UNAWARE OF GOLD - Asian writers in the West know little of their traditional literatures

Ashok Mitra
The Telegraph, 29 October

Britannia has long ceased to rule the waves. No matter, thanks to the American century, English has retained its dominance on the global stage. It is by far the most important lingua franca for conducting international affairs, including trade and communications. Even the obstreperous French have come round to acknowledging this, for-them-hard-to-swallow, reality.

The rapid spread of the English language has coincided with another equally breathtaking development. Bright youngsters, the offspring of families who migrated from the subcontinent and are settled on either side of the Atlantic, have emerged as major phenomena on the international literary scene. They are an exceptionally clever lot, coming as they usually do from affluent, fairly sophisticated households. Their parents, financially secure and socially well-established in the United States of America or Britain, have sent the children to distinguished academic precincts, where they have often outshone the native breed. Quite a few of these bright young things, with a Pakistani or Indian or Bangladeshi background, have taken to literary activity as a profession. Writing either poetry or fiction, some amongst them have in no time created a niche for themselves in the fiercely competitive literary arena. The English they write is smart and elegant and exudes a certain charm. The emerging market in the US as well as in Britain for ‘ethnic’ themes has provided them with a fortuitous additional advantage.

Many of the young ones venturing on a literary career have been taken aback by the degree of success they have achieved. The works of fiction they write find a roaring market. Literary awards such as the Pulitzer and Man Booker come their way. Established publishers make a beeline for them and inveigle them into signing contracts for new works; the advance offered sometimes amounts to as much as five hundred thousand or a million dollars.

All kudos to this new generation. They are a determined lot, they work hard, and they certainly have a feel for the joys and achings the information-technology-laden global society is experiencing. Some of them have exhibited remarkable dexterity in weaving stories around the challenges migrant families they have sprung from face in the new environment that they have settled in. This is occasionally accompanied by a moderate dose of nostalgic mishmash for the land they have left behind.

While what such émigré writers produce is attractive in their own manner, the more intense issues afflicting humankind are rarely their cup of tea. A vast quantity of their products are in the nature of intra-mural conversations on themes of immediacy, for instance, one group of migrants interacting with other groups, or some assorted migrants interacting with assorted original settlers. Often the focus is still narrower, such as on some boy involved with some girl, or some boy involved with some other boy, or some girl involved with some other girl. As one finishes reading a random specimen of these literary endeavours, one does get the whiff of a certain climate of emotions; perhaps the whiff is not even of a climate, but merely of a transient weather.

A disturbing thought intrudes. It is more than possible that many of these writers of south Asian extraction, famous and rich on either side of the Atlantic, do not have even a nodding acquaintance with what goes on in the field of literature in the languages their migrating families were born in. For example, one such writer bearing a Bengali surname, who might have won a Pulitzer or a Man Booker, would conceivably have never heard of Manik Bandyopadhyay. Or consider the case of a young man from an emigrating Lahore household, currently in the limelight of global acclaim because of his best-selling work of fiction in English; he does not have even a cursory acquaintance with Sadat Hasan Manto. Both Manik Bandyopadhyay and Manto died more than half a century ago in dire penury. They continue to be unrecognized in international literary circles. In their own countries too, only a limited number of copies of their works get sold every year. Most of their output remains untranslated into English or any other important foreign language. Whatever is not available in such translations is reckoned as not worthy of being considered as great literature.

Besides, literary judgment itself is now transformed beyond recognition. Globalization has changed the pattern of daily living, almost everywhere, for the average householder. There are innumerable demands on the time set aside for leisure and recreation. Reading occupies an insignificant corner of this space. Given this parametric constraint, light reading is the preferred menu; few are interested in exploring the angst defining the human condition.

Move back three-quarters of a century or less. Dark colonial days, the stupor of hunger, illiteracy and superstition: the dignity of existence was a foreign concept for millions in subjugated lands. And yet, alongside the frequency of excruciating suffering and brutal goings-on, dreams would sprout, passions would find their outlet, starving writers, their creative power stripped for action, would beget literature with the impress of breathlessly daring imagination. The duo, Manik Bandyopadhyay and Manto, did precisely that, one in Bengali, the other in Urdu, exploring the lower depths as much of the mind of an individual as of society. They, at the same time, kept watch on the grisly dance of decadence in the colonial milieu with a merciless enchantment.

Bandyopadhyay and Manto were without question two of the greatest writers of the 20th century; obiter dictum or no, the statement can be defended even after account is taken of the output in the world’s major languages. Bandyopadhyay was barely 26 when he wrote, at one go, in overlapped time, those two outstanding works of fiction, Marionette Dance and The Boatman of Padma. This pair of novels were serialized in two literary monthlies: one journal would pay Bandyopadhyay five rupees per installment, the other offered the princely sum of fifteen rupees per piece. Manto, almost similarly placed, scraped together some sort of a living preparing scripts for Bombay films and, later, as a journalist in Lahore. Economic distress never parted company with either of them.

Historical progress is described as the configuration where time future packs within itself less of inequity than time past or time present. The hypothesis unfortunately does not hold for either Bandyopadhyay or Manto; their claim to greatness continues to receive short shrift. Disbelievers are invited to read just one searing short story Manto wrote on the grisly tragedy of the Partition. A teenaged girl is snatched away from her family during the bestial frenzy of the ongoing communal turmoil. She must have been violated a hundred times in the course of a couple of days. The desperate father finally discovers her inert body in a dingy, suffocating room. A doctor is called in, he takes a quick look at the girl’s still figure. Before examining her further, he asks the window to be opened up — “Khol do” — so that some fresh air could come in. The doctor’s stentorian voice perhaps penetrates into the furthest recess of the seemingly lifeless girl’s subconscious, it interprets the order in the light of the harrowing experience of the past few days; the girl’s hands try to make a movement towards the direction of the strings tying her salwar. The father goes berserk in joy: “She is still alive, my daughter is alive.”

The best-selling crowd of young writers of south Asian descent, have not, it is an odds-on probability, heard of Manto’s “Khol do”, nor have they come across any of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s explosive short stories on the more horrid aspects of social disintegration. Their ignorance leaves them unruffled. Old, the market has assured them, is not gold; what they produce, is.

EVOLUTION & IMPASSE

Some special features of human nature have combined with material circumstances to produce the contemporary sickness of human civilisation.

By AMLAN DATTA
The Statesman, 28/29 October

MAN, it has been said, makes his own history. He does it through a struggle for overcoming contradictions. There are conflicts and contradictions of different kinds. Every epoch in history tends to be dominated by a particular kind of conflict and people belonging to that epoch become strongly inclined to interpret all history in the light of their fragmentary experience. It often happens that when a new age arrives people are handicapped by a kind of impaired vision as they live in the twilight of a past epoch. Thus, a shadow falls between consciousness and existence, for consciousness is not solely determined by the experience of time present; it is strongly influenced by inherited prejudices, memories of old enmities and the enchantment of an imaginary past. Enlightenment never ceases to be a struggle of escape from old and strongly entrenched habits of thought and feelings. This struggle provides the background for the role of reason in the making of history.

Our own epoch is dominated by a major contradiction which is quite special. In its range and implications for the future, it is unprecedented. It provides new perspectives for age-old ideas on unity and conflict in human society. Since the 1970s, an increasing number of people all over the world have become conscious as never before of the spectre of an ecological imbalance carrying with it the threat of a global disaster. The scale of this impending catastrophe makes it truly unprecedented. The problem can also be viewed in terms of the possible consequences of a big war in future. If a third World War does happen, it will demonstrate once for all and rather too late the ultimate unity of interest of all mankind by plunging the whole world in a common ruin.

The idea of the human family has been preached by saints memorably since ancient times. Interactions, both positive and negative, among different parts of the world have existed for a very long time. Despite this inter-relatedness of races and nations all past history has been the history of local civilisations. Mercifully, the devastation caused by the fiercest of wars in earlier times was local devastation. Notwithstanding the talk of “globalisation”, so common today, civilisations continue to be local in spirit. “Clash of civilisations” continues unabated and provides at this hour a leading theme for animated discussion. On the one hand, the threat to human survival at this hour is a global threat; on the other hand, humanity stays stubbornly divided and fragmented in spirit. This is the great contradiction that afflicts human society today.

When we look for an explanation of this situation, we risk getting confused by a multiplicity of proximate causes. What we need then is an inquiry at a deeper level. The search at that level leads on to a broader perception of the human predicament.

Some special features of human nature have combined with material circumstances to produce the contemporary sickness of human civilisation. When we take a purely materialistic view of this complex situation, we fail to arrive at an adequate understanding of the nature of the problem. At the same time, the material causes also deserve to be carefully noted. We have to pay attention to causal factors at two different levels and take into account the way in which they are inter-related.

For a true understanding of the crisis of our time it is best to look at the human condition in an evolutionary perspective. Among the factors which interact among themselves and chart the course of history, human nature is often thought to be a comparatively stable and changeless element. There is some truth in that thought, but it needs to be qualified in at least two ways. Changing forms of social organisation influence human nature by promoting some psychological tendencies and discouraging others, supporting certain aspirations and producing unforeseen discontents. There is also something else worth taking into account.

