Perhaps the most accurate indicator of how civilised a particular society really is, is the way it treats its social rejects—particularly those who have abandoned their grip on reality and crossed the threshold into the twilight world of the mentally unbalanced. In a poor country like India, which boasts of one of the oldest civilisations…
Public memory is all too amnesic., and the Bhagalpur blinding’s which sickened and shocked the nation when they were exposed in November 1980 have almost become history. Even the dogged legal battle for justice by the blinded has virtually disappeared from newspaper columns, lowering a ‘curtain of silence on one of the most shameful episodes…
Family planning in India has always been dogged by a debilitating combination of moral, sociological, superstitious and even political complexes. Post-1977, however, while the nation’s population control effort has acquired the coy appellation of ‘family welfare’, encouraging work has been done towards adopting newer and safer techniques of birth control. Last fortnight Dr Badri Nath…
Not since Brutus has there been such a stab in such a back. No wonder Indira Gandhi was so “absolutely livid” and her daughter-in-law Maneka so studiously low-key. The culprit: Maneka’s mother Amiteshwar Anand, who fetched Mrs Gandhi a resounding snub by selling her chintzy. down-at-heel magazine Surya India and its Hindi counterpart to two…
ALL GOOD Hindus hope to reincarnate as better Hindus, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be celebrating its second birthday on April 5 with the conviction that it is well on the way to establishing itself as a “nation alternative”. More than anything else, a strident section in the party is anxious to shed…
For centuries, cranes have been held up as auspicious birds in many countries, serving as symbols of long life and happiness. Ironically, however, the graceful Siberian crane (Grus leucogeranus) is in grave danger of being reduced to total extinction only around 250 of these birds exist world-wide today. The crane family, Gruidae, itself is the…
It is a war without end, a no-win situation in which nobody can provide answers to some questions: How long will this go on? Which side will eventually prevail? What is the cost to the nation in money, matériel, men?
This was has no name. It is more an endless series of skirmishes than a sustained military confrontation. Yet, this war has been raging intermittently for 26 years in Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram.
Dhanbad’s dreaded Mafia gangs were riveting topics of conversation last fortnight, and for different reasons. Film actor Shatrughan Sinha, with the blessings of the ruling Congress(1), launched a film on the Mafia, swamping the town’s hotels with an entourage of 250. Sinha was not being foolish in filming so dangerous a subject-his chief patron is Laliteshwar Prasad Sahi, Bihar’s health and family welfare minister. And Union Irrigation Minister Kedar Pandey travelled all the way to Dhanbad to inaugurate the shooting of the film.
Eighteen hours after Haryana Governor Ganapatrao Devji Tapase committed the most undemocratic faux pas in India’s political history, he was cowering on a sofa in the Chandigarh Raj Bhavan’s large reception hall. “This is Haryana!” yelled apoplectic Lok Dal MLAs, eyes blood-shot, neck veins bulging, pressing around the diminutive Tapase in a knee-touching, eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.…
Violence is an unfortunate fact of life in Delhi University. That was bloodily emphasized on February 16 when Dilip Simeon, 32, history lecturer at Ramjas College, was savagely beaten up by six men on his way to work. The lecturer’s multiple fractures came as the flash-point of an acrimonious feud between college Principal Dr. Kartar…
Union Home Minister Prakash Chand Sethi has elevated the art of governance to a fine degree of pettifoggery. Political interference in the bureaucracy is not unusual, but Sethi is exhibited a penchant for intervention in personnel promotions. In the process, he has heightened the siege mentality of the Central Secretariat Service (CSS), which is constantly…
Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the struggle within “We are all like a family and there is bound to be dissent in a democratic party.” The trouble with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 55, is he is too transparent. A rotund, dhoti-cad orator given to over- heated rhetoric, his misfortune is that he heads a party consisting in…
The guns are yet to fall silent in the North-east but in places where development has made an inroad, peace has prevailed. Only by bringing all stakeholders on board can the government hope to end the region’s alienation. “… we have no social affinities with the Hindus or Mussalmans. We are looked down upon by…
