India’s ‘silent’ prime minister becomes a tragic figure

Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images - Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s second term in office has been damaged by corruption scandals and policy paralysis

By Simon Denyer, Published: September 5, 2012

NEW DELHI — India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh helped set his country on the path to modernity, prosperity and power, but critics say the shy, soft-spoken
79-year-old is in danger of going down in history as a failure.
The architect of India’s economic reforms, Singh was a major force behind his country’s rapprochement with the United States and is a respected figure on the world stage. President Obama’s aides used to boast of his tremendous rapport and friendship with Singh.
But the image of the scrupulously honorable, humble and intellectual technocrat has slowly given way to a completely different one: a dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government.
Every day for the past two weeks, India’s Parliament has been adjourned as the opposition bays for Singh’s resignation over allegations of waste and corruption in the allocation of coal-
mining concessions.
The story of Singh’s dramatic fall from grace in his second term in office and the slow but steady tarnishing of his reputation has played out in parallel with his country’s decline on his watch. As India’s economy has slowed and as its reputation for rampant corruption has reasserted itself, the idea that the country was on an inexorable road to becoming a global power has increasingly come into question.
“More and more, he has become a tragic figure in our history,” said political historian Ramachandra Guha. The historian told the Caravan, an Indian magazine, last year that Singh had been fatally handicapped by “timidity, complacency and intellectual dishonesty.’’
The irony is that Singh’s greatest selling points — his incorruptibility and economic experience — are the mirror image of his government’s greatest failings.
Under Singh, economic reforms have stalled, growth has slowed sharply and the rupee has collapsed. But just as damaging to his reputation is the accusation that he looked the other way and remained silent as his cabinet colleagues filled their own pockets.
In the process, he transformed himself from an object of respect to one of ridicule and endured the worst period in his life, Sanjaya Baru, Singh’s media adviser during his first term, said in a 2011 interview with the Caravan. In a telephone conversation, Baru said his sentiments had not changed.
Attendees at meetings and conferences were jokingly urged to put their phones into “Manmohan Singh mode,” while one joke cited a dentist urging the seated prime minister, “At least in my clinic, please open your mouth.”
Singh finally did open his mouth last week, to rebut criticism from the government auditor that the national treasury had been cheated of billions of dollars after coal-mining concessions were granted to private companies for a pittance — including during a five-year period when Singh doubled as coal minister.
Singh denied that there was “any impropriety,” but he was drowned out by catcalls when he attempted to address Parliament on the issue. His brief statement to the media afterward appeared to do little to change the impression of a man whose aloofness from the rough-and-tumble of Indian politics has been transformed from an asset into a liability.
“It has been my general practice not to respond to motivated criticism directed personally at me,” he said. “My general attitude has been, ‘My silence is better than a thousand answers; it keeps intact the honor of innumerable questions.’ ”
Singh probably will survive calls for his resignation, but the scandal represents a new low in a reputation that has been sinking for more than a year.
‘I have to do my duty’
Singh was born in 1932 into a small-time trader’s family in a village in what is now Pakistan, walking miles to school every day and studying by the light of a kerosene lamp. The family moved to India shortly before partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and Singh pleaded with his father to be allowed to continue with his studies rather than join the dry-fruit trade.
