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One would have thought that after the Bombay attack and the public outpouring of resentment against politicians, that the establishment would get its act in order. One would expect that careful thought would go into the making of proposals to combat terrorism and to keep the people secure. Instead what do we find? The same old clichés and the usual attack on human rights activists.

What the people of India expected, was that the governments would give careful thought to making the police a professional fighting force oriented towards the security of the ordinary citizens of India rather than operating, as it does now, as the protectors of politicians. They also expected that the police would eliminate from its ranks the use of torture and the vice of corruption, two aspects of policing today that make the general public both distrustful and fearful of the police.

Listening carefully, however, to the statements of BJP and Congress politicians in the media, one can find no reference to the demands of the people. Politicians are obviously distracted by the national  lections scheduled for early next year and even such a serious incident of terrorism as the Bombay attack figures even now in their consciousness as a

vote catching exercise.

In a knee-jerk reaction, GOI proposes to enact The Unlawful
Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2008. Under section 15, the prosecution is to be granted upto 180 days to file a chargesheet (it is a 90 day limit today after which the accused is granted bail mandatorily), the provisions for bail are stricter, and if arms or explosives are proved to be recovered from the accused, then the court is entitled to presume that the accused has committed a terrorist act.

Indian criminal law provisions rank among the strictest in the world. In the US and the UK even after the terrorist attacks in those countries, the maximum period of detention without a chargesheet is 2 days and 28 days respectively. The provisions in India for search and seizures are the most liberal in the world.

Supreme Court decisions to the effect that even if the searches and seizures are illegal they may still be relied upon in evidence
against the accused, has given the police a free hand to do all kinds of hanky panky while conducting raids. Amendments have been made in various statutes to permit interceptions of communications.

Supreme Court decisions after 2000 have watered down the criminal law protection of accused persons and have lowered the criminal law standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt to such an extent, that international jurists are appalled by the way in which the Indian courts are convicting accused persons. Why then, with such strict laws and with such a convicting judiciary, did the Bombay attack happen with such impunity? The answer is simple. The problem in India lies not in the law but in its implementation.

This is where the main demands of the people that the police become a professional force, that law and order be separated from the investigation of crimes, and that corruption and violence be eliminated, becomes important. The Central Government also proposes to pass The National Investigation Agency Bill, 2008 which will see the setting up of a national body to oversee the investigation and prosecution of terrorist offences. Here again the approach is cosmetic rather than substantial and the aim is to impress rather than protect. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is today a national body for the investigation of all serious crimes. The only difference between the CBI and the NIA is that the former is required to take the permission of the states prior to acting within the state, whereas the NIA can operate without consent. But if all the states are agreed, as indeed they are, that terrorism ought to be fought at the national level as well, then there ought to be no difficulty for the Central Government to consult the legislatures of the states in a transparent manner, to obtain consent for the CBI to operate throughout the country.

All that would be necessary thereafter is for the Central Government to administratively upgrade the CBI. THOUGH it must be said to the credit of the Union Government that they have not succumbed to the temptation to introduce the draconian POTA provision authorising confessions to a police officer (which rendered POTA trials farcical), the reference to Left Wing Extremism in the Statements of Objects and Reasons is disappointing.

Naxalism has deep social roots in injustice, poverty and state  violence, unlike the senseless terrorism of Pakistani agents. Like  the IRA in Ireland, it must be recognised as a political tendency and negotiated with politically. The reasons for the growth of naxalism must be understood as requiring a radical shift from the inequities of globalisation to a more socialistic programme where the common person is treated with dignity. In the present political situation however, one can only see hysteria and the lack of reason.