Human consciousness itself has stages of development. This makes any simple concept of a fixed human nature untenable. It will be just as well to elaborate on this theme. Human beings, to begin with, are ego-centric. This accords well with nature’s scheme. A person has to protect his body as a primary condition of survival. Since no two persons share the same body, attention to one’s body makes one self-centred as a matter of physical compulsion. However, it is also part of nature’s design to motivate human beings to reproduce themselves. The family comes to be included thus in an expanded image of the self. To a great extent, all kinship bonds, including the feeling of tribal solidarity, can be similarly explained. Such feelings belong to a primitive level of consciousness where active rationality does not play a major role. That is where “primitive” communism belonged. However that was not the end of history.

Trade played a vital role in guiding society towards new forms of human relationship beyond kinship. This equally marked a new stage in the evolution of human consciousness. Along with trade a calculating reason gained ascendancy and became influential, although “infra-rational” psychic forces did not cease to play a role in human affairs. As our way of life changes, so does our mode of thought.

The “calculus of pleasure and pain” induced a change in the concept of welfare. A normal family has a certain idea of collective welfare: a gain to one member of the family is felt as a gain for the whole family. Trading parties compete as well as cooperate; but each party has an idea of its separate interest and cooperation itself is based on calculated self-interest. Within limits, this looks reasonable. But it cannot provide a durable basis for a society at peace with itself.

In the hedonistic ethics of a commercial civilisation, happiness is measured separately for each individual. Also an idea gains ground that commodities, sold and purchased, provide the principal means of procuring happiness. To a large extent this makes happiness indistinguishable from sensuous pleasure. The basis is laid for materialistic ethics.

These ideas have played a positive role in liberating human mind from the stranglehold of “supernatural fears”. But they have their own shortcomings. Some of these shortcomings are simple, others more subtle. It is well known that the additional pleasure that a consumer derives from any particular commodity starts diminishing beyond a point as more and more of it is consumed. It is possible to seek an escape from this situation by courting a variety of luxury goods.

But this route of escape creates at least two kinds of problems. Only an affluent class can choose this route. The “conspicuous consumption” of this affluent class sharpens discontent among a much larger number of people who cannot afford that style of life. An unequal competition for wealth undermines the basis of happy social relationship and beyond a point luxury cannot compensate for this loss of genuine companionship. There is an additional complication that tends to go unnoticed. The rich are envied, but it is doubtful if they are enviably happy. Bondage to luxury cripples even the capacity to distinguish between purchasable excitement and the joy steady that proceeds from true union.

There is a state of union which ought to be valued not for the sake of any material gain, but for its own sake. This is not as uncommon or mysterious an experience as it is often supposed to be. One can detect it in the laughter of a child, although people made skeptical by the disappointments of life often fail to recognise it even when they come by it. Nature itself has planted in the human mind the capacity to feel an incomparable sense of freedom in motiveless union of what is within and what is without, overstepping the boundaries of an obstinately isolated self. A conscious recognition of the value of this freedom marks the beginning of that stage of consciousness which can be called the spiritual stage. The spiritual goes beyond the rational, but does not contradict reason.

Although a certain recognition of the higher levels of consciousness is not altogether missing at this hour, a tenacious and at times fierce feeling of tribal solidarity continues to play a role in human affairs. The individual feels a certain sense of security in staying tied to a limited group, even though the cost of group rivalry goes on escalating fearfully.

It is evident that there is a critical mismatch between the stage of development of man’s consciousness at large and what the material and ecological conditions demand today for human survival. Can mankind overcome this basic contradiction in the foreseeable future?

There is no certain answer to that question. Two contrary tendencies of human mind are ever at work side by side. On the one hand, there is inertia which makes one accept the present state as the only natural state and a reasonable basis for deriving rules for all time.

On the other hand, there is an evolutionary force, elan vital, which does not allow the human consciousness to stay permanently at rest, but urges it on to move from one stage to another. There are forms of social organisation which link up notably with states of consciousness. In large parts of the world the dominant form of social organisation today has been determined largely by the requirements of commerce and the market economy. Economic and political power have got intimately intertwined. Power, economic and political, is what leaders of this society aim at and accept as the purpose of their life with that devotion which religious people reserve for God. Other considerations exist but peripherally. Thus, for instance, when one has amassed enough wealth, it is considered proper and decent to use a small portion for charity, an act which still leaves one’s central purpose in life unaltered. This is a view of life which is difficult to reject in a society where power belongs to those who conform to it. Nonetheless, a rebellion against the status quo is unavoidable with unforeseeable consequences.

There was a time when Marxism promised to provide a major plank for an ideological and political assault on the bourgeois civilisation. It now appears that communists in India and elsewhere professing the Marxian ideology have themselves adopted the essential features of the order which they wanted to overthrow. The spirit of rebellion against the dominant order of the day must seek now an alternative route and a new philosophy of life. In fact, there are several alternatives and some of these are unsafe, even regressive. What has been called “religious fundamentalism” as a mode of protest against modernism provides such a regressive ideology, leading back to a lower level of consciousness; marked by primitive solidarity, collective hatred and organised intolerance.

The fascination of totalitarianism in one form or another, combining a vindictive tribalism with modern technology, has misled successive generations in recent history. History counsels abundant caution. One may seek an exit from the existing situation, but there is the risk of landing in a worse situation unless one has the right sense of direction. One has to take reasonable precaution against losing one’s sense of direction.

Constructive work

Reasonable precaution quite often takes the form of hedging or combining opposites. It is a good idea to combine a movement of protest and resistance against injustice with a programme of constructive work and a visible commitment to peace. Let us present the problem concretely in a material context.

Spread of industrialisation across the globe is a major feature of the history of our time. Industrialisation has been justified on the ground that it is necessary for alleviation of poverty. But there are alternative patterns of industrialisation and the really important question relates to choice among these alternatives. The history of state-sponsored industrialisation from the time of Peter the Great to modern China as well as market-based “mercantilist” economies strongly suggests that the choice has all along been influenced by the presence of a special tendency at work. Let us state the matter in the simplest language. Industrialisation has proved attractive to nation states because it is necessary for military power. To that has been added the seduction of luxuries of a new middle class, the dominant class in society. This is a bias that economists very often overlook, nay, endorse on the ground that they should be professionally neutral about political matters. This professional neutrality has unfortunately strained the quality of the debate on industrialisation. The pull of power and wealth distorts the pattern of industrial development; those who criticise this distortion are wrongly accused of being opposed to industrialisation; and a kind of endorsement of this unfair accusation is provided by a deceptive silence on the part of those who are expected to know better.

Historically speaking, industrialisation has been an exceedingly painful experience in the early stages for large chunks of uprooted humanity. Some ameliorative measures are usually adopted at higher stages to give the process a semblance of respectability. But that still leaves a basic problem substantially unaltered. A widely adopted pattern of industrialisation leans distinctly towards heavy industry geared to the production of military hardware. Along with that come almost inevitably a number of other things, such as a centralised political system, growth of a powerful managerial stratum of society, a new middle class which lauds and leads this pattern of development, a consumerist culture and supporting social norms. Economic progress has come to denote all these things taken together. An unavoidable outcome of this situation is a crisis wrapped in a dilemma. Competitive programmes for strengthening national security lead to a frightful accumulation of weapons of mass destruction. What looks prudent for individual states considered separately takes the character of an increasing threat to the collective security of the world as whole. It is not easy for any single nation to opt out of this march towards a collective doom.

This makes a concerted peace movement an essential requirement for overcoming the contemporary crisis. Success along this line cannot be achieved overnight. There is no alternative to a gradual process of restoring sanity in human affairs. The spirit of the peace movement must percolate to all the constituent parts of society. It must also set in motion fresh ideas on the political and economic reorganisation of human society with an accent on decentralisation of power and sustainable development. The question of correct pattern of industrialisation and appropriate technology and the right balance between the city and the country should be set and settled in this larger context.

There is a related point which cannot be too strongly emphasised. India is struggling to make a transition to industrialisation under conditions of political pluralism and universal suffrage. No major country in the past had to face the same challenge of combining industrial development with broad-based democracy. This makes the Indian experiment a historic exception. The social sciences have to adjust themselves to the new requirements of material development consistent with peace.

Most of our thought is done in parts, thus leaving a special space cut out for philosophy. As the parts to be harmonised belong to different spheres of experience, one has to stand back to gain that larger framework within which an adequate integration is possible.

We have talked of institutions and ideas and discussed briefly the relationship between the two. Institutions are materialised ideas. It is not enough to have new ideas; we need a change in the material outfit of life. But all institutions are corruptible; therefore, it is not enough to have just a new set of institutions however ingeniously designed.

Social conscience

We need new institutions and energising ideas in close embrace and a wakeful social conscience keeping vigil. We have to have a sense of history and, at the same time, be watchful of what is happening right now. Man, like other animate beings, lives from day to day. But, unlike other animals, he has an awareness of an ancient inheritance and a moral commitment to a future beyond his own generation. It is only by a dialectical movement at several levels simultaneously that the evolutionary impasse of our times can be effectively negotiated.

For humanity as a whole, there is no roadmap to guide its onward journey. All we have is a certain sense of what we have left behind, some knowledge of where we are placed now and an intuitive understanding of the direction in which mankind has to strive and move in future. Hopefully it is possible to get an idea of progress derived from an enlightened view of stages of human development.

