2010

For long India remained indifferent to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). New Delhi’s position towards the Organisation was at best ambivalent. Now that this regional grouping has acquired strength and muscle, India is showing a keen interest in joining it. New Delhi considers SCO membership vital for promoting its interests in the region. The government has written to its missions in four Central Asian countries as also in China and Russia to do the needful in this regard (…)

The ruling coalition—UPA-II—has completed one year in office. If one takes UPA-I and UPA-II together, this month the United Progressive Alliance, led by Sonia Gandhi with Dr Manmohan Singh as the head of government, completes six years.
True, in these six years the government at the Centre has ensured communal harmony with the Hindutva forces unable to mount, at least for the present, renewed assault on our secular values and pluralist ethos even if linguistic parochialism of the (…)

Dear President,
I, with my life-long association with tribal affairs, beginning with the troublesome days in Bastar (1968) and having the privilege of being the last Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (1986-1991), am constrained to approach you at a critical time when we are witnessing virtual collapse of the constitutional regime for the tribal people while being attacked and suppressed in a war-like situation.
I approach you directly because people (…)

All day I have been getting calls from television channels asking me for a bite on the Afzal case. I have refused. Whatever I wanted to say has been written in my book Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: Patriotism in the Time of Terror.
The question of Afzal came up because of the judgement in the Mumbai attack case and death sentence to Kasab. The facts of the two cases are different and there is no link between the two cases.
If the media really wanted to hear Afzal’s side of (…)

Even as ’Operation Green Hunt’ is trekking a bumpy road to taming the Maoist challenge, the emerging trends indicate, though retaining their violent identity, the politics of the gun is being increasingly mainstreamed into India’s political culture of orderly mayhem. The recent media exposure regarding their linkages with police and CRPF gun-runners in UP and fratricide among the ranks expose that their rutted road to revolution is following some of the familiar trends in mainstream politics (…)

We, the undersigned, welcome the public statement of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress Party, that the extreme neglect of the tribal areas is at the root of the present crisis in those regions. We hope that this appreciation of the need to go deeper into the question would lead to initiatives for immediate cessation of hostilities and dialogue so that the process of people-oriented development can be made feasible.
Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, former Judge, Supreme Court of (…)

BOOK REVIEW
Socio-Cultural Diversities and Globalisation: Issues and Perspectives edited by S.R. Mehta; Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla; pages 364; price: Rs 595.
In recent times, globalisation—the process signifying interaction and integration among the people, companies, governments of different nations given impetus by international trade, investment, and information technology—has been a topic for debate, discussion and dissection amongst academics. (…)

The world will applaud the way America defeated the New York bombing attempt.
Luck, of course, plays a part in such matters. But in this case no one can deny the skill and professionalism with which the investigators proceeded until they got their man in dramatic style.
Luck came in the form of a footpath vendor who noticed smoke inside a parked van. It was lucky, too, that he was a Vietnam war veteran who had a fair idea of smokes and fires. It also happened that a mounted police (…)

My Gita, Bible, Quran, Guru Granth Saheb in all temporal affairs is the Constitution of India. This Basic Law, parts of which cannot be amended as per a landmark ruling of the Supreme Court in the Keshvanand Bharti case, binds all Indians to certain fundamentals which we must accept, or cease to be Indians on their rejection. These are contained in the Preamble, reinforced in the Fundamental Rights, amplified in the Directive Principles of State Policy and enshrined in the Fundamental (…)

Sitting in the midst of this unbearable heat, let me offload some of those ironies that hit and continue to hit. Last week’s stampede at the New Delhi Railway Station is one of those offshoots of complete mismanagement, coupled with two teasers—the concerned Union Minister, Mamata Bannerji, giving those confusing statements from faraway West Bengal; not even bothering to catch the next train to the accident site and then opening or shutting her month. Though, of course, her coming here (…)