Courtesy By-  Colin Gonsalves,

The writer is an eminent lawyer and civil rights activist.

http://www.countercurrents.org/gonsalves201208.htm

अच्युत पालव ऊर्फ कॅलिग़्राफी म्हणण्या एवढं पालवांच नाव या कलेशी जोडलं गेलं आहे. शब्दाना अर्थगर्भ व्यक्तिमत्व प्रदान करताना नित्यनवे अविष्कार सादर करणे हि तर त्यांची हातोटी. रोजची वर्तमानपत्र, मासिकांमधून त्यांच्या कलेचा आस्वाद वाचकाना घेता येतोच आणि त्या माध्यमांमधून ते सतत घरा-घरांत संचार करत असतात. पण जगभरात कलेच्या माध्यमातून त्यांनी जी रांगोळी घातली त्याला तोड नाही. पालव यांच्या अक्षरचित्रांनी रशियातील म्युझियममध्ये कायमस्वरूपी विराजमान होण्याचा मान पटकावला आहे. ‘युरोपियन कंटेम्पररी म्युझियम’मध्ये निवड झालेले पालव पहिले भारतीय आहेत.

जगभरातील लोकांचा कॅलिग़्राफीतला उत्साह, काम आणि जाणिव बघुन आपल्या भारतातील विद्यार्थी मागे आहेत हे जाणून संपुर्ण देश पादाक्रांत करत अनेक कलामहाविद्यालयात स्वतः जाऊन जागृती करण्याचं काम अच्युत पालवानी केलं आहे. ही सामाजिक जाणिव आणि समाजऋणातून उतराई होण्यासाठी कलाकार खरतर कला सादर करण्यात मग्न असतो पण पालव या अवस्थेतून जागृत होऊन समाजसेवकाच्या चालीने ही भ्रमंती करतात ते पाहून त्याना सलाम करावासा वाटतो

कलाकाराच्या कलेला वेदनेनेही अंकुर फुटतात, असं असलं तरी या जातीवंत कलाकाराने भगिनी निधनाच दुःख पोटात घेऊन आपल्या महोत्सवाला हसत मुखाने सामोर जाणं हा नियतीचा खेळ म्हटलं तरी ते सोप नक्कीच नाही.

जे. जे. कलामहाविद्यालयात २१ डिसेंबर पर्यंत १० ते ७ या वेळात अच्युत पालवांच्या पुढाकाराने ‘कॅलिफेस्ट ‘ हे प्रदर्शन भरलय त्याला आपण एकदा जरुर भेट द्याच.

— नरेन्द्र प्रभू

http://prabhunarendra.blogspot.com/2008/12/blog-post_19.html

ग्रंथाली वाचक चळवळीचे

मासिक ‘रुची’ चा डिसेंबरचा अंक

वाचण्यासाठी येथे क्लिक करावे - ग्रंथाली वाचक चळवळीचे मासिक ‘रुची’ चा डिसेंबरचा अंक.

Those who live in Tel Aviv, New York or London need not fear a Mumbai episode. If 10 infantry-trained terrorists were to attack those cities, local police with their own hostage-rescue teams would quickly deal with them.

But in India, the reality is that local police cannot be expected to react usefully to a terrorist attack, or indeed any form of armed attack, as they would in many other countries — for example, sealing off the area and summoning help. Instead, Mumbai and India’s other mega-cities are policed by semi-illiterate constables who deal only with petty crime as they make their rounds, drinking free tea in cafes and accepting small gifts from shopkeepers for chasing away intrusive beggars. They hardly ever stop inter-religious or inter-caste violence and are reluctant to engage anyone with a firearm.

Accordingly, in Mumbai there was no police cordon around the huge Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel nor the quite small Nariman House of the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch group during the sieges, so that terrorists could have been reinforced or could have escaped.

It’s not that India is unfamiliar with terrorism. According to recent data from India’s Home Ministry, about 7,000 Indians have been killed in terrorist incidents since 2004 — mostly but not exclusively by Muslim extremists. Obviously the nation has needed a much better-educated, better-paid, better-trained national anti-terrorist police unit for years, but none has been established. Thus the forces available to fight the terrorists in Mumbai were pathetically inadequate in quantity, quality or both.

That was clearly true of Maharashtra’s state anti-terrorism squad, which is headquartered less than 10 minutes from the sites of the attacks but which had a total of 35 officers — and fewer than 15 on duty. This, to protect a state population of 96 million, 18 million in Mumbai alone. The squad’s commander, Hemant Karkare — who was killed early in the attacks — was a 54-year-old investigator, not a fighter even at the level of an ordinary infantryman.