If that too sounds overly contentious, let us agree on something simpler: we have to aim at nothing higher or more mysterious than a tolerant and friendly human society. The transition from the present world to a global union of friendly societies is bound to be a long process with successive approximations across endless hurdles on the way and lots of surprises too.

The author, a noted economist, is former Vice Chancellor, Visva Bharati.

Who rules the world? France, of course!

John Lichfield

My son has made a startling discovery that will confirm the deepest fears of the leader writers of **The Sun**. Britain, according to French officialdom, is part of the the 99th dEpartement (county) of France. So is the United States. So are China, Russia, Gabon, Lithuania and Kazakhstan. In fact, the whole of the rest of the world, save Monaco, is merely the 99th dEpartement of France.

This discovery explains many things. It explains why Nicolas Sarkozy thinks he rules the world, even if he no longer reigns supreme in the heart of his ex-wife. It explains why President Sarkozy decided this week to save the planet by building fewer motorways in France. It explains why France was devastated not to win its own rugby World Cup. (Technically, however, France did win. South Africa is also part of the 99th dEpartement of France).

My son is sitting his baccalaurEat, the French equivalent of A-levels, next June. He recently had to sign his official examination entry form: the confirmation d’inscription au baccalaurEat gE*Eral. He was born in Washington DC and has Irish, British and American nationality but has been living in France for 11 years.
None of these complications troubled the French educational bureaucracy. His form was filled in as follows. Name: Lichfield, Charles. Nationality: foreigner. Born: Washington. DEpartement: 099. Country: United States. DEpartement 099? What is dEpartement 099?

There are 95 dEpartements, or counties, in metropolitan France, numbered from 01 (Ain, near Lyons) to 95 Val d’Oise (north of Paris). Their numbers can be found on all French car number plates. There is no dEpartement 96. That space is perhaps reserved for Wallonia, when Belgium finally splits in two. All the overseas dEpartements, Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana in the Americas and REunion in the Indian Ocean, count as dEpartement number 97.

Monaco, supposedly a sovereign nation, counts as dEpartement number 98. Has anyone told His Serene Highness, Prince Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre, Prince of Monaco and Marquis des Baux, that he is, in fact, the ruler of dEpartement 98? The whole of the rest of the world, my son explained to me, is dEpartement 99.

Surely this could not be so, I thought. Not even French officialdom would so sweepingly reject the claims to separate identity of other peoples. Was France so similar after all to the British and the Americans, to whom the rest of the world is merely a source of anger or amusement?

I was reminded of the celebrated New Yorker magazine front cover which showed the world, as viewed by the typical inhabitant of Manhattan. New Jersey took up 70 per cent of the globe. Could the whole of the rest of the world, in the French official mind, consist of one dEpartement of France?

A little investigative journalism (one phone call and a trawl of the Internet) proved that my son was entirely correct. For the education ministry, all foreigners who take the baccalaurEat have been born in dEpartement 99. According to the interior ministry, the votes of all French citizens who live abroad are cast in dEpartement 99. According to the social affairs ministry, all foreigners who use the French state health and pension system, the SEcuritE Sociale, started life in dEpartement 99. Much now becomes clear. Consider.

This has been a Black October for President Sarkozy. He had staked much on France winning the rugby World Cup, even announcing in advance that the France coach, Bernard Laporte, would enter his government. When France lost to England in the semi-final, the President was apparently incandescent. “Bang goes 1 per cent of GDP,” he said.

The President’s wife, CEcilia, finally won the divorce that she has been seeking for several months. In two interviews, she said, in effect, that she no longer loved her husband. She was not prepared to live a public lie as someone defined as merely the “wife of” a powerful husband that she no longer loved. Maybe that makes CEcilia Sarkozy into a feminist icon, of sorts.

The former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, supposedly Sarkozy’s ally, actually a kind of one-man opposition, says privately that “a man cannot govern France if he cannot hold on to his wife”. Ninety per cent of the French people tell pollsters that they disagree. In truth, judging by the remarks of my neighbours in Normandy and Paris, they do not entirely disagree.

Meanwhile, President Sarkozy is dealing with the first big challenge to his plans to make France work harder. A second transport strike looms unless he can persuade the railway unions that steam locomotives have (sadly) vanished and there is no longer any justification for engine drivers to retire at 50. The provisional signs are that M. Sarkozy and the more moderate unions are cooking up a deal that will blunt the strikes n and the reforms. The results will then be declared a “rupture” with the fudged reform agenda of the past.

After his environmental conference this week, President Sarkozy promised to save the planet by insulating French homes properly and sending more goods by rail and canal. Much that was agreed at the conference makes sense. However, a couple of months ago, the French state railways announced that they were winding down part of their freight operation. More goods will have to travel by road. No one seems to have told M. Sarkozy.

France has a way of doing things differently from the rest of the world. Small wonder. It now turns out that France believes, at the heart of its being, in its deepest national subconscious, that it is the rest of the world.

What happens elsewhere does not matter too much. President Sarkozy’s confidence in his own divine right to succeed rapidly recovered from the economic-growth-threatening defeat of the France rugby team. Challenged on the stuttering outlook for the French economy last week, he said: “France will have the highest level of growth in the world. France will have the lowest level of unemployment. I have been elected. I will succeed.”

This may seem an empty boast, mere bravado. Not necessarily. If the whole world is really France, it becomes a statement of the obvious.
What of poor CEcilia, meanwhile? She divorced the President to avoid the public eye. She has since been on the front cover of every French magazine, serious and non-serious. The king of the French paparazzi has predicted that she will become the new Princess Diana.

CEcilia is said to be considered fleeing into exile. But exile where? Wherever she goes, she will still be in dEpartement 99.

The Independent

Nayachar benefits all cock-and-bull: RSP

Anindita Chowdhury
The Statesman

KOLKATA, Oct. 26: Left Front partner RSP has found holes in the state government's arguments in favour of setting up a chemical hub for rapid industrialisation in the state. It has dismissed the latter's claim that the hub would generate large-scale employment as a “cock and bull story”.

Though, officially, all Left Front partners had given their nod for setting up a Petroleum Chemical and Petrochemical Investment Region at Nayachar, it is evident from what appears in a recent RSP publication that the party had been forced into a position it did not want to be in.

The CPI-M's junior partner has argued in its publication that in Haldia, only 4,000 people have found employment in various projects, including downstream industries. Hence, the state government's contention that the hub would provide “direct employment opportunities to 1 lakh people and another 10 lakh people will find employment in downstream industries is just a cock-and-bull story (ashade golpo).

Apprehensions have been expressed over developing infrastructure for the hub at government cost which, the Left Front ally believes, would draw real estate developers who are likely to "influence government policy” and indulge in land speculation. Apart from attacking the Central government, the RSP has rubbished claims that the project, once completed, would benefit local residents and improve their standard of living. According to the publication, the chemical industry is reliant on technology and isn't labour intensive. Hence, only people from the upper strata of society would find employment and improvement in the quality of life of the locals would remain a “daydream". But the project has been opposed on grounds of environmental hazards, keeping in mind violation of green laws in the country.
The RSP accused the CPI-M-led state government of following former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's policy which disregarded environmental impact for the sake of poverty eradication.

Despite the show of unity at the all-party meeting for the sake of coalition politics, the RSP has been critical of the CPI-M at various public meetings. Even during Cabinet discussions, RSP ministers reminded the chief minister of appointing an expert committee for the project as soon as possible.

Centre deals a blow

KOLKATA, Oct. 26: The Union ministry of environment and forestry (MoEF) may just have hammered the last nail into the coffin of the chief minister’s hopes of setting up a chemical hub in West Bengal. The MoEF has said that setting up of industries or expansion of existing industries is a prohibited activity in places such as Nayachar Island, that happen to be Coastal Regulation Zone areas. The ministry has also said that it had not, as of 5 October, received any proposal from West Bengal for setting up of any petrochemical or any other chemical industry in Nayachar Island. According to the ministry, Nayachar Island is classified as Coastal Regulation Zone I and Coastal Regulation Zone II.

Nayachar, all cock-and-bull: Nayachar fouls law

Business Standard / Kolkata October 27, 2007

Nayachar Island, the proposed site for the petrochemical hub project of the West Bengal government, would have to be de-notified form the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification of 1991 for setting up industry there.

The island lying at the confluence of Hooghly and Haldi rivers, off Haldia in Medinipur district, falls within the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) area, and is classified as CRZ I and CRZ III.

According to the Notification, setting up of industries is actively prohibited in any area classified as CRZ I, while areas falling within CRZ III could be used for developing pipelines, and conveying systems.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF)has conveyed in a recent letter dated October 5 to a Kolkata based NGO called Society for Direct Initiative for Social and Health Action(DISHA) that it had not received any proposal from the state government for setting up of petrochemical or chemical industry in Nayachar island.

The state government is likely to request the West Bengal State Coastal Zone Management Authority to de-notify Nayachar island from the CRZ, said Santanu Chakravorty of DISHA.

“However, the authority did not have the legal powers to de-notify the area from the CRZ on grounds of facilitating industry development”, he claimed.

West Bengal did not have a Coastal Zone Management Plan(CZMP) either, claimed the NGO, further establishing the lackadaisical attitude of the government on environmental issues. West Bengal has a very short coast-line compared to other coastal states, and thereby enhancing the coast-line's geo-ecological importance.

