VOX POPULI
by
Aam Admi
Issue: 120
Date: 07.07.2012
Contents:
1. Pakistan: The Fount Of Terrorism, But India Should Continue To Talk
2. Abu Jundal Affair: For God's Sake, Keep Interrogation Secret
3. CRPF Attack in Bastar Stinks to High Heaven
4. India's Economy: Discard Keynes, Tread The Mahatma's Way
5. Of Nuclear Power Plant's & Safety Features
6. Dhoble’s German Fracas
Pakistan: The Fount Of Terrorism, But India Should Continue To Talk
India always seems to have too high expectations from Pakistan. This is evident from the disappointments expressed in the various incidents relating to the release of death row prisoners in Pakistan to the continued denial of the Pakistan State's involvement in the 26/11 terror incident at Mumbai and the refusal of Pakistan to look rationally at the many dossiers sent by India in this matter. This inspite of the West including both the US & UK being very clear about Pakistan’s involvement in the incident. This is kind of normal since life teaches us that irrespective of how well you deal with anyone, they would reciprocate their own way and not necessarily in the same manner as you. Pakistan is a nation which has many faces which even the US has now understood through the various charades and games that Pakistan continues to play with them. India had warned the US all along but then the US never listened and is re-learning this out of its own experience. It is only now that the US is finally coming around to the fact what India has been telling them for decades about the Pakistan leadership and establishment being complicit with terrorism. Given the state of Pakistan’s economy the revenue stream arising from terror, both in terms of supporting it for the money coming through it from drugs and extortion as also combating it, when money comes in as aid from the US & the West, terror is a golden goose for them. Or putting it another way, Pakistan has the terror toast buttered on both sides to gorge upon. Thus in Afghanistan if the Taliban does not become active by the time of the US withdrawal in 2014 then it is to Pakistan’s disadvantage. That is precisely the reason why India will face a stoic denial from Pakistan on all matters of terror but that does not mean that India should give up on dialogue. The same logic on terror applies to Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan if you saw him at the recent NATO conference in Chicago basking in the spotlight of the West created by the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda. Once the US & NATO forces withdraw one wonders if he would like to remain in his home country since then the aid pipeline would not be as bountiful as it is now. On these billions of dollars of Western aid, the entire Karzai clan, his Cabinet and those close to him have minted money hand over fist and are now looking at more comfortable climes to live out their retirement. The best way to deal with terror would be for the West to switch focus from Iran and put sanctions on both Pakistan and Afghanistan isolating them both financially as well as physically by a blockade and thus throttle terrorism and choke it off until it is dead. There is no other way to make this work.
Abu Jundal Affair: For God's Sake, Keep Interrogation Secret
The manner that we deal these days with issues of national importance is rather sad. With the media very strong and active, it is almost as if everyone including government officials and ministers also seem to be in a rush to tell their side of the story first. The first is to take credit for the achievement and cover themselves with glory as is evident in the Abu Jundal story. The publicity being given to this person’s purported actions in relation to 26/11 are all over the media with even Home Minister Chidambaram jumping into the fray about the manner in which the accused was intercepted and deported from Saudi Arabia. Now considering that 26/11 was a serious issue and there is a need even after so many years to get to the bottom of it, it is rather disappointing to see the manner in which it is being handled. To shoot holes in the story that is pieced together from what has come out in the media, the accused is an uneducated person initiated into terror through a process of training by the ISI supposedly. For our intelligence agencies to stoop down and claim laurels in extracting information from such people is rather sad. There have been doubts cast about the person irrespective of the DNA check and for all you know he may have been planted by the ISI to sing a story to which they know the Indian intelligence agencies will dance to. We all know a couple of months back how some Pakistani businessmen visiting India were branded terrorists by our intelligence agencies and an alert was sent to all major cities and then when the truth came out our agencies like RAW and others had more than mud on their face. By P Chidambaram getting involved in it, we are only making the matter more complicated in terms of our relationship with Pakistan. Why can we not keep all this under wraps after the initial announcement of the suspect’s arrest until there is sure information and definite things to say to the media? Why do we expose ourselves unnecessarily and look like fools? There is nothing wrong with the media looking for scoops in such stories but at the same time the intelligence agencies should not live up to their existing reputation of being as effective as a sieve in keeping critical information secret. Will our authorities at least now learn the meaning of Secret, Top Secret and For Your Eyes Only or do they still believe that these phrases are seen only in 007 James Bond movies or its desi version like Agent Vinod!