If politics is the art of deception, the Congress(I) symbolises its highly developed state. After crying itself hoarse about its inability to conduct the Garhwal Lok Sabha by-election, the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh seems on the surface surprisingly resigned to the victory of its bête noire, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, 63, president of the Democratic…
Inscrutable are the ways of public-sector trade unions. The Federation of the State Trading Corporation Employees’ Unions (FSTCEU) lived up to this image when it resorted to an eight-day strike last fortnight over a peculiarly non-economic issue: the shifting of the corporation’s Delhi branch office from its location on the arterial Janpath to Malcha Marg…
It began as a small tiff, as all battles do. The two antagonists identities lent it a delicious irony: Vijaya Raje Scindia, the ex-Rajmata of Gwalior, and her only son, ex-Maharaja Madhavrao. Over the years, this essentially political fight spilt out of the Gwalior palace into national attention. Today, it includes all the ingredients of…
Visually, the scene was vintage Bergman. A low canopy of sullen clouds scudded over a landscape whipped by icy winds. Despair seemed to be wrung out of every muscle of the ragged bunch of men stumbling down the village’s main dirt street. There were 15 of them, all walking with the collapsing gait of acute…
Of all the functions of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), there is one routine task crucial to the health of the economy: incinerating the mounds of soiled currency notes well past their prime and providing the commercial banks with mint-fresh replacements. Last month, in an effort to clear the backlog of ‘non-issuable notes’-inevitable when…
Delhi University is one of the few in the country to possess a full-fledged faculty of music. But for years now, the Music Department has been rocked by a clash between the shastrakars (grammarians) and the kalavidhs (performers). At the root of the controversy lies the dilemma of whether university teachers of music ought to…
Whatever else the government is butter-fingered at doing, it is adept at keeping the results of its impetuosity in a state of continuing suspense’. The campaign against the Bihar Press Bill is almost four months old now, but the Government has only indulged in a lot of double-talk—swearing by press freedom in one breath, and…
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for short-term post-doctoral research trips to the USSR had been rejected. No reasons were given, but both lecturers believe it was because they were not considered politically acceptable. Another lecturer in…
Tyres are one essential commodity over which the Government seems to exert no control whatsoever. In the last six months prices have risen twice. And this is despite the fact that the last decade has seen a sudden burgeoning in the number of tyre-manufacturing units, which caused worries last year that there would be a…
While it lasted, last fortnight’s nine-hour hostage hold-up in Congress(l) Member of Parliament Dalbir Singh’s.Delhi apartment generated wild images of urban terrorism on the loose. lt was the first time ever that the problems of distant, rural India had been so dramatised and Ram Narayan Kumar, the improbable attacker, appeared to signal a new and…
Hiteswar Saikia was last Fortnight trying to settle into the hottest seat in India-the chief ministers hip of Assam. The diminutive, balding ‘politician had been selected to lead a ministry that had obtained one of india’s largest-ever majorities-91 seats out of 109. But the mandate had come drenched in blood, and ridden on an abysmally…
All private secretaries to Union ministers are equal, but S.R. Bhatia is more equal. Bhatia is the private secretary to Prakash Chand Sethi, the Union home minister, and currently he is at the centre of a storm that is battering at the doors of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and the Central Secretariat Service…
There was the baby-faced ex-pilot, all thumbs as he handled the controls in his political flight simulator; the rough-spun son of the, soil, a man of diamond-hard loyalty to the ruling family. catapulted into a devalued presidency; the freckle faced widow in rebellious flow, queen of the mimics and endowed with a hard nose; the…
For all those journalists who think they belong to a thankless and poorly-paid profession, there is hope on the horizon. It comes from the latest impresario to champion the “welfare and relief” of India’s toiling journalists: Jinendra Kumar Jain, 42. From obscure beginnings as a small-time publisher, Jain has used every ‘journalistic’ rung to hop…
Lush vegetation in the Thar? Groves of jamun trees? Mighty rivers the size of the Ganga and Indus? Seasons of monsoon-like rainfall? None of this is the fantasy it might appear at first sight. It was true in the distant past of the vast, inhospitable expanse of the Thar desert known to be one of…