Major portions of Nayachar can be expected to fall under the CRZ I category, claimed the NGO, making it particularly vulnerable against industrial development.

This apart, DISHA noted that the state government had played an active role in evicting 20,000 fishermen from their seasonal fish-drying activities in Jambudwip a few years back, on grounds of protecting the mangroves.

The same government is willing to bend rules for bringing in industrial investment into the state, alleged DISHA.

In another move, the NGO has filed a contempt of court petition against the central and state environment departments in the Calcutta High Court for their inaction after the Court's order to take legal action against unscrupulous realtors and hoteliers at Mandarmoni near Digha.

The local tourism industry constructed hotels on the beach, destroying sand dunes and beach vegetation, alleged S Dev, general secretary of DISHA.

Nayachar, all cock-and-bull: Green hurdle to Bengal’s Nayachar hub plan

Indranil Chakraborty
The Financial Exress, Friday , October 26,

Kolkata, Oct 26The West Bengal government’s plan to include the riverine island of Nayachar off Haldia in the proposed chemical hub is unlikely to get the clearance of the Union ministry of environment & forests unless the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification of 1991 is modified.

After the violent opposition at Nandigram, which was originally proposed as part of the hub, the state had decided to build the hub around the existing petrochemicals facilities at Haldia. To ensure the minimum area requirement, it had then proposed to include Nayachar, a 47sq km natural island formed out of silt from the Hooghly river.

The Union ministry of environment and forests, responding to an application filed under the Right to Information (RTI) Act by a non-governmental organisation, has said the Nayachar island falls within the CRZ are and is classified as CRZ-I and CRZ-III, in line with the CRZ Notification of 1991.

The ministry has said, going by the CRZ notification, only certain listed activities like pipelines, conveying systems and storage of products are permissible.

However, the ministry has said, “In the coastal regulation zone area setting up of industries/expansion of existing industries is a prohibited activity.”

A Senthil Vel, additional director to the ministry, has informed the RTI applicant, Santanu Chacraveri of NGO Disha, that till now it has not received any proposal for setting up of petrochemical or any other chemical industry in Nayachar Island.

Pranabesh Sanyal, one of the four permanent central members of the National Coastal Regulation Authority, said he was not aware Nayachar falls under Zone III.

Sanyal, who along with six other specialists from various fields working on the feasibility study to determine whether there can be any industry in Nayachar under the Jadavpur University initiative, said their report would be ready in the next 15 days.

“I believe that if the chemical hub has to come up in Nayachar, the zone classification has to be changed from I to IV after a proper carrying-capacity study,” said Sanyal. “We are looking at all the aspects and will submit our report soon,” he added.

CRZ is an area between the high tide and low tide zone, plus the maximum area demarcated beyond the highest high tide zone. Under CRZ-V, industry can come up in the area beyond 200 metres of the highest high tide line, which in case of CRZ-I is 500 metres.

Chacraverti is of the opinion that Nayachar should come under CRZ-I. “If some one says that the zoning can be changed then one has to establish why the earlier zoning of Nayachar was wrong,” he said

Nayachar, all cock-and-bull: 'No industry permitted in Nayachar'

Saturday, October 27
Headlinesindia.com

Kolkata: In a jolt to the West Bengal government's proposed chemical hub at Nayachar Island in East Midnapore district, the Centre has stated that no industry could be set up there as it fell under Coastal Regulation Zones-I and III. "The Nayachar island falls within the Coastal Regulation Zone and falls under the category of CRZ-I and CRZ-III ... In the CRZ area setting up of industries/expansion of existing industries is a prohibited activity," Additional Director in the Ministry of Environment and Forests A Senthil Vel said in a letter to Santanu Chakraborty, an activist working for NGO 'Disha'.

Chakraborty had sought information from the MoEF under the RTI Act on whether the ministry had any knowledge of plans to set up petrochemical or any other chemical industry in Nayachar, whether Nayachar was covered under the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification and whether petrochemical or any other chemical industry was permitted there.

In his letter dated October 5, Senthil informed that the MoEF had not received any proposal for setting up of petrochemical or any other industry in Nayachar Island. West Bengal Industry Minister Nirupam Sen had, however, told newsmen on October 15 that the state government had submitted a specific proposal to the Centre for setting up the chemical hub at Nayachar. The proposal for the 11,000 acre hub was approved by the state cabinet on September 25.

Interestingly, although there was a State Coastal Zone Management Authority in West Bengal, the state had no Coastal Zone Management Plan. (PTI)

Nayachar, all cock-and-bull: Plan for chemical plants on Indian island draws flak

Bappa Majumdar
Reuters, Mon September 17

KOLKATA, India, Sept 17 (Reuters) - A plan to establish a chemicals industry complex off India's east coast has run into political and environmental problems, only months after a similar project had to be abandoned.

The communist government of West Bengal state wants to create a low-tax zone on Nayachar Island, with incentives for chemicals, petroleum and petrochemical industries, despite it being protected by environmental laws.

Government officials say Indonesia's Salim group is looking to develop the land in coordination with Indian state-run refiner Indian Oil Corp. (IOC.BO: Quote, Profile, Research).

Nayachar was chosen after a plan to develop farmland in nearby Nandigram along the West Bengal coast met with protests from the farmers whose land was to be taken over. That plan was shelved after police fired on protesters in March, killing 14.

But the environmental cost of the Nayachar project has provoked more protests from opposition groups, and drew flak from members of the communists own ruling alliance, who say a proper environmental assessment needs to be carried out.

Conservationists say the plan could kill marine life, including hundreds of endangered river dolphins, and rob thousands of fishermen of their livelihoods by polluting the Hooghly River delta leading out into the Bay of Bengal.

About 3,000 people live on the 64 sq km (25 sq mile) island, most involved in fishing.

The ecosystem will be damaged even by treated effluent from the chemical factories, which will be spread far by the tides, said Ramapati Kumar, a toxic effect expert for Greenpeace.

"When you do it in a sensitive and biodiverse area like Nayachar, the impact can be enormous, killing rare dolphins and other marine animals," he said. "The Nayachar project will be a disaster if it goes ahead."

NO PROBLEM?

Both Nayachar and Nandigram were chosen partly because of proximity to an existing chemicals complex at Haldia on the coast. But West Bengal's leaders -- the world's longest-serving democratically elected communist government -- deny the area's environment will be spoiled.

"We will take care of all necessary environmental norms and there should not be a problem," Anandadeb Mukherjee, a member of the West Bengal Coastal Authority said, without elaborating.

West Bengal must get permission from the central government to develop the land, which is protected under environmental laws.

The island is owned by the state government. It moved many families there in the late 1980s in a project to stimulate fishing in the area. But the government has not renewed the villagers' lease on their land, and the families will be forced to move on.

West Bengal said it will rehabilitate the affected families, but has not yet given any details.

Heavy industry usually pollutes wherever it is set up, conservationists say, particularly so in India where pollution regulations are not strictly enforced.

Chemical and heavy metals plants in Vapi, a town in western India's Gujarat state, have made it one of the ten most polluted places on Earth, according to a report released last week by the New York-based Blacksmith Institute.

But the strong tides around Nayachar island will spread waste across a much larger area than if the industry was based elsewhere in the state, said Pranabes Sanyal, an environmentalist and member of the National Coastal Zone Management Authority, a government agency.

"We cannot let the government go ahead with a project in an ecologically sensitive area without proper study," said Mortaza Hossain, a state government minister from a key government coalition ally.

Inequality in India and China: Is Globalization to Blame?

Pranab Bardhan
YaleGlobal, 15 October

BERKELEY: Economic inequality is on the rise around the world, and many analysts point their fingers at globalization. Are they right?

Economic inequality has even hit Asia, a region long characterized by relatively low inequality. A report from the Asian Development Bank states that economic inequality now nears the levels of Latin America, a region long characterized by high inequality.

In particular, China, which two decades back was one of the most equal countries in the world, is now among the most unequal countries. Its Gini coefficient – a standard measure of inequality, with zero indicating no inequality and one extreme inequality – for income inequality has now surpassed that of the US. If current trends continue, China may soon reach that of high-inequality countries like Brazil, Mexico and Chile. Bear in mind, such measurements are based on household survey data – therefore most surely underestimate true inequality as there is often large and increasing non-response to surveys from richer households.

The standard reaction in many circles to this phenomenon is that all this must be due to globalization, as Asian countries in general and China in particular have had major global integration during the last two decades. Yes, it is true that when new opportunities open up, the already better-endowed may often be in a better position to utilize them, as well as better-equipped to cope with the cold blasts of increased market competition.

But it is not always clear that globalization is the main force responsible for increased inequality. In fact, expansion of labor-intensive industrialization, as has happened in China as the economy opened up, may have helped large numbers of workers. Also, the usual process of economic development involves a major restructuring of the economy, with people moving from agriculture, a sector with low inequality, to other sectors. It is also the case that inequality increased more rapidly in the interior provinces in China than in the more globally exposed coastal provinces. In any case it is often statistically difficult to disentangle the effects of globalization from those of the ongoing forces of skill-biased technical progress, as with computers; structural and demographic changes; and macroeconomic policies.