A series of scholarships allowed Singh to continue those studies first at Cambridge and then at Oxford, where he completed a PhD. Marriage was arranged with Gursharan Kaur in 1958; they have three daughters.
A successful career in the bureaucracy followed, but it was in 1991 that Singh was thrust into the spotlight as finance minister amid a financial crisis.
With little choice, Singh introduced a series of policies that freed the Indian economy from suffocating state control and unleashed the dynamism of its private sector.
More than a decade later, in 2004, Singh again found himself on center stage, becoming in his own words an “accidental prime minister.”
The Congress party led by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi had surprised many people by winning national elections that year, but she sprang an even bigger surprise by renouncing the top job and handing it to Singh.
In him she saw not only the perfect figurehead for her government but also a man of unquestioning loyalty, party insiders say, someone she could both trust and control.
“I’m a small person put in this big chair,” Singh told broadcaster Charlie Rose in 2006. “I have to do my duty, whatever task is allotted of me.”
From the start, it was clear that Sonia Gandhi held the real reins of power. The Gandhi family has ruled India for most of its post-
independence history and enjoys an almost cultlike status within the Congress party. Sonia’s word was destined to remain law.
But Singh made his mark during his first term in office, standing up to opposition from his coalition partners and from within his own party to push through a civil nuclear cooperation deal with the United States in 2008, a landmark agreement that ended India’s nuclear isolation after its weapons tests in 1974 and 1998.
It was a moment that almost brought his government down, an issue over which he offered to resign. While no electricity has yet flowed from that pact, it marked a major step forward in India’s relations with the United States.
The Congress-led coalition went on to win a second term in 2009, in what many people saw as a mandate for Singh.
The 2009 election “was a victory for him, but he did not step up to claim it — maybe because he is too academic, maybe because he is too old,” said Tushar Poddar, managing director at Goldman Sachs in Mumbai. “That lack of leadership, that lack of boldness, lack of will — that really shocked us. That really shocked foreign investors.”
‘He suffers from doubts’
In a series of largely off-the-
record conversations, friends and colleagues painted a picture of a man who felt undermined by his own party and who sank into depression and self-pity.
His one attempt in 1999 to run for a parliamentary seat from a supposedly safe district in the capital, New Delhi, had ended in ignominious defeat. His failure to contest a parliamentary seat in 2009, making him the only Indian prime minister not to have done so, further undermined both his confidence, his friends and colleagues say, and his standing in the eyes of the party.
Congress, insiders say, never accepted that the 2009 election was a mandate for Singh and jealously resented the idea that he could be seen to be anywhere near as important as a Gandhi. Rahul, Sonia’s son, was being groomed to take over from Singh, and the prime minister needed to be cut down to size.
He soon was openly criticized by his own party over attempts to continue a peace process with Pakistan despite the 2008 attack on Mumbai by Pakistani militants.
Singh became even more quiet at his own cabinet meetings, to the point of not speaking up for the sort of economic changes many thought he ought to be championing.
“His gut instincts are very good, but sometimes he suffers from doubts about the political feasibility, about getting things done,” said Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a Columbia University professor who has been friends with Singh since their Cambridge days.
Singh will go down in history as India’s first Sikh prime minister and the country’s third-longest-serving premier, but also as someone who did not know when to retire, Guha said.
“He is obviously tired, listless, without energy,” he said. “At his time of life, it is not as though he is going to get a new burst of energy. Things are horribly out of control and can only get worse for him, for his party and for his government.”