Tribute

By contrast, India’s National Security Guards, formed in 1985, are well trained. But the guards are a military-style commando assault force, with no real experience in civilian hostage rescue, even though that is one of their official missions. With 7,500 trained men, they could have responded adequately in a military way, if only someone had managed to call enough of them in quickly.

The first terrorist attack was reported about 9:30 p.m. The strategy for alerting the central government failed, so it was Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the Maharashtra state government, who got the call to decide what help was needed. He happened to be on a trip in the state of Kerala, hundreds of miles to the south. For 90 minutes, he did nothing of consequence while receiving calls on his cellphone about the attacks. Finally, at 11 p.m., he called Shivraj Patil, the home minister in charge of the nation’s security and law enforcement. (After this colossal security failure, Patil resigned Sunday. It took Deshmukh until Wednesday to do the same.)

Because Patil had no information of his own — a very peculiar situation for an interior minister anywhere — he put the key question to Deshmukh: How many commandos of the National Security Guards were needed? Deshmukh replied 200. That may have been more than enough to fight against 10 or 15 infantry-trained terrorists (they were not ninjas or samurai, after all) but was grossly inadequate to deal with even one target as big as the immense Taj hotel. Patil had no competent staff to intervene to determine the right number, which was at least 1,000.

Enough Is Enough !

All the government commandos were in New Delhi, more than 700 miles from Mumbai. Even as the mayhem in Mumbai was being broadcast to the world, no one thought to send the commandos in the fastest way possible — by commandeering several of the passenger jets at New Delhi’s airport with crews ready to fly. Instead, an old and slow Ilyushin Il-76 and its sleeping pilots were summoned from the Chandigarh airport 150 miles away. The transport plane did not arrive in New Delhi until 2 a.m. By the time the commandos arrived in central Mumbai, it was 7 a.m., 9 1/2 hours after the first reports of attacks.

Even then, they had to act with almost no information — not even an accurate floor plan of the massive Taj hotel — and of course in grossly inadequate numbers, given the need to sweep the Taj room by room. As a result, the commandos didn’t move on the lowest-priority Nariman House of Chabad, the smallest target by far, until Friday morning, more than 40 hours after it was first entered by the terrorists on Wednesday night. They blasted their way inside, and after an interval — which could have proved fatal to any captives had any still been alive at that point — other government commandos rappelled from helicopters, in full view of TV cameras and the uncontained crowd pressing in all around. They were greatly applauded as they left after killing the terrorists and finding the five hostages dead inside.

In the end, the attacks in Mumbai were a revealing confrontation between 10 to 15 trained soldiers willing to fight and die and a hopelessly inadequate security system. But India is a democracy with a free press, and what will happen soon, after all the usual recriminations and resignations, will be the creation of a properly decentralized system, backed by an information network. It is unfortunate that the thousands of previous deaths from terrorism didn’t suffice to reform the system before the Mumbai tragedy.

Courtesy By- Edward N. Luttwak is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

गंगाजल नेचर फौंडेशनची छायाचित्र आणि महितीपट व निबंध स्पर्धा !

दोन फुलांची कथा

दोन फुलांची कथा
अशी ही दोन फुलांची कथा
एक शिवाच्या पदी शोभाते
एक शवाच्या माथा

इथला निर्माल्य ही सुगंधी
तिथली माळ ही कुणी न हुंगी
इथे भक्तीचा वास फुलांना
तेथे नरक व्यथा

जन्म जरी एकाच वेलीवर
भाग्यामध्ये महान अंतर
गुळखोबरे कोणा
कुणाला मिळे पिंड पालथा

दोन फुलांचे एकच प्राक्तन
उच्च नीच हा भाग पुरातन
एक शिलेला देव मानते
एक पूजितें मृदा

निर्माल्य कुणी मंदिरातला
अर्पियला गंगा माईला
जरा पलीकडे स्मशानातला
पाचोळाही वाहत आला
फुलाफुलांची ओळख पटली
हसला जगत्नियंता

- कुसुमाग्रज

http://www.gangajal.org.in/Material/Rules.pdf

http://www.gangajal.org.in/Material/EntryForm.pdf