The other reaction, usually on the opposite side, puts aside the issue of inequality and points to the wonders that globalization has done to eliminate extreme poverty, once massive in the two Asian giants, China and India. With global integration of these two economies, it is pointed out that poverty has declined substantially in India and dramatically in China over the last quarter century.

This reaction is also not well-founded. While expansion of exports of labor-intensive manufacturing lifted many people out of poverty in China during the last decade (but not in India, where exports are still mainly skill- and capital-intensive), the more important reason for the dramatic decline of poverty over the last three decades may actually lie elsewhere.

Estimates made at the World Bank suggest that two-thirds of the total decline in the numbers of poor people – below the admittedly crude poverty line of $1 a day per capita – in China between 1981 and 2004 already happened by the mid-1980s, before the big strides in foreign trade and investment in China during the 1990s and later. Much of the extreme poverty was concentrated in rural areas, and its large decline in the first half of the 1980s is perhaps mainly a result of the spurt in agricultural growth following de-collectivization, egalitarian land reform and readjustment of farm procurement prices – mostly internal factors that had little to do with global integration.

In India the latest survey data suggest that the rate of decline in poverty somewhat slowed for 1993-2005, the period of intensive opening of the economy, compared to the 1970s and 1980s, and that some child-health indicators, already dismal, have hardly improved in recent years. For example, the percentage of underweight children in India is much larger than in sub-Saharan Africa and has not changed much in the last decade or so. The growth in the agricultural sector, where much of the poverty is concentrated, has declined somewhat in the last decade, largely on account of the decline of public investment in areas like irrigation, which has little to do with globalization.

The Indian pace of poverty reduction has been slower than China’s, not just because growth has been much faster in China, but also because the same 1 percent growth rate reduces poverty in India by much less, largely on account of inequalities in wealth – particularly, land and education. Contrary to common perception, these inequalities are much higher in India than in China: The Gini coefficient of land distribution in rural India was 0.74 in 2003; the corresponding figure in China was 0.49 in 2002. India’s educational inequality is one of the worst in the world: According to the World Development Report 2006, published by the World Bank, the Gini coefficient of the distribution of adult schooling years in the population around 2000 was 0.56 in India, which is not just higher than 0.37 in China , but higher than that of almost all Latin American countries.

Another part of the conventional wisdom in the media as well as in academia is how the rising inequality and the inequality-induced grievances, particularly in the left-behind rural areas, cloud the horizon for the future of the Chinese polity and hence economic stability.

Frequently cited evidence of instability comes from Chinese police records, which suggest that incidents of social unrest have multiplied nearly nine-fold between 1994 and 2005. While the Chinese leadership is right to be concerned about the inequalities, the conventional wisdom in this matter is somewhat askew, as Harvard sociologist Martin Whyte has pointed out. Data from a 2004 national representative survey in China by his team show that the presumably disadvantaged people in the rural or remote areas are not particularly upset by the rising inequality. This may be because of the familiar “tunnel effect” in the inequality literature: Those who see other people prospering remain hopeful that their chance will come soon, much like drivers in a tunnel, whose hopes rise when blocked traffic in the next lane starts moving. This is particularly so with the relaxation of restrictions on mobility from villages and improvement in roads and transportation.

More than inequality, farmers are incensed by forcible land acquisitions or toxic pollution, but these disturbances are as yet localized. The Chinese leaders have succeeded in deflecting the wrath towards corrupt local officials and in localizing and containing the rural unrest. Opinion surveys suggest that the central leadership is still quite popular, while local officials are not.

Paradoxically, the potential for unrest may be greater in the currently-booming urban areas, where the real-estate bubble could break. Global recession could ripple through the excess-capacity industries and financially-shaky public banks. With more internet-connected and vocal middle classes, a history of massive worker layoffs and a large underclass of migrants, urban unrest may be more difficult to contain.

Issues like globalization, inequality, poverty and social discontent are thus much more complicated than are allowed in the standard accounts about China and India.

Pranab Bardhan is professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-chair of the Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. He was the editor of the “Journal of Development Economics” for many years.

Re-calibrating democracy in Bangladesh

Muhammad Zamir
Dhaka Courier, 26 October

The word democracy seems to mean different things to different people. For some it probably connotes the right to exercise one's choice with freedom, albeit responsibly. For others, it appears to suggest the freedom to use acquired power without any restraint or accountability or without the need to function within the due process of law. This difference in interpretation has become for all of us the central point in the re-organization of politics and political behaviour that is normally associated with the dynamics of democracy. We stand today at an important crossroad in our national existence. We are faced with challenges that have to be met and overcome. I am tempted here to refer and compare our current situation with that of Charles Dickens' observation in his incomparable 'Talc of Two Cities'- " It was the best of times. It was the worst of times". He was referring to Paris during the French Revolution. I am referring to Dhaka as it is today.

I have refrained from writing on the evolving and emerging democratic process within our country. I have done so consciously. I have been an interested spectator and watched tile unraveling of political partnerships and political parties. The intensity of the storm that started since the beginning of the year has gradually gained over the last few months. However. there are now hints that a transition and resolution of sorts is on the way.

Some among us have expressed anxiety and concern about the nature of the current process of governance within the country. Others have indicated satisfaction with the current situation. One political analyst from within the preceding category informed me the other day that Bangladesh had lost its democratic status in the eyes of the international community. He suggested that I should write about it. His concern emanated from the fact that we had not been invited to participate (for the first time since 2000, possibly because of our current indeterminate and unusual political status) in the Ministerial Meeting of the 'Community of Democracies' (a global group of 126 active participants and 20 observers) being held in Bamako. Mali in November this year. I have told my analyst friend that he should not read too much into this exclusion. I firmly believe that we will be there in other meetings of this important Group in the future. We will be there after we have completed the many sensitive and delicate tasks, associated with the restoration of a meaningful and functional democracy where the elected representatives will be accountable to the people for their actions.

We still have many miles to go before we can really claim to be a responsible democracy. There are many unresolved issues that need to be addressed. In the meantime we should try to be positive and constructive. We, in our own way, should also assist the current Administration to arrive at just decisions (pertaining to contentious criminal cases filed against important political and business personalities) according to due process of law.

We have a Chief Adviser who has recently dismissed the notion that the country is presently under a dual rule format. It has also been made clear that, despite the continuing status of emergency, he does not perceive any political role for the Armed Forces. The senior leadership of our Armed Forces has also clearly indicated that they are not interested in the taking over of power.

Nevertheless, it is also true that the Armed Forces have been playing an important role in matters of governance- the curbing of corruption, improvement of law and order, marketing of food items and the distribution of flood relief. From that point of view it has been an interesting partnership.

It has been suggested by some that the current Government or some of its Agencies have taken undue interest in the reformation of politics, in the changing of the leaderships of certain political parties within the country and in intimidating certain sections of the media. The Chief Adviser has denied this. We shall accept his view with the hope that the future will not prove his reassurance wrong.

However, it also needs to be noted that chaos prevails today within the two major parties. I personally believe that splintering of the Awami League and the BNP can only lead to the strengthening of the less affected and currently more organised extreme right wing parties who have within themselves extremist and fundamentalist elements. One hopes that the wrong genic is not let out of the proverbial bottle.
In the meantime, we have today, an interesting scenario within our political arena.

The ban on indoor politics has been lifted at least in and around Dhaka. There are still many restrictions that I wish were not present. I personally believe that there should be withdrawal of all restrictions in indoor politicking throughout the country, at least up to the Divisional Headquarters level. This would have been better. This might have facilitated greater exchange of views (at the Council and Executive Committee levels of political parties) on proposed reforms within the electoral process. This would have strengthened the hands of the Election Commission during their ongoing discussions with representatives of different political parties who could have presented their proposals on the basis of broad consensus.

It needs to be remembered that significant issues will have to be resolved by the Election Commission if the forthcoming election is to be considered as credible and fair. Media reports have indicated that the Election Commission is going to propose new provisions and amendments to the Representation of the People Order, 1972. They have a tough year ahead. In addition to the preparing of a corrected electoral roll and the relevant identity cards, they will also have to finalize the basic structure under which the future election will be held. They will also have to decide on sensitive issues like political parties being permitted to continue to have labour and student fronts and the total amount that can be spent by a candidate for his election. This is as difficult as it gets.

The Election Commission has apparently prepared a draft of the amended version of the Representation of People Order, 1972. This will be in the format of the Representation of People Ordinance, 2007. Once promulgated by the President it will acquire the status of law and will be binding in related areas. It has been reported in both the print and the electronic media that the Election Commission will finalize this proposed draft after their ongoing dialogue with the different political parties is competed by the end of November this year.

One can only hope that the Election Commission will be able to ensure that suitable rules are in place that will stop black money and muscle power from determining electoral results. This will necessitate each candidate filing with the Election Commission a detailed report about the current wealth status of the candidate and the immediate members of the candidate's family. There should also be a brief resume about the nature of his socio-economic activities within his prospective constituency and also whether he has ever been prosecuted and sentenced for any form of criminal activity. That should also include whether he is a defaulter of any loan. These details should subsequently be made available in a web page on the computer so that any voter from his constituency can access that page for information. If it is subsequently found that the candidate has filed wrong information or concealed information then his election from the constituency will have to be cancelled. At the end of the day we must have a matrix that will stop fly-by-night businessmen steamrolling their way into the political arena, getting nomination from political parties (on the basis of extortion/donation) and becoming Members of the Jatiyo Sangshad. Politics must not be seen as the pathway to wealth through participatory corruption. It must not also accord to a MP a status where he considers himself being above the due process of law and accountability. Some of the political parties who have very little presence throughout the country will probably term some of the EC's requirements as harsh or even undemocratic but that should not stop the EC from bringing back some order into the system.