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/asia/0,9263,501120924,00.html

The New Great Wall | Sep. 24, 2012

Sep. 24, 2012

A photo-illustration of the Great Wall of China

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http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3919146.ece?css=print

For web giants, shifting boundaries of free expression

Somini Sengupta

FINE LINE: The wide margin for free speech often lands companies like Google and Facebook in feuds with governments and lobbyists. Photo: V.V. Krishnan

The Hindu FINE LINE: The wide margin for free speech often lands companies like Google and Facebook in feuds with governments and lobbyists. Photo: V.V. Krishnan

Internet companies write their own rules for determining hate speech, which gives them wide latitude in interpreting what constitutes offensive material in different countries

For Google last week, the decision was clear. An anti-Islamic video that provoked violence worldwide was not hate speech under its rules because it did not specifically incite violence against Muslims, even if it mocked their faith.

The White House was not so sure, and it asked Google to reconsider the determination, a request the company rebuffed.

Although the administration’s request was unusual, for Google, it represented the kind of delicate balancing act that Internet companies confront every day.

These companies, which include communications media like Facebook and Twitter, write their own edicts about what kind of expression is allowed, things as diverse as pointed political criticism, nudity, and notions as murky as hate speech. And their employees work around the clock to check when users run afoul of their rules.

Google is not the only Internet company to grapple in recent days with questions involving the anti-Islamic video, which appeared on YouTube, which Google owns. Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had blocked links to the video in Pakistan, where it violates the country’s blasphemy law. A spokeswoman said Facebook had also removed a post that contained a threat to a United States ambassador, after receiving a report from the State Department; Facebook has declined to say in which country the ambassador worked.

Becomes jurisprudence

“Because these speech platforms are so important, the decisions they take become jurisprudence,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who has worked for both Google and the White House. Most vexing among those decisions are ones that involve whether a form of expression is hate speech. Hate speech has no universally accepted definition, legal experts say. And countries, including democratic ones, have widely divergent legal approaches to regulating speech they consider to be offensive or inflammatory. Europe bans neo-Nazi speech, for instance, but courts there have also banned material that offends the religious sensibilities of one group or another. Indian law frowns on speech that could threaten public order. Turkey can shut down a Web site that insults its founding President, Kemal Ataturk. Like the countries, the Internet companies have their own positions, which give them wide latitude on how to interpret expression in different countries.

Although Google says the anti-Islamic video, “Innocence of Muslims,” was not hate speech, it restricted access to the video in Libya and Egypt because of the extraordinarily delicate situation on the ground and out of respect for cultural norms.

Google has not yet explained why its cultural norms edict applied to only two countries and not others, where Muslim sensitivities have been demonstrably offended.

Google’s fine parsing led to a debate in the blogosphere about whether the video constituted hateful or offensive speech.

Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University, said Google was justified in restricting access to the video in certain places, if for no other reason than to stanch the violence.

Wide margin

“Maybe the hate speech/offensive speech distinction can be elided by the smart folks in Google’s foreign ministry,” Mr. Spiro wrote on the blog Opinio Juris. “If material is literally setting off global firestorms through its dissemination online, Google will strategically pull the plug.”

Every company, in order to do business globally, makes a point of obeying the laws of every country in which it operates. Google has already said that it took down links to the incendiary video in India and Indonesia, because it violates local statutes.

But even as a company sets its own rules, capriciously sometimes and without the due process that binds most countries, legal experts say they must be flexible to strike the right balance between democratic values and law.

“Companies are benevolent rulers trying to approximate the kinds of decisions they think would be respectful of free speech as a value and also human safety,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.

Unlike Google, Twitter does not explicitly address hate speech, but it says in its rule book that “users are allowed to post content, including potentially inflammatory content, provided they do not violate the Twitter Terms of Service and Rules.” Those include a prohibition against “direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

That wide margin for speech sometimes lands Twitter in feuds with governments and lobbyists. Twitter was pressed this summer to take down several accounts the Indian government considered offensive. Company officials agreed to remove only those that blatantly impersonated others; impersonation violates company rules, unless the user makes it clear that it is satirical.

Facebook has some of the industry’s strictest rules. Terrorist organisations are not permitted on the social network, according to the company’s terms of service. In recent years, the company has repeatedly shut down fan pages set up by Hezbollah.

In a statement after the killings of United States Embassy employees in Libya, the company said, “Facebook’s policy prohibits content that threatens or organises violence, or praises violent organisations.”

Facebook also explicitly prohibits what it calls “hate speech,” which it defines as attacking a person. In addition, it allows users to report content they find objectionable, which Facebook employees then vet. Facebook’s algorithms also pick up certain words that are then sent to human inspectors to review; the company declined to provide details on what kinds of words set off that kind of review. — New York Times News

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http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article3924720.ece

NEW DELHI, September 22, 2012

‘Frail’ India placed last on nutrition front

Bindu Shajan Perappadan

Sharing space with Congo and Yemen at the bottom of the table

A study of nutrition-specific commitments by 36 countries found India sharing space with two other countries at the bottom of the table failing on both commitments and outcomes, according to the “Nutrition Barometer” report released by non-government organisation Save the Children on Friday.

The report aims to provide a snapshot of national governments’ political, legal and financial commitments and progress in addressing child nutrition. It gauges these commitments that are measurable and comparable across a diverse group of 36 countries that together account for 90 per cent of the world’s stunted children.