The fuse has been burning for almost four years and the mood in the state has passed through all the faces of anger, despair and belligerence to arrive, on election eve, at the explosive. Gauhati has become unrecognisable. Once the citadel of lahe lahe, the Assamese philosophy of languor and peaceability, the capital now rumbles…
There is an old Indian parable that says it all: six blind men feel various parts of an elephant’s anatomy, and each one extrapolates, from his experience, a vision of a funny world. The difference, of course, is that everybody is talking about three old men-charan Singh, 79, Morarji Desai, 86, and Jagjivan Ram, 74,…
Events In Mizoram seems to be moving inexorably towards a resumption of insurgency. The cease-fire agreement, which came into effect at midnight on July 31 last year, has never seemed more fragile than it is now. As the indecisive talks with Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga near the end of their sixth year, the…
Pranab Mukherjee’s first budget, at first glance so redolent of status quo, is peppered with little booby traps. Two paragraphs in his speech have caused heartburn amidst tyre manufacturers—who are dismayed about a stiff excise hike—and soft drink bottlers, who are cut up because Mukherjee has cracked down on soft drink franchises’ excise exemptions. The…
It was a browser’s dream come true – kilometres of books that took hold of the bibliophile’s heart-strings and did not stop tugging for hours. For eleven days last fortnight, Delhi’s Pragati Maidan became a meeting-place of minds. From a distance. as the Fifth World Book Fair moved to its finish in a welter of…
It was a visitation of grief and destruction, a cruel twist to the suffering Gujarat was already shrouded in. Meteorologists first noticed the brewing cyclone over the Arabian Sea on November 5, 1,200 km to the south-west of Goa. Forty-eight hours later it was just 600 km to the south-west of Bombay, and heading rapidly…
It was beyond the ken of a civilised society, a blood spattered vindication of a heartless government’s sudden constitutional piety. The carnage began with a few deaths on February 2; during the next three weeks, it rose every day with dreadful ferocity: a dozen at Cha maria on the 12th, a hundred at Gohpur on…
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the feud between Mrs Gandhi and her rebellious daughter-in law Maneka. But though the charges can never really be substantiated, there is a connection which leads credence to the charge-the friendship…
Titled Judiciary: Attacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and then by the postponement of the Dussehra break. On October 29, as Justice Vidyaranya Dattatreya Tulzapurkar of the Supreme Court finally faced an invited audience at the Symbiosis Law College in…
Large advertisements in Delhi newspapers-last fortnight announced that Mother Dairy was being forced to dilute the fat content of milk supplied to the capital’s citizens to 3 per cent from 4.5 per cent so that the sale price could remain Rs 2.20 per litre. At Mother Dairy booths, lengthening queues were often turned away because…
When Frenchman Bernard Bel and American Jim Arnold met by chance in a Delhi hotel in September 1979, it turned out to be a momentous occasion for Indian music. In the two years since, Bel and Arnold have together embarked on an ambitious research of Hindustani classical music’s vast oral tradition along mathematical lines. Never…
Not for nothing has Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga acquired a reputation for being a cool and calculating man. Towards the end of 1981, however, his smooth phrases took on a jagged edge, as his talks with the prime minister’s special envoy G. Parthasarathi entered the final lap. Mizoram-watchers were not surprised, therefore, when…
Rarely had an event invited such determined and concerted action by Union Government: When the 24-hour national strike called by the National Campaign Committee (NCC) ended at 6 a.m. on January 20. two things stood out clearly: the effects of the strike were either negligible or tremendous, depending on which side of the fence the…
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on the Supreme Court’s decisions, only a very shrewd bookie would emerge victorious. So unpredictable have the thought-processes of the nation’s highest court become. A three-judge bench consisting of Chief Justice…
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for short-term post-doctoral research trips to the USSR had been rejected. No reasons were given, but both lecturers believe it was because they were not considered politically acceptable. Another lecturer in…
Counter-Insurgency Deep inside the jungle in northernmost Mizoram, a lone man brews a tin mug of tea in the early morning haze. He is squatting on the bamboo floor of a makeshift shelter covered with banana leaves. Beneath it fails away the precipitous hillside, all 3,000 feet of it densely carpeted with bamboo and teak…