CRPF Attack in Bastar Stinks to High Heaven
In the instance of the CRPF attack in Bastar where 19 ‘Maoists’ were killed one can see the authorities and again Minister Chidambaran going to the media is to get the official side of the story out first. This would make it appear that all other versions of the incident coming out in the media would be seen by the general public as rebuttals. This is the common enough strategy one follows in road accidents where you try to take the upper-hand so that even if the fault is yours the other party is sufficiently cowed down to express or justify his version. In all this talk of the CRPF shooting in self-defence and whether they do not have a right to defend themselves, the fact that axes were used to mutilate the bodies after they had been shot and killed, is being lost. Why was this brutality necessary? Why were no autopsies done? How were these people identified as Maoists? The villagers say something else altogether and why were women, teenagers and children shot down. If it was close to midnight why were the operations not deferred till the morning and the suspected Maoists surrounded by calling for extra forces so that casualties could have been minimized? If operations had to be completed for operational reasons at the dead of night why were not high powered floodlights used to throw more light on hazy identities? Defending themselves by saying that women and children were held as shields by the Maoists or that the Maoists have women cadre is not exactly covering themselves with any glory. Rushing to the media to take credit P Chidambaran had to eat crow later on national media apologizing if (!) the villagers were innocent bystanders. It is good that the Home Minister but it looked as doing lip service of an apology. Is saying sorry enough to the villagers who have lost their near and dear ones? Is the government not expected to weight its options and then act. We seem in the new ally relationship with the US taking on their habits of killing innocent civilians and then calling it firstly ‘collateral damage’ and thinking that just by saying sorry you are absolved of guilt. This will not work in India, sir! Thus the CRPF-Bastar operation stink smells to high heaven that something rotten has happened there that night and it is time that the true story came out.
India's Economy: Discard Keynes, Tread The Mahatma's Way
The PM’s reference to activating animal instincts in economy refers to Keynesian economics which is part of economics textbook lore but what we need in India is a practical and hands-on approach in tackling the economic mess that we are in now. Why we cannot follow Mahatma Gandhi’s prescription for our economy which is more contemporary than Keynes and stems from an intimate knowledge of the needs of our people is something that is not understood? Mahatma Gandhi had suggested to going back to panchayati raj, making the village as the basic unit of the economy, concentrating in production of ‘desi ’ goods so that we can make the lot of our own people better. Surely we can adapt the Mahatma’s ideas to fit in with current times when we have been seeing that our policy planners in the economic field seem to be completely out of ideas on how to tackle our economy. Their only approach seems to the palliative way like when you go the doctor he will give you a dose of medicine and ask you to come after 3 days if the complaint persists. And when you go back after this time he continues with the same medicine or changes the medication experimenting with you like a guinea pig. So also our economists at the helm of the financial health of our country who buy time in lots of 2-3 months or 6 months or 1 year depending on who is speaking out and when and their constant refrain is that things will get better when actually the reverse is happening and maters are getting worse. This is a complete shame and it is time that the PM in his new economic avatar, saddled with the old economists team, rolls up his shirt-sleeves and gets down to serious business. We have tried different models and one thinks it is time to give the Mahatma's ideas a chance so that inclusive development does not become a slogan but is part of the development process. In the 21st century and after 65 years of Independence we cannot have people continue to die, 61 at last count, every year in the Brahmaputra floods in Assam and we have simply done nothing about it. Similarly we have set up power plants, both gas and coal based, but do not have the fuel to supply them while the country reels under power shortages, more so in the summers. We have surplus grain because of a good monsoon that we cannot store and therefore pray for a bad monsoon the next year so that the grain stocks balance out themselves. All this needs to corrected and quickly if India has to stand proudly in the comity of nations of this world. FDI is not the be-all and end-all of our economic maladies like the Chief Economic Advisor, Kaushik Basu is making it out to be and who inveterately seems unable to get out of the habit of putting his foot in his mouth, which he did again by saying that prices will come down in 2-3 months. Will he guarantee that? Unfortunately he has lost all credibility and no one believes anything he says.
Of Nuclear Power Plant's & Safety Features
The news of the Kudankulam NPP commissioning in its final stages is being carried in the media while at the same time there is no advice on the progress of the report submitted by the High Court judges on the public hearing and what the Tamil Nadu and/or the Central Govt. is planning to do about that. Also there have been earthquakes felt in Gujarat coast where a NPP is planned as also near the Jaitapur NPP site in Ratnagiri district of Maharasthra albeit in the range of 3 - 4 on the Richter scale over the last 6 months. We do hope that per the pattern of the earthquakes, they do not move southward and down to Kudankulam to test the safety that the government has claimed that it has built into the plant post-Fukushima.
Dhoble’s German Fracas
We have another comment covered by the media over 29th June 2012 that ACP Dhoble and his team had asked some German women tourists who were at a pub in Mumbai to come with them to the police station. The video grabs showed the German women arguing with the policemen asking why they should go to the police station. The media, one thinks, should stay away from such incidents and let the police do their job particularly in these times of terror. The visit may have been innocuous enough to establish the validity of their visas, check their antecedents and then let them go. These kind of things routinely happen abroad, more so in Communist countries, where sometimes visiting Indians are asked to come to the police station. We have no hullabaloo raised about such incidents and even when our ex-Presidents, Ministers and publicly known members of our society are put through security procedures in the West particularly in the US, we react by saying that they should comply with established regulations and should not be expected to be treated as VIP’s as at home. So why should these German women not go through a simple procedure of visiting a police station to check their antecedents. Should we not have the same yardsticks for Indians as well as foreigners? Or is the colonial mindset so embedded in our psyches that we will bend backwards whenever we see a white skin?
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