attempts to rescue maneaters, growing public anger seriously undermines the long-term support crucial for wild tigers, protected areas and the forest personnel who guard them. Overall, the future of wild tigers as a species is rendered more precarious when local public anxiety and anger are not quickly dealt with by eliminating the problem animal. By caring for individual wild tigers far too deeply, we may be dooming the species. To save the tiger for posterity, we need to work on expanding protected area coverage, and reducing adverse human impacts. Both these require increased local support for tiger conservation. Yet, this is precisely what is undermined when human-tiger conflict escalates. While a few animal lovers may feel good if a maneater is rescued rather than killed, the cause of tiger conservation suffers. In this overall context, the decision of the Tamil Nadu government to shoot the maneater in the Nilgiris, rather than persist in pointless rescue attempts, was the right thing to do. (K. Ullas Karanth is director for Science-Asia, Wildlife Conservation Society).

Choosing death over life

Without waiting for changes in the law or development of a policy, we must all try and inform ourselves to respond to people experiencing psychological distress
Suicide rarely impacts our consciousness, except when news involving a celebrity hits television screens or newspaper headlines. It is not something, though, that our society can afford to deny. It is not glamorous. It is an unnecessary end of a life, which has memories, beliefs, feelings, thoughts, relationships, experiences and aspirations. The sense of isolation of the person who attempts suicide is unfathomable. Sometimes, suicide may seem like an impulsive decision to an overwhelming crisis; at other times it may seem that it is a response to ongoing anguish and despair, when the individual loses the reason to live. More often than not it happens when the balance between pain and suffering and between the reasons to live and the resources to cope with the difficulties faced in life is tipped towards hopelessness.
Alarming reality

Beyond the personal reality of individual lives, the Indian reality on suicide is alarming. In a recent study focussed on India and published in The Lancet, a premier medical journal, it was

estimated that for nearly 1,87,000 people in 2010 the cause of death was suicide. It was estimated in the same study that in India the standardised rate of suicide per 1,00,000 people aged 15 years or older, of 263 for men and 175 for women, was the second highest in the world. The same study also reported suicide as the second most common cause of death for unnatural death that is, more deaths are caused by suicide than by HIV/AIDS, cancer or cardiac illness. This is in the context of the situation in India where 90 per cent of people who need mental health support do not have access to it. There is a significant human resource gap of mental health professionals. There is no policy for mental health or suicide prevention. And attempted suicide is still a crime! Suicide, however, is not merely a health issue. We are a society in transition. There is significant violence, discrimination, exclusion and intolerance that form the social canvas of our times. There is a mismatch of aspirations and opportunity. Relationships are not based on respect and knowledge, but transactional contracts of one-upmanship. The discourse with our children is full of criticism and unreasonable expectations. The young, the old, the women and men in our society are vulnerable to demoralisation. Such demoralisation is a breeding ground for helplessness. Is it possible for a society to reach out to people who are thinking about suicide before they attempt it with a fatal or a non-fatal end? Is it possible for a person to be offered support? Is it possible to help a person step back and see at least a speck of hope to explore alternatives and choices one more time? The answer is a clear yes. Without waiting for changes in the law or development of a policy, we all must try and inform and skill ourselves to respond to people experiencing psychological distress. We must start by creating space for conversations in our relationships. Let us learn not to judge people or force our opinions on them. Just listen and validate the persons experiences. We must learn to recognise symptoms of psychological distress and illness. If people tell you that they are sad or feeling hopeless, do take them seriously. If they have lost interest, if they are not able to enjoy, if they have become withdrawn or if they are extremely anxious, recognise these as features of depression, which if treated early, will prevent suicidal thoughts. Do not just ask a depressed person to pull up their socks and live. Explore if they have had thoughts of harming themselves. Have they attempted self-harm in the past? If they have, it increases the likelihood that they might attempt it again. Also remember, if the person is intoxicated, it is more likely that he/she would attempt suicide. Do not patronise. Do not make the person feel guilty. Be with the person. Your words have power; do not use them in a trivial manner. Sometimes, sensitive silence is better than goading. Help people navigate their problems without imposing a solution on them.

Vulnerable people

If you are overwhelmed, do not be brave by trying to support the person on your own. Involve other people, share the responsibility of caring. Most large cities have volunteer organisations that provide phone-based support to people in distress. Most medical colleges have departments of psychiatry and most district headquarters have psychiatrists in private practice. If you cannot find a mental health professional, approach any system that provides support to people who are vulnerable such as the resident welfare association, the police, a health service, etc. There is a psychological framework that precipitates suicidal thoughts. It includes black-andwhite thinking, a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. The person also may be coping with poverty, unemployment and debt. There may be a rejection in a relationship and failure in examinations. For women, experiences of violence and abuse in intimate relationships may be a determining factor. For a large number of people, there may be an underlying illness like depression or schizophrenia. There may be a history of substance abuse with alcohol, cannabis or benzodiazepines. There is a relatively easy access to means of suicide in our country. Pesticides and easily available prescription only medicines create a risky environment for such vulnerable individuals. How does an individual who is considering suicide as an option help himself/herself? Let me address you directly and urge you to seek help immediately. First, it is important to remember that there are many people who did step back and live and were able to be hopeful one more time. People are resilient and people do survive. You are resilient and you can survive! Step back for a moment. Talk to someone. It could be a friend, a colleague, a family member, a counsellor, a spiritual person, or any other person that you may have access to. You have a right to live. Plan the next hour to be with someone or talk to someone, then with his or her help, plan the next 24 hours. Include the step of seeking professional help in the plan. During this time, do not attempt to solve all your problems or even answer the question as to why you should live. Just let someone know how you feel and be with them. No decisions need to be taken. Each passing moment will give you a breather and then you will be able to look at your experiences and problems afresh.
Policy challenges