The salaried middle classes have time and again fallen prey to the Government’s more capricious economic decisions. But, one group that has suffered the most from constantly rising costs of living is the large, amorphous mass of the nation’s pensioners. Bereft of a common voice, nearly three million retired government employees and defence personnel have…
The India-Rubber man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme Court heard the Patna Urban Cooperative Bank case. Then, last fortnight, Mishra’s fortunes took a sudden upward swing. On December 16, the Supreme Court held, by a two-one majority, that…
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of being walked to the gallows on the morning of Sunday. November 8. 1981, in retribution for the brutal murder of Gita and Sanjay Chopra on August 26, 1978, the two…
Political cinema, like the new wave of the mid-’70s, has long acquired a pejorative meaning in India. At most, a political film that catches the public eye is built around a social theme that fits in with the Government’s meandering philosophy. A ‘successful’ political film also usually turns out to be feature-length, in colour, and…
Qutab Minar, the 72.5-metre-high monolithic tower that Iltutmish built 750 years ago, witnessed two shocks in its hoary life-span. In 1368, it was struck by lightning that ripped through its top; in 1803, an earthquake shook down a harp-shaped cupola that adorned its fifth storey. The latest shock, which came last fortnight, damaged none of…
I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun. Yes it is. — John Lennon. 1968 Vishwanath Pratap Singh had cause to be happy on December 30 The prime minister herself had come down to Lucknow to pat him on his back and give his ministry a clean chit.…
“My resignation over the Dehuli issue is not important, law and order is,” was Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s answer when asked why, after owning moral responsibility for the massacre, he had not quit. “Either we protect the survivors, and liquidate the killers, or we might as well find somebody else to run…
On January 18 the strike by 2.5 lakh textile workers in Bombay’s 60 mills will complete a year; 25,000 of these workers in eight mills have been on strike since October 1981. In every way, the lengthening strike has become a grim milestone in India’s industrial history, with the opposing sides only gaining in belligerence…
So Ham-Handed and desperate for representatives of any stature in Assam has the Congress(I) become that it has jettisoned all concern for decorum and dignity in the loftiest institution of the land, the Supreme Court. Exactly four weeks after he delivered a judgment that granted Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra a reprieve from trial for…
Nearly two months after a shocked Parliament was rocked by the Nellie and Gohpur massacres and the bloodbath that had drenched Assam during February’s’ election week, the issue had all but been forgotten by both government and opposition. Suddenly last fortnight it was revived by journalist Arun Shourie’s scathing expose in the last issue of…
Every dissenter is in a minority of one, and K. Ashok Rao, 36, deputy manager in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), is discovering what it is like to take on this public sector leviathan. Rao is, after all, only one of BHEL’S 70,000 employees. Yet, on February 23 this year, Rao filed a writ petition…
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock waves emanated from an indecisive Supreme Court. In November 1981, the court had stayed executions all over the country after it was contended in the case of Kuljit Singh (alias…
That trite phrase ‘as old as the hills’ has suddenly taken on startling significance in relation to a thread that runs through Hindu beliefs: the cult of mother-worship. a veneration of the shakti form that harks back to primeval times. Recently, an lndo-US team of archaeologists working in the Son valley in Madhya Pradesh Sidhi…
I am your valuable,/The Pure gold baby,/That melts to a shriek,/I turn and burn,/Do not think I underestimate your/great concern./Ash, ash/You poke and stir,/Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—A cake of soap,/ A wedding ring,/A gold filling. …
The sprawling city that Charles-Edouard le Corbusier had designed for bureaucrats and retired people looked like an army encampment girding up for an enemy onslaught. As the expected moment of conflict neared, Chandigarh’s streets were gradually cordoned off with bamboo and steel barricades; a vast area taking in the Punjab, Haryana and Union territory secretariats,…