Malawi performs better

While the countries that performed best included Guatemala, Malawi and Peru -- all of which showed strong commitment with strong nutrition outcomes relative to the other countries in the group – the Democratic Republic of Congo, India and Yemen showed the weakest performance with frail commitments and frail outcomes.

Save the Children India’s CEO Thomas Chandy said: “In fact, India is the only other country other than the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen that fails on both political and legal and financial commitments. Countries in South Asia including Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal are among the 36 countries that are part of the report but they fare better than India in dealing with malnutrition.’’

He added that the report is a pointer to the need to back political commitment with adequate resources and effective mechanisms.

Said Mr. Chandy: “In India, States that have supported their policies and schemes with adequate resources and political will have done much better in dealing with malnutrition, child mortality and maternal mortality.

India comes out frail on both commitments and outcomes. India’s spending on health is abysmally low, 1.67 per cent of the GDP in the 12th Plan.’’

The Nutrition Barometer builds on existing indices such as the Global Hunger Index produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Hunger Reduction Commitment Index (HRCI) released by the Institute of Development Studies. It analyses commitments made by the national government to fight under-nutrition and attempts to understand how they move with children’s nutrition status.

Data of 2005-06

The outcomes for India have been measured using the National Family and Health Survey 3 (NFHS 3) from 2005-06 in the absence of more recent data on malnutrition being available in the country.

Save the Children’s Director (Advocacy and Policy) Shireen Vakil Miller said: “The survey report indicates an urgent need to address the issue immediately. Unless we track the efficacy of our schemes and policies on the ground there can be no course correction even if it is required.’’

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-slowly-confronts-epidemic-of-missing-children/2012/09/22/395d51b0-fd95-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_print.html

India slowly confronts epidemic of missing children

By Simon Denyer, Published: September 23

NEW DELHI — Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.

They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.

Simon Denyer/The Washington Post - Children rescued from a bangle-making factory in New Delhi after a police raid on Sept.5, 2012. More than 90,000 children go missing in India every year, many of them sold into forced labor on farms and in factories.

“It was living hell these past two years, trying to figure out where we could find him,” said his father, Iqbal Ali. “I used to run a biscuit bakery, but from the day he disappeared, I got so caught up trying to meet politicians, police and people who claim to do magic to get children back, that I had to shut down my bakery. I had no time for it.”

More than 90,000 children are officially reported missing every year, according to data compiled and released late last year by leading children’s rights group Bachpan Bachao Andolan, which showed the problem was far greater than previously thought.

Up to 10 times that number are trafficked, according to the group — boys and girls, most from poor families, torn from their parents, sometimes in return for cash, and forced to beg or work in farms, factories and homes, or sold for sex and marriage.

It is an epidemic that, until a few years ago, remained unreported and largely ignored by the authorities.

But years of tireless work by activists, a few crucial victories in court — and the shocking discovery of the bones of 17 slain girls and young women around a businessman’s home in a suburb of New Delhi called Nithari in 2006 — have gradually put the issue on the nation’s agenda.

India’s 24-hour news channels have also played a role in highlighting an issue long tolerated by the country’s middle classes. The media frenzy surrounding the Nithari killings was a watershed, reminiscent of the way the disappearance of Etan Patz in Manhattan in 1979 helped spark the missing-children’s movement in the United States.

In recent weeks, footage from surveillance cameras — a new phenomenon in modern India — has also been repeatedly broadcast on television here, showing infants being brazenly snatched from train stations and hospital lobbies as parents slept nearby.

“A couple of decades ago, there was no understanding of the issue of missing children or trafficking for forced labor — child labor was not even considered a crime,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, an activist for the children’s rights group. “Though things are slowly changing, the biggest issue is the lack of political and administrative will to enforce the law, which is often outside the reach of the common person.”

Irfan suffered perhaps the most common fate — kidnapped to satisfy India’s insatiable demand for cheap, agricultural labor.

In India and many other developing countries, children often work in agriculture. What is only now becoming apparent is the huge trafficking industry that has grown up outside the law.

