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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
By Chaitanya Kalbag in Colombo 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…
Chaitanya Kalbag 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…