The other day for example, one political party suggested to the Election Commission that 'willing candidates from a non-registered party should be allowed to participate in the elections through a registered party. This is absurd. If someone is so keen to participate. that person can always do so as an independent candidate.

The Election Commission and the political parties should also focus in their ongoing discussions on the following factors: (a) the question of having a faced regulatory mechanism pertaining to the receiving of donations by political parties, generating of other forms of revenue by such parties and their eventual expenditure (which has to be made more transparent and should include annual auditing) and (b) the publication of clear manifestos by each political party at least three months before the election date (with regard to their perspective policies on future agricultural initiatives, energy, vocational training and employment opportunities, healthcare, safeguarding of human rights, higher education, dissemination of information technology. improvements to be undertaken in the transport and communications sector, the facilities to be accorded to our hardworking expatriate community and the diversification of our manufacturing capacity and the export base). These manifestos should be devoid of platitudes and focus on real answers to real issues, as they exist both at the District levels and the National level.

We need to move one step ahead in the global race and restore confidence in us within the international community. This will help us again to emerge as a country others can bank on and invest in. Only then will democracy find a meaningful expression.

Muhammad Zamir is a former ambassador and secretary to the government of Bangladesh

We were far more liberal then

Jawed Naqvi
Dawn, 24 October

AT most railway stations in British India, so I am told, there were separate water pitchers kept for Hindu passengers and Muslim passengers. A label on each read Hindu water and Muslim water. We divided colours too. Green became known as Islamic even though no Green Party of the dozens that exist today is covertly or overtly Muslim.

Similarly, saffron came to be identified among Hindus as a colour of tyaag or sacrifice even though saffron, to my knowledge, is grown exclusively in Christian Spain, Muslim Iran and predominantly Muslim Kashmir. Some of this cussedness is recent. In the old days we were more liberal.

The imposing entrance to Delhi’s Purana Qila, a mediaeval fortress built in stages by Mughal Emperor Humayun and his Afghan challenger Sher Shah Suri, is decorated with a large six-cornered star. In today’s context the design would be seen as a Jewish symbol — the Star of David. Another engraving on the gate looks like a lotus, widely acknowledged as a symbol of Buddhism, but which has been co-opted recently as an insignia of Hindu revivalism, and election symbol of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Can we conclude that at least some of the Muslim rulers of India were not as bigoted as many of us have become today? Or is it possible that India’s former rulers had no time to waste on what was kosher or what was haram in art? Nowadays we must emphasise the five-pointed star with the crescent as a symbol of Islam.

The Red Cross has had to create a Red Crescent for the noble movement to become acceptable in Muslim countries. Similarly, little do we realise that the five-point star has a recent origin. It was in the Ottoman era of Sultan Salim that the first separation took place between the religious flag and the national flag. The national flag was red with a crescent and the religious flag was green with a crescent. Only later, a five-cornered star was added to symbolise the five pillars of Islam.

Theodor Herzl popularised the Star of David as the symbol of the new Zionist movement. I am told Jews wanted to have a simple geometric symbol to identify Judaism in the manner in which the Christian community employed the cross. But today’s Iranians won’t have any of that. They will not wear a tie because it reminds them of the Christian cross.

It would, of course, be a mistake to assume that our rigid attitude towards art, including its colours and geometrical symbols stems from some kind of Third World atavism. Cultural morbidity in this respect has attained a glorious high in the United States and its alter ego, Israel.

Now we are told that the US Navy will be spending about $600,000 to redesign or camouflage a 1960s barracks building in San Diego because of complaints that it looks like a swastika when viewed from the air. I am deluged with emails on the issue.

In the past, says one reader, this might have been a problem only for the occasional air traveller who happened to be over Coronado Island, but with the advent of aerial mapping and visualisation tools like Google Earth, everyone can see anything from the sky. In fact, many people have made a game out of finding oddities in satellite photos.

Now it’s one thing to see landmarks like this and snicker over a designer’s missteps 40 years ago (the navy says it noticed the shape but that it didn’t think anyone would see it from above), but it’s another thing altogether to complain to the navy about the shape of a building when viewed from space. But people really seem to have the time on their hands: the navy says it’s been inundated with complaints; enough, to justify spending that much money on new structures and extra bushes. It’s the first known case of its kind.

Mediaeval poet saint Kabir mocked missionaries of spiritual zeal thus: ‘Man na rangaye, rangaye jogi kapda.’ (The ascetic colours his clothes saffron but keeps his mind safely locked away in the darkness of his being.) If some obscurantist Jewish lobbyists are behind the campaign to change the shape of a 40-year-old building, it would be prudent for them to also check their own runaway neo-Nazis.

According to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, young Jewish groups are turning to the Nazi ideology. ‘Anti-Semitism has been swelling recently in Europe, and also in the Jewish state. Not long ago, the first Israeli neo-Nazi Internet site was launched. More precisely, it is an Israeli site in the Russian language. Who says there are no original productions here?’ the newspaper wrote recently.

The site is well organised, according to the paper. It has text and pictures showing the activists of the organisation, ‘The White Israeli Union’, some of them in Israel Defence Forces uniforms on the background of army camps and saluting with a raised arm. The expanded text is divided into sub-sections. There is one on ‘Who we are’, where the managers of the site introduce themselves as ‘Ilya from Haifa and Andrei from Arad’, and it is narrated there that the members of the organisation are ‘people who have pride in themselves and are sick of living among the dirty bastards’.

There is a section on ‘Who our enemies are’, where all the ‘enemies’ are extensively documented: the Jews, the Arabs, the immigrants from all Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, the Moroccans, the foreign workers — in short, the ‘black-asses’. In the material about the Arabs there is even a practical suggestion to enlist in the Israeli army a combat unit, in order to get weapons and begin to shoot at them in every possible circumstance.

‘Those who follow phenomena of this sort say that in its structure and content, the site resembles neo-Nazi sites in Russia, and strong connections exist between the activists here and the activists there,’ says the Haaretz. In the forum on the local site, there is an ambivalent attitude towards the fact that these proud white people are living in Israel. There are those who attack them for this and there are those who say that it is in fact important that some of ‘our people’ be in the ‘Jews’ state’ too.

The members who live in Israel explain that they want to defend the true Russian person on Israeli soil. They have a mission and so do, it seems, the people behind the swastika controversy, the graffiti vendors, the Danish cartoonist and those who are sworn to kill him. All art is useless, said Oscar Wilde. That was way before its religious zealots gave it a new purpose.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Indexing inhumanity, Indian style

P. Sainath
The Hindu, 26 October

It took minutes for the top guns to swing into action when the Sensex fell by several hundred points. But no Minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit the 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index.

It all happened around the same time. The day the Sensex crossed 19,000, India clocked in 94th in the Global Hunger Index — behind Ethiopia. Both stories did make it to the front page (in one daily at least). But, of course, the GHI ranking was mostly buried inside or not carried at all that day. The joy over the stunning rise of the media’s most loved index held on for a bit the next day. The same day, India clocked in as the leading nation in the number of women dying in childbirth. In this list, the second, third and fourth worst countries put together just about matched India’s 1.17 lakh deaths of women in childbirth. This story appeared in single column just beneath the Sensex surge.

Next came the fall of several hundred points in the Sensex. That is, barely a couple of days later. It took minutes for the top guns to swing into action. Fingers were in every dyke. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram lost no time in reassuring worried investors via the media. Other top officials were all over television, doing the same. “FM soothes the Market’s nerves” ran the ticker. The barrage — both media and official — kept up through the day. The panels of experts convened to celebrate the 19K summit were reconvened to explain why they’d tripped off the cliff. They then droned on about the merits of P-Notes, regulation and the future. What stood out, of course, was the swiftness of both government and media response to each twitch in the index.

No Minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit the 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index. That’s out of 118 countries. The daily, DNA, though, did capture the essence of the story with its report: “Ethiopians manage hunger better than us.” For indeed, they do these days. At least by the measure of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index. Ethiopia ranks a notch above us at 93. Draw the baseline anywhere in the 1990s, and you’ll find Ethiopia worked better at reducing hunger than we did. Pakistan ranks ahead of us, too, at 88. China logs in at 47. All our South Asian neighbours do better than us on this index, except Bangladesh. And who knows when it will overtake us? None of the countries boasts an economy growing at 9 per cent a year.

You’d think it was an issue worth some attention. But it was hard to find panels debating this on television. Or any editorials in the newspapers doing the same. No Ministers or top babus soothing the nerves of the hungry. No experts with furrowed brows warning that the trends could continue, even worsen.

The GHI is by no means the only measure of what’s happening. The United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organisation put it simply in 2006. Its State of Food Insecurity in the World report confirmed yet again that we have the largest number of undernourished people in the globe. The 2004 edition of the report had shown that India had added more people to the “newly hungry” in the planet than the rest of the world together. There, too, nations much worse off had done far better. Between the years 1995-97 and 2000-02, hunger grew in India at a time when it fell in Ethiopia.