Irfan’s story, though, has a happy ending. Last month, after more than two years away, he finally made it home to his joyous parents, after climbing on a chair in the shed where he was held and breaking a window with an earthen vase to escape.

“I was supposed to bathe the buffalo, to feed them, to pick up the dung,” he said, describing his life imprisoned in virtual solitary confinement in a room adjoining a buffalo shed outside the town of Mullanpur, some 200 miles northwest of Delhi.

“I was fed just once a day, just leftovers. When I used to shriek and make a fuss, they would tie my hands and feet at night.”

After escaping, Irfan found shelter with another family for several months. Then, last month, as the media furor about missing children reached its peak, he saw photographs of his parents and himself on a TV show.

Only then did he journey back to the New Delhi district of Nangloi, the only address he had in his memory.

“I took the train to Delhi, and a bus to Nangloi,” he said, “but when I arrived it had all changed. Before, there was no overpass, no metro. It looked like a completely different place to me.”

After half an hour of wandering, Irfan says he bumped into a friend, who took him home.

“We were just overwhelmed with happiness,” said his mother, Shabnam. “We went and got new clothes made for all of us. All his old clothes were too small, because he had grown so tall.”

Young laborers

Kidnapping represents just the tip of the iceberg of a vast child-trafficking industry in India. Many young children are sold by their parents or enticed from them with the promise that they will be looked after and be able to send money home. Never registered as missing, many simply lose touch with their parents, working long hours in garment factories or making cheap jewelry.

Globally, trafficking of children for forced labor and sexual exploitation remains a “largely hidden crime,” says the International Labor Organization, with no reliable data even existing on the scale of the problem.

The organization makes a “conservative estimate” that 5.5 million children around the world are trapped in forced labor, but in India alone the government uses estimates of 5 million to 12 million children forced to work.

On a recent raid with activists and police, 36 children were rescued from a series of tiny rooms where they were making bangles for 10 hours, some for just $4 a month.

One was just 6 years old, the son of a rickshaw puller from the faraway city of Patna, his hair and skin covered in glitter from the work. “They didn’t let me talk to my mother on the phone,” he said.

Last month, the Indian government proposed a blanket ban on the employment of children younger than 14, building on a 2009 law that established a child’s right to education until that age. Activists hailed the proposal, which now needs parliamentary approval, as a major step forward, but warned that enforcement will remain a significant challenge.

The U.S. State Department says India is making “significant efforts” to comply with minimum global standards for the elimination of trafficking, but notes challenges in enforcement and “the alleged complicity of public officials in human trafficking.”

Little help for the missing

The parents of several missing children interviewed in the past month said they had received little or no help from the police, largely, they said, because they were poor.

“The police were very cold. They just kept saying: ‘A lot of kids are missing. What can we do?’ ” said Kunwar Pal, 48, whose son, Ravi, was 12 when he went missing two years ago after going out to ride his bicycle. “Maybe if I had the money to pay a bribe, they would have found my kid.”

Nearly 450,000 cases of children trafficked for labor were reported in the past three years, but prosecutions were launched in just 25,000 of those cases and 3,394 employers were convicted, official figures show.

Twelve years ago, Pal’s wife died in childbirth, their infant daughter succumbing to diarrhea soon after. Now, in his bare one-roomed house, he pines for his favorite son, an obedient, undemanding and studious boy who dreamed of becoming a detective.

“He liked soap operas on TV, one called ‘CID,’ and he used to say he wanted to study and be educated and become a policeman,” said Pal, before breaking down in tears. “I am always expecting a call. ‘Papa, can I come home?’ ”

Rama Lakshmi and Suhasini Raj contributed to this report.

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September 30, 2012 03:23 IST NEW DELHI, September 30, 2012

Indian Internet economy all set to explode: study

Shalini Singh

PTI Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal told mobile operators to focus on data for revenues rather than voice.

Internet’s contribution to GDP will grow from $30 billion to $100 billion by 2015

The Internet has established its role as a powerful economic force multiplier with a new study projecting that its contribution to India’s GDP will explode to $100 billion (Rs. 5 lakh crore) by 2015 from $30 billion (Rs.1.5 lakh crore) at present.