Iran’s much-vaunted Islamic revolution appears to have finally spilled over into India. Chanting Allah-o–Akbar and wielding primitive weapons like lathis bristling with nails, bicycle chains, knives and iron rods, a group of 100 pro-Khomeini Iranian students attacked 25 anti-Khomeini counterparts under cover of darkness in Aligarh on June 9. The bloody battle left 14 of…
Last week-end the seesaw battle being waged by Swraj Paul to take over Escorts and DCM slowed to a less suspenseful motion when the London-based industrialist suffered a series of setbacks. The first and predictable one came when Escorts’ Board of Directors refused on June 9 to register 4,62,377 shares lodged by Paul’s brokers Harish…
Rope-Making On Summer nights all over north India. people put out hundreds of thousands of cots in the open air to sleep on Most of the cots are made of rope strung on a wooden frame, and almost all of the rope comes from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Rope-making in Saharanpur is a traditional skill…
There are times when India looks invincible, bursting with food stocks and blessed with a government that is gungho about its workability. But the rain gods do not work to a 20-point programme, and last fortnight weathermen the country over were developing cricks in their necks as they stared hopefully into the pale blue and…
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s health more than anything else has been responsible for the sudden thaw in Delhi-Srinagar relations For a while last month Kashmir teetered on the brink of an insoluble crisis while the prickly Resettlement Bill hung fire, the Sheikh grew more belligerent and the Centre seemed trapped in a peculiar inertia. Then, on…
Within a few years from now, the westernmost and thirstiest fringe of Rajasthan, along the Indo-Pakistani border, is going to be brought to life by the digging of what will be the longest irrigation canal in the world up to date. Though the climate is torrid, the soil, here too, is good. When the water…
The story is as complicated as the whorls on a fingerprint, a ready-made screen-play bursting with grandeur, feudalism, pretension, and the tattered remnants of pomp and panoply. The theatre of this absurd epic, Raj Darbhanga in Bihar, has been reduced today to a threadbare relic of the fiefdom’s old glory. Darbhanga was once India’s largest…
Indian foreign policy has always suffered from contradictory tugs and pulls, and last month the Government exposed its tendency to over-react to global developments. Israeli Consul Yousuf Hasseen earned his expulsion with an outspoken interview with Bombay’s Sunday Observer (INDIA TODAY. July 31). But the subsequent announcement by Foreign Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao that…
No point of no return was so final as the one Charan Singh and Devi Lal reached on July 21. The crusty Jat leaders have clashed repeatedly over the last two years and a half-only to be dragged back into uneasy reconciliation every time by mediators. Incredibly, Charan Singh moved to hammer the last nail…
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by the cloud raised by stays granted on more than 20 executions of condemned murderers throughout the country. The flurry of stay orders stemmed from a May 6 ruling by a…
The 35-km ride from Katunayake International Airport into Colombo in a slow Mitsubishi coach I driven by a nervous Sinhala I is enveloped in silence. Almost every Indian visitor is heading for the Lanka Oberoi, or the Galle Face, or the Ceylon Intercontinental— hotels that have escaped the attention of mobs in search of hiding…
It was a grim warning for all users of intemperate language, and particularly for citizens of India who continue to believe that caste bestows special rights on an individual. Untouchability has long ago been ‘abolished’, but caste prejudice is one of the most insidious cankers eating into the country’s vitals. At 4 p.m. on August…
Ganesha’s temple had never seen so many supplicants, all with unanswerable prayers Colombo’s Tamils call it Pillaiyar Kovil, and its ornamented gateway on Galle Road in the Wella-watta area is flanked by carefully incinerated Tamil shops. Wella-watta was a genteel Tamil ghetto. Now the temple is a refugee camp, and cheek-by-jowl stand three others at…
One of the misconceptions spawned by the Bihar Press Bill is that it will emasculate Bihar’s journalists. The truth is that Bihar’s journalists have already been emasculated by Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra. Using the twin methods of patronage and advertisement support, Mishra’s Government has directly subsidised an explosion of small papers across the state-the very…
In the coolness of the early morning there is little traffic on National Highway 3. Outward bound from Nasik, the tar stretches infinitely in mottled grey, punctuated by the whoosh and blare of passing trucks. Through the sounds of the stirring countryside come the choral slaps of the marchers’ feet. It is a curious cavalcade—at…