The lawmakers and policymakers have to shed their denial of mental health issues and put mental health and well-being on the agenda. The proposed Mental Health Care Bill which was recently introduced in the Rajya Sabha at least does two positive things: it creates a parity between health and mental health and it proposes to decriminalise suicide. Let us hope it is considered in the last session of this Lok Sabha.

The mental health policy has to clearly state goals and targets for reducing the frequency of suicide in the country. The access to mental health services in the community has to be increased substantively, and this will not only require a financial outlay for developing service delivery systems that do not exist, but also a change of thinking on how we develop a new mental health workforce. An immediate solution would be to embed online skills-based training on mental health and suicide prevention into training programmes for all teachers, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, nurses and human resource professionals. We have helplines and call centres for so many issues in this country. Is it not time for a 24x7 national suicide prevention hotline with trained professionals? Another step that would help decrease the rural suicide rates would be to increase awareness about locking pesticides away and safe. We are the only country which perhaps spends more on investigating suicide as a crime instead of preventing it. Let us change that, for each life is as precious as any other. (Dr. Achal Bhagat is senior consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Apollo Hospitals, and chairperson, Saarthak, a mental health non-governmental organisation.)

The Biggest Reviewer

Posts and tweets as votes?
It was promoted and to use television jargon, teased , quite like a potential Bollywood blockbuster. As if on cue, the social media went overboard over Rahul Gandhis First Day, First Show. Its one thing to have ball by ball or rather answer by answer commentary . But arent reviews even before the much hyped interview was aired, over the top? Im referring to those who jumped the gun with their prophecies like I bet you will hear more of Arnab than his star interviewee. Others complimented the Gandhi scion for his decision to face a tough interviewer and answer what The Nation Wants To Know. During the interview and soon after it was over, timelines erupted with sarcasm and derision. And this is the first time I think a topic was trending in almost equal measure both on facebook and twitter. A dip stick survey will reveal that most facebook posts fall into the personal realm family & friends, feats and feasts, resolutions and selfies. Which is why facebook is often regarded as a tame, perhaps vegan version of twitter. Few walls are splashed with political punditry. This time was different. Ive noticed that users who usually steer clear of politics, posted updates on their take or take away from the interview. Many were scathing. An hour into the show, Srinath Rajarams timeline analogy of a student in an examination writing whatever he studied regardless of the questions, triggered a wave of similar spoofs either bursts of improvisation or telepathy. Naveen Chowdary Tummala launched an anaphoric We must empower people broadside. Nabarun Ghosh was just as unsparing with his cheeky Mere Paas Empowerment Hai. Mere Paas RTI Hai. Mere Paas Youth Hai. Mere paas Ma Bi Hai. The Singer & DJ even spotted an AMUL hoarding that carried the Najawab Interview and posted a picture on his wall. As facebook was slowly digesting the overkill, Mathangi Srinivasamurti

summed it all up with the buzzwords in India today System, Empowerment, Change, Women, Youth Frankly Speaking, I have never seen facebook so caught up with a particular subject. As the interview was playing out, I kept looking up twitter as well. Surprisingly, none of Rahuls most vociferous critics had tweeted midway. Not even Narendra Modi ,who, perhaps for strategic reasons, chose not to tweet about the interview at all. Which I thought was a good thing as its always advisable to judge, if at all, at the end of any performance. Some retweeted barbs from followers like RTI standing for Return To Italy. Newslaundry tweeted a version of The Interview That Wasnt in its Criticles section. Across the social media, if you cut out the jibes and content that cannot fall under the fair comment category, the responses made for humorous reading. They were quite like wisecracks at theatres, that can sometimes be more entertaining than the movie playing on screen! The verdict is now out as loudly as you can possibly fathom. The social media is the biggest reviewer of the mainstream media. Thats how its meant to be. Viewers and readers are the jury. Obviously, the entire army of facebookers and tweeple may not be qualified to sit in judgment. But a good number of discerning people exist on this platform. And they are watching. What made folks on the social media so interested in what they saw, apart from the fact that this was Rahul Gandhis first television sit down interview? I interpret this as a clear indication that the common man is today very concerned about the outcome of the 2014 election. Twitter has a lions share of political partymen or at least those who owe allegiance to one party or the other. There is nothing new about caustic tweets. But to me, facebook, overflowing with wall posts on a political issue from people I know are apolitical, is what brings up my antenna. To those who say that tweets and posts and Like buttons are not votes, its time to think again. Keywords: the social network column, sanjay pinto column, social networking, facebook