The study on the “Impact of Internet on the Indian Economy” by McKinsey, which is still to be released, could well become a new anchor for the government’s programmes to enhance digital citizenship.

Revealing the highlights of the study, in the presence of Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal at a curtain raiser held to announce a two-day multistakeholder conference on Internet governance to be held at FICCI here on October 4-5, McKinsey said the contribution of the Internet to global GDP is roughly three per cent or $1.7 trillion and its performance in India will eventually mirror this trend.

We’re not for control, says Sibal

The government is also alive to the growing power of the Internet, including as a communications multiplier. Mr. Sibal, while stating that “the government of India does not want control over the Internet,” emphasised that “any nation which wants to be a stakeholder and key player in the 21st Century must come to terms with the cyberworld.”

The world currently has 2 billion Internet users, of whom 50 per cent live outside the developed world. The global Internet population is projected to climb to 2.6-2.9 billion by 2015. According to McKinsey, of this, 30 “aspiring countries” with a very high economic growth have seen Internet users grow at five times the level in the developed world. In the next 10 years, netizens in these 30 countries are projected to grow at 10 times the pace in the developed world.

By 2015, based on existing projections, India, which with 120 million users has the third largest Internet user base in the world, is projected to hit 350 million, catapulting it to a global ranking of 2, with the fastest rate of growth. An alternative growth model used by McKinsey, factoring in the trend that wireless-based expansion usually overshoots any standard formula, presents a more ambitious forecast of half a billion Internet users by 2015. This is good news for mobile companies since three out of every four or 75 per cent of all new Internet users in India are expected to go online, using wireless devices. Globally, 15-20 per cent of the users access Internet on wireless technologies, while in India this figure will eventually be closer to 55 per cent.

Recognising this move, Mr. Sibal told mobile operators to focus on data for revenues rather than voice. Of the Internet’s $30 billion contribution to India’s GDP, individual users investing in smart devices and phones, PCs and telecom services spend $9 billion. The spend of private enterprise, both large and SME investment in hardware, software, including cloud technologies, is $8 billion. The government spends roughly $2 billion and the export sector, net of imports, roughly $10 billion. The Indian Internet economy is larger than several of the service sectors such as hospitality or even the utility sector with an additional 1.6–2 times multiplier effect, since this expenditure creates a demand for up and downstream industries. The growth, however, in terms of both the GDP and users, is faced with several barriers and the need to ensure that individual pieces of the Internet’s ecosystem work in harmony with one another.

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October 2, 2012 02:56 IST

Historian in the Marxist tradition with a global reach

Martin Kettle

Dorothy Wedderburn

WIDELY READ, INFLUENTIAL AND RESPECTED: In a profession notorious for microscopic preoccupations, few historians such as Hobsbawm have ever commanded such a wide field in such detail or with such authority. Photo: The Hindu

If Eric Hobsbawm (June 9, 1917 – October 1, 2012) had died 25 years ago, the obituaries would have described him as Britain’s most distinguished Marxist historian and would have left it more or less there. Yet by the time of his death at the age of 95, Hobsbawm had achieved a unique position in the country’s intellectual life. In his later years Hobsbawm became arguably Britain’s most respected historian of any kind, recognised if not endorsed on the right as well as the left, and one of a tiny handful of historians of any era to enjoy genuine national and world renown. Unlike some others, Hobsbawm achieved this wider recognition without in any major way revolting against either Marxism or Marx. In his 94th year he published How to Change the World, a vigorous defence of Marx’s continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-10. What is more, he achieved his culminating reputation at a time when the socialist ideas and projects that animated so much of his writing for well over half a century were in historic disarray, and worse, as he himself was always unflinchingly aware.

In a profession notorious for microscopic preoccupations, few historians have ever commanded such a wide field in such detail or with such authority. To the last, Hobsbawm considered himself to be essentially a 19th-century historian, but his sense of that and other centuries was both unprecedentedly broad and unusually cosmopolitan.