There was also another link begging to be made. Not just between the Sensex and hunger stories. Let’s revert to the latest maternal mortality figures released by the WHO and others. Some 536,000 women died in childbirth in 2005. Of these, every fifth one of them, at least, was an Indian. That is, 117,000 of them. A total that could only be matched by Nigeria, Afghanistan and Congo together. Almost 99 per cent of all these deaths worldwide occurred in developing countries. Much of this, again, is amongst the poorer sections of the population.

If we were to look at specific groups or communities, this would be even clearer. Let alone on the hunger index, India’s rank in the U.N.’s Human Development Index is anyway dismal. There, at 126, we are below Bolivia, Guatemala and Gabon. Yet even that rank does not tell the full story. If we were to isolate the rich and the better off as a group, they might enter the top 10 nations. Efforts last year to look at adivasis as a group led pretty much in the reverse direction. One study found that if we were to derive the HDI for our tribes only, they would rank in the worst off 25 nations of the world.

That’s quite easy to believe. Canada has always been among the top 10 nations of the world in HDI rankings. In fact, it occupied the top slot for some years. Yet, a survey of its native or indigenous people towards the end of the last decade placed them at rank 63. That is, all those natives living on “reservations.” Across the world, tribal people mostly have a poor HDI profile.

And so it is in India, too, where they are pretty much at the bottom. The study that found their HDI to rank amongst the bottom 25 nations of the world, also found things to be worse by the region. The tribes of Orissa, it reports, fall below even the low end of the HDI of sub-Saharan African nations. This is by no means the only study to tell us how India’s tribes are doing. There are tons of official data to show us that in great detail. But there’s no rush to debate their survival in expert panels. They mostly get covered when they resist displacement. Often with loss of life. They make up just eight per cent of the population. But account for over 45 per cent of those losing their lands to projects.

The furore now on the import of wheat is welcome. At least the media have begun to look at the issue. But surely, it is also worth discussing how we came to import wheat in the first place. And how a nation with so many in hunger ended up exporting millions of tonnes of grain this decade. That too, at prices lower than those we offer to millions of poor people in this country.

New heights of misery

And no matter how the Sensex is doing, the misery index for the poor scales new heights in one sector after another. Health costs still mount. They push people into debt even faster than before. A study done for the WHO in six Indian States found that 16 per cent of households it looked at were pushed below the poverty line by heavy medical costs. Nearly 10,000 families from lower income groups were covered by the survey for the years 2002-05. Some 12 per cent had to sell their assets to meet health expenses. Over 43 per cent had to resort to loans for the same reasons.

Our answer to this has been: more of the same. More privatisation. Less and less of a public health system. In Mumbai, extortion by hospitals has become so frequent as to actually find mention in the media. But journalists do not get to make the link between the gutting of public services and the public’s misery. Much less can they track this in terms of private profiteering. That would go against the publication or channel’s stand of privatisation as a cure for all ills.

More than once this year, the Bombay High Court has warned hospitals against the cruel practice of holding back the body of a patient — demanding lakhs of rupees from the family before returning it. It still happens, though. Now even at government hospitals leased out to private managements. So a low income family is suddenly told it owes the hospital a huge sum of money. And that the body of its five-year-old girl will be released only when that sum is paid. A fine example of public-private partnership as it works today.

In fact, it would be good to devise a health index spanning the reform years. One that looks at how both rich and poor have done health-wise. How many years of life, for instance, are taken away from you by ill-health if you are one of India’s less well off citizens? In the world of the media, though, only one index matters: the Sensex. Watching which has spawned a whole little industry in itself. The numbers who pronounce on and debate it (in the media, anyway) are impressive. The oracles reading equity’s entrails for omens. Maybe we need a media relevance index. An MRI scan of mass-produced mediocrity.

Ethiopians manage hunger better than us

Rajesh Sinha
DNA, 15 October

In South Asia, only Bangladesh is below India’s 94th position in the Global Hunger Index

NEW DELHI: The second fastest growing economy in the world with an 8% plus growth rate lags behind its south Asian neighbours, except for Bangladesh in the Global Hunger Index.

Ranked 94th among 118 countries in the latest Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2007 from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), India’s score on the index is 25.03, a negligible improvement from 25.73 in 2003 was 25.73.

Even Ethiopia managed to reduce the index by 12.3, compared with the targeted 24.7, and is placed just ahead of India.

The index, comprising three indices — child malnutrition, child mortality and estimates of the proportion of people who are calorie deficient — ranks countries on a 100 point scale, with 0 being the best (no hunger) and 100 being the worst.

The index is mainly based on proportion of undernourished in the population, prevalence of underweight in children under five years and those under-five mortality rate.

Within South Asia, only Bangladesh does worse than India, with an index value of 28.40. Pakistan is ahead of India at 88th position with GHI of 22.70.

The whole of South Asia is ranked as a hunger hotspot, with hunger levels similar to sub Saharan Africa. The report says although the two regions have virtually identical GHI scores, their determining factors vary: in South Asia women have a lower nutritional status and more often give birth to babies with low birth weight.

In addition, young children are not fed properly for their age and are therefore often underweight. This is the result of the insufficient education of many South Asian women and their low status in society.

In India, where the large majority of South Asia’s population lives, economic growth in the agricultural sector has lagged considerably behind growth in other sectors over recent years.

This has had a negative effect on progress in alleviating poverty and hunger in rural areas. Furthermore, members of the lower castes and certain ethnic minorities continue to be discriminated against in society and are, therefore, disadvantaged with regard to educational opportunities and the labour market, the report says.

The worst country is Burundi with a GHI of 42.37 and the best is Libya with GHI of 0.87.

India is nowhere near the countries it loves to compare itself with. The other countries of the celebrated BRIC quartet are way ahead. Their index values are less than 10: Brazil 4.60, Russia 2.33 and China 8.37. South Africa has an index value of 5.25.

The index covers does not cover highly industrialised countries and some developing countries for which no data was available.

The Outsourced Brain

DAVID BROOKS
NYT, October 26

The gurus seek bliss amidst mountaintop solitude and serenity in the meditative trance, but I, grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization.

I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S.

Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my G.P.S. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line. More than once I experienced her mercy, for each of my transgressions would be greeted by nothing worse than a gentle, “Make a U-turn if possible.”

After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.

It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.

My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.

Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.

I click on its recommendations, sample 30 seconds of each song, and download the ones that appeal. I look on my iPod playlist and realize I’ve never heard of most of the artists I listen to. I was once one of those people with developed opinions about the Ramones, but now I’ve shed all that knowledge and blindly submit to a mishmash of anonymous groups like the Reindeer Section — a disturbing number of which seem to have had their music featured on the soundtrack of “The O.C.”

Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.

I am one with the external mind. Om.

Mobile web is finally getting started

Victor Keegan

Everything is up for grabs in the smartphone market.

It is interesting why so few of us use one of the breakthroughs of recent years: the ability to search the web from wherever we are with a mobile phone. This ought to be hugely empowering, enabling us to answer any question from wherever we happen to be instead of having to wait until we are within reach of a computer. If mobiles provided a good web experience, we would probably use them at home as well since the phone would already be close to our hands and the computer may need to be activated in another room.

There are a number of reasons why this hasn’t happened and why it may be about to change. It is partly because the operators have been shamefully greedy in trying to raid our pockets by charging for all the data we download even though we may never have wanted it in the first place. That is now changing as operators belatedly offer “all you can eat” tariffs — but it still won’t be enough to ignite the mobile web.

Why? Because the user experience is still not good enough. Mobiles were designed to make telephone calls. No one had any idea at the beginning that they would be as popular as they now are, let alone that they would house around 60 different functions, of which browsing the web is merely one.

As screens got bigger to make words, photos and videos easier to view, keyboards shrank, making it more difficult to key in the words you need for a search. On some phones you still have to make several thumb movements to get the cursor into the search box. Crazy. Small wonder mobile browsing is a minority sport, way behind texting, phone conversations and alarm calls in our priorities.

Now things are changing. Mobile phones are about to experience a rerun of the web wars of a few years ago which ended with Microsoft winning the browser battle (with Internet Explorer snuffing out Netscape) and Google triumphing in search. Hopefully, the best user experience will win (but do not bet too much on it). Everything is up for grabs in the smartphone market where London-based Symbian is the dominant supplier of operating systems (with 70 per cent of the market), pursued by Microsoft, Apple, Linux, and others. Opera from Norway is market leader in browsers but facing fresh competition from Apple’s Safari on the iPhone, Nokia’s own open-source offering and, soon, Google as well. Yahoo! has greatly improved its search experience. It needed to as Google will soon launch its improved mobile search software to lay claim to the goldmine of advertising-backed search.

Consumers will be in for a treat — as long as one of them doesn’t see all the others off and establish a monopoly.

— ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

Let’s not overestimate the threat

Adrian Hamilton

Should we be worried about the sudden change in Iran’s negotiating team on the nuclear issue? In an obvious sense, the answer has to be yes.