The sheer scope of his interest in the past, and his exceptional command of what he knew, continued to humble those who talked to him and those who read him, most of all in the four-volume Age of... series in which he distilled the history of the capitalist world from 1789 to 1991. “Hobsbawm’s capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs,” wrote Neal Ascherson. Both in his knowledge of historic detail and in his extraordinary powers of synthesis, so well displayed in that four-volume project, he was unrivalled.

Reading Marx

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, a good place for a historian of empire, in 1917, a good year for a communist. He was second-generation British, the grandson of a Polish Jew and cabinet-maker who came to London in the 1870s. Eight children, who included Leopold, Eric’s father, were born in England and all took British citizenship at birth (Hobsbawm’s Uncle Harry in due course became the first Labour mayor of Paddington).

But Eric was British of no ordinary background. Another uncle, Sidney, went to Egypt before the First World War and found a job there in a shipping office for Leopold. There, in 1914, Leopold Hobsbawm met Nelly Gruen, a young Viennese from a middle-class family who had been given a trip to Egypt as a prize for completing her school studies. The two got engaged, but war broke out and they were separated. The couple eventually married in Switzerland in 1916, returning to Egypt for the birth of Eric, their first child, in June 1917.

“Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world,” he said in his 1993 Creighton lecture, one of several occasions in his later years when he attempted to relate his own lifetime to his own writing. “My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler’s rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge of the 1930s, which confirmed both.”

In 1919, the young family returned to settle in Vienna, where Eric went to elementary school, a period he later recalled in a 1995 television documentary which featured pictures of a recognisably skinny young Viennese Hobsbawm in shorts and knee socks. Politics made their impact around this time. Eric’s first political memory was in Vienna in 1927, when workers burned down the Palace of Justice. The first political conversation that he could recall took place in an Alpine sanatorium in these years, too. Two motherly Jewish women were discussing Leon Trotsky. “Say what you like,” said one to the other, “but he’s a Jewish boy called Bronstein.” In 1929, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Two years later his mother died of TB. Eric was 14, and his Uncle Sidney took charge once more, taking Eric and his sister Nancy to live in Berlin. As a teenager in Weimar Republic Berlin, Hobsbawm inescapably became politicised. He read Marx for the first time, and became a communist.

Hobsbawm could always remember the winter’s day in January 1933 when, emerging from the Halensee S-Bahn station on his way home from his school, the celebrated Prinz Heinrich Gymnasium, he saw a newspaper headline announcing Hitler’s election as chancellor. Around this time he joined the Socialist Schoolboys, which he described as “de facto part of the communist movement” and sold its publication, Schulkampf (“School Struggle”). He kept the organisation’s duplicator under his bed and, if his later facility for writing was any guide, probably wrote most of the articles too. The family remained in Berlin until 1933, when Sidney Hobsbawm was posted by his employers to live in England.

The gangly teenage boy who settled with his sister in Edgware in 1934 described himself later as “completely continental and German speaking.” School, though, was “not a problem” because the English education system was “way behind” the German. A cousin in Balham introduced him to jazz for the first time, the “unanswerable sound,” he called it. The moment of conversion, he wrote some 60 years later, was when he first heard the Duke Ellington band “at its most imperial.” Never satisfied to be anything less than the master of anything that absorbed him, Hobsbawm spent a period in the 1950s as jazz critic of the New Statesman, and published a Penguin Special, The Jazz Scene, on the subject in 1959 under the pen-name Francis Newton (many years later it was reissued with Hobsbawm identified as the author).

Learning to speak English properly for the first time, Eric became a pupil at Marylebone grammar school and in 1936 he won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where at one point he had rooms on a staircase on which his only two neighbours were A.E. Housman and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was at this time that a saying became common among his Cambridge communist friends: “Is there anything that Hobsbawm doesn’t know?” He became a member of the legendary Cambridge Apostles. “All of us thought that the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of capitalism,” he wrote 40 years later. But, he added, “It was not.” When war broke out, Hobsbawm volunteered, as many communists did, for intelligence work. But his politics, which were never a secret, led to rejection. Instead he became an improbable sapper in 560 Field Company, which he later described as “a very working-class unit trying to build some patently inadequate defences against invasion on the coasts of East Anglia.” This, too, was a formative experience for the often aloof young intellectual prodigy. “There was something sublime about them and about Britain at that time,” he wrote. “That wartime experience converted me to the British working class. They were not very clever, except for the Scots and Welsh, but they were very, very good people.”

Hobsbawm married his first wife, Muriel Seaman, in 1943. After the war, returning to Cambridge, Hobsbawm made another choice, abandoning a planned doctorate on north African agrarian reform in favour of research on the Fabians. It was a move which opened the door to both a lifetime of study of the 19th century and an equally long-lasting preoccupation with the problems of the left. In 1947, he got his first tenured job, as a history lecturer at Birkbeck College, London, where he was to remain for much of his teaching life.

With the onset of the Cold War, a very British academic McCarthyism meant that the Cambridge lectureship which Hobsbawm always coveted never materialised. He shuttled between Cambridge and London, one of the principal organisers and driving forces of the Communist Party Historians Group, a glittering radical academy which brought together some of the most prominent historians of the post-war era. Its members also included Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A.L. Morton, E.P. Thompson, John Saville and, later, Raphael Samuel. Whatever else it achieved, the CP Historians Group, about which Hobsbawm wrote an authoritative essay in 1978, certainly provided a nucleus for many of his first steps as a major historical writer.

First book

Hobsbawm’s first book, an edited collection of documents from the Fabian era, Labour’s Turning Point, published in 1948, belongs firmly to this CP-dominated era, as does his engagement in the once celebrated “standard of living” debate about the economic consequences of the early industrial revolution, in which he and R.M. Hartwell traded arguments in successive numbers of the Economic History Review. The foundation of the Past and Present journal, now the most lasting, if fully independent, legacy of the Historians Group, also belongs to this period.

Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and always thought of himself as part of an international communist movement. For many, this remained the insuperable obstacle to an embrace of his writing. Yet he always remained very much a licensed freethinker within the party’s ranks. Over Hungary in 1956, an event which split the CP and drove many intellectuals out of the party, he was a voice of protest who nevertheless remained.

Yet, as with his contemporary, Christopher Hill, who left the CP at this time, the political trauma of 1956 and the start of a lastingly happy second marriage combined in some way to trigger a sustained and fruitful period of historical writing which was to establish fame and reputation. In 1959, he published his first major work, Primitive Rebels, a strikingly original account, particularly for those times, of southern European rural secret societies and millenarian cultures (he was still writing about the subject as recently as 2011). He returned to these themes again a decade later, inCaptain Swing, a detailed study of rural protest in early 19th-century England co-authored with George Rude, andBandits, a more wide-ranging attempt at synthesis. These works are reminders that Hobsbawm was both a bridge between European and British historiography and a forerunner of the notable rise of the study of social history in post-1968 Britain. By this time, though, Hobsbawm had already published the first of the works on which both his popular and academic reputations still rest. A collection of some of his most important essays, Labouring Men, appeared in 1964 (a second collection, Worlds of Labour, was to follow 20 years later). But it was Industry and Empire (1968), a compelling summation of much of Hobsbawm’s work on Britain and the industrial revolution, which achieved the highest esteem. For more than 30 years, it has rarely been out of print.

‘The Age of’ series

Even more influential in the long term was the “Age of” series, which he began with The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, first published in 1962. This was followed in 1975 by The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and in 1987 by The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. A fourth volume, The Age of Extremes: 1914-91, more quirky and speculative but in some respects the most remarkable and admirable of all, extended the sequence in 1994.

The four volumes embodied all of Hobsbawm’s best qualities, the sweep combined with the telling anecdote and statistical grasp, the attention to the nuance and significance of events and words, and above all, perhaps, the unrivalled powers of synthesis (nowhere better displayed than in a classic summary of mid-19th century capitalism on the very first page of the second volume). The books were not conceived as a tetralogy, but as they appeared, they acquired individual and cumulative classic status. They were an