At the very least it signals a hardening of Iran’s stance in nuclear negotiations at a time when Washington, and London, are ramping up the rhetoric on their side. Yes too, because it marks a further consolidation of power within Teheran by Iran’s radical President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But no, because it doesn’t take us any further forward in understanding whether Iran is really determined to develop nuclear weapons or inflame the conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

Indeed you could argue that the sudden resignation of Ali Larijani as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and his replacement by Saeed Jalili, a close ally of Ahmadinejad, is proof that Iran isn’t the monolithic dictatorship of President Bush and Tony Blair’s fevered imaginings.

The mere fact that Larijani’s resignation has been greeted with outspoken and very public criticism within parliament and political circles in Teheran is an indication of how fluid politics is there.

We’re not talking here of a Western-style democracy, of course, although the tensions within the Iranian government are mirror-imaged by the divisions within Bush’s administration. Iran is a theocracy where final authority rests with the supreme leader and where the clerics of the Council of Guardians make sure to cut out of the electoral system anybody considered of a liberal or radical, let alone secular, bent.

Within those confines, however, there is considerable room for dissent and competing ambition and that is what we seem to be witnessing now. Contrary to Western assumptions, Ahmadinejad is not the creature of the conservative clerics.

Indeed, it was Larijani who was generally assumed to have the blessing initially of the establishment in the presidential elections of 2005.

Ahmadinejad came in as an outsider, a non-cleric, an educated professional and, like his close colleague, Jalili, a veteran of the war with Iraq.

His appeal was to the urban dispossessed, the unemployed youths and the rural poor who felt that they had been left out of the wealth that was coming to the country through higher oil prices and resented what they saw (rightly) as the corruption and complacency of the older generation of clerical leaders, including the still powerful Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the runner-up in the elections.

In that sense, Ahmadinejad does represent a new and assertive Iran, hardened by war, technically educated, determined to break out of the confines of what they see as the failure to build on Khomeini’s original revolution.

In that sense, too, he presents a much less acceptable face to the world, feeling beholden neither to the West, who tacitly approved Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran and the consequent war in which Iran lost at least half a million dead and seriously wounded, or to Russia, which armed and supported Saddam.

But he is not a tyrant, let alone the Hitler of Blair’s recent vision. For a start, he doesn’t have untrammelled power. The clergy and the establishment, who regard him as much an incompetent as a threat, have moved to restrict his ability to introduce legislation or form his own foreign policy.

His all-too apparent failure to steer the economy or reduce the gap between rich and poor has deprived him of a good deal of his domestic constituency, as the recent local elections proved. For the moment, he seems to have Ayatollah Khamenei’s support, but it is not unequivocal. In 18 months’ time, Ahmadinejad faces re-election. On present trends, he could well lose it.

Nor, in terms of the outside world, does he seem to be seeking a different or more radical foreign policy. His argument with Larijani is, on his own account, not about aims, all the government is united in insisting on Iran’s right to enrich uranium, but on tactics. Larijani seemed, in Ahmadinejad’s eyes, to be temporising on the fundamentals by appearing willing even to discuss enrichment.

But Ahmadinejad has never wavered from his insistence that Iran does not want nuclear weapons nor in his willingness to discuss broader questions of regional security and peace.

The danger with Iran is not with the personality or the international posturings of the Iranian President, unwelcome though they may be.
It is that in ratcheting up the confrontation, and continually demonising Iran as the enemy, we will find ourselves driven to a war that is neither necessary nor without consequence.

Ahmadinejad knows that. He’s been in one. But do Bush, Cheney, Brown or Sarkozy, who haven’t?

The Independent

THE DEBATE HASN’T ENDED - Those against the nuclear deal may approach the apex court again

Ashok Mitra
The Telegraph, 26 October

The Lok Sabha was adjourned in the last week of August following raucous acrimony over the issue of parliamentary prerogative to decide the rights and wrongs of a foreign treaty signed by the government. The debate is currently in a limbo. That does not mean that it has lost its relevance.

The speaker of the Lok Sabha, apparently, has no doubt in the matter. In terms of Entry 14 of the Union list in the Seventh Schedule of our Constitution, “entering into treaties and agreements with foreign countries and implementing of treaties, agreements and conventions with foreign countries” are a prerogative of the Union government. This prerogative, the speaker must have assumed, is absolute; Parliament can at best debate various aspects of a treaty entered into with a foreign country, but cannot vote on it; till as long as the government has the confidence of Parliament, it can go ahead and sign treaties and agreements with foreign governments and international agencies.

There is a problem though. For the Union list defines the ambit of authority of not just the executive, but also that of the legislative body at the Central level. That legislative body is Parliament. Since Parliament has the power to legislate on a subject covered by any entry in the Union list, it arguably should have the right to give its opinion on each and every aspect of it. This particular argument would seem to gain further ground from the contents of Article 253, which reads, “… Parliament has power to make any law for the whole or any part of the territory of India for implementing any treaty, agreement or convention with any other country or countries or any decision made at any international conference, association or other body.” The purport of the article is abundantly clear. In case a treaty signed by the government with a foreign country entails any legislation for its implementation, Parliament has to come into the picture; if Parliament refuses to pass the necessary legislation, the treaty would be still-born. The legislature, it follows, has a say in the matter of signing a foreign treaty; the executive cannot appropriate for itself the role of the sole arbiter of its merits.

The debate will of course not end here. Those favouring conferment of absolute authority on the executive to enter into treaties with foreign countries are likely to interject: in several instances signing a foreign treaty does not call for either fresh legislation or amendment of an old one; Parliament can therefore be conveniently bypassed. The 123 Agreement, it will be maintained, is one such instance. An immediate rejoinder could, however, be forthcoming. Parliament’s prerogative, it might be asserted, cannot be compartmentalized: if it can sit in judgment on some foreign treaties, it would be odd to suggest that some other treaties are beyond its domain; the right to reject a treaty should imply that Parliament also has the corresponding right to approve a treaty; if such approval is not sought from it, the treaty must be considered ultra vires of the Constitution.

At this juncture, partisans arguing on behalf of the executive could well seek refuge in precedents. There has been not a single occasion since the Constitution was introduced for Parliament to contest the right of the executive to enter into foreign treaties; what has not happened in the past cannot be allowed to take place now.

Seemingly checkmated, those unhappy with the 123 Agreement might choose a different line of attack. Barring the Marrakech Treaty of 1994, which ushered in the regime of the World Trade Organisation, no other treaty signed in the past had affected the nation’s sovereign status. The WTO treaty did encroach substantially on our economic independence, but since the two major national parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, had agreed to this erosion of suzerainty, the conscientious objectors were in a hopeless minority in Parliament. The situation, it is maintainable, is qualitatively different in the present case: a decisive majority of the members of the Lok Sabha are opposed to the provisions of the 123 Agreement; to put it into operation without taking into account the opinion of the parliamentary majority would be outrageous. A couple of supplementary arguments too might be added. To surrender either the whole or a part of our sovereignty would supposedly make nonsense of the Constitution’s Preamble, which proclaims India to be a sovereign republic. Also breached in the process would be a Directive Principle of State Policy — enunciated in Article 51, ordaining the State “to maintain just and honourable relations between nations”, since the 123 Agreement, as far as India is concerned, is neither just nor honourable. New Delhi’s retreat from signing the gas pipeline agreement with Iran and Pakistan, the suggestion would be put forward, was an early omen; once the 123 Agreement goes through, things would be much worse.

Committed opponents of the Agreement would like to stir things up at this stage. In case the 123 Agreement, read together with the Hyde Act, is prima facie incompatible with the Preamble to our Constitution as well as with the Directive Principle of State Policy referred to in Article 51, would it not actually damage the basic structure of the Constitution? It might not prove altogether easy to quell apprehensions along these lines expressed with great rigour.

The Supreme Court of India has till now been reluctant to consider the issue of parliamentary jurisdiction over foreign treaties and declined to entertain writ petitions in this regard. Once the issue is linked to the basic structure of the Constitution, the possibility at least exists that the nation’s highest judiciary might take a somewhat different view of the matter. But there is an equal possibility that it might not.

Developments in more recent weeks appear to have led to a cooling off of New Delhi’s determination to rush with the implementation of the 123 Agreement, irrespective of the sentiments of the parliamentary majority; there are evidently differences within the ruling alliance; some of the coalition partners have broken the prime minister’s heart. Coaxing and cajoling nonetheless continue from the Washington DC-end. One story that is afloat need not be taken altogether light-heartedly: George W. Bush is reportedly anxious to ‘consummate’ the nuclear deal he has signed with the Indian prime minister before coming March, when the first primary polls take place for choosing the next president of the United States of America.

Whatever the domestic political realities, those heading the government in New Delhi could therefore be under pressure till the very last moment to make a final attempt to finalize the Agreement notwithstanding widespread reservations in different quarters, including among important constituents of the United Progressive Alliance itself. Those dead set against the Agreement may therefore owe it to themselves to approach the nation’s highest judiciary for reconsideration of its earlier position; a fresh writ petition could be filed seeking the Supreme Court’s view on the entire range of issues. To checkmate any pre-emptive move on the part of the government, the court might be further requested to clamp an interim directive on the executive authority to not implement the 123 Agreement till as long as it has not given its verdict.

The town cynic is going to pop in here and shoot the question: what is the point of such jurisprudence-fetishism; has not the salt itself already lost its savour? Maybe he is right. But which direction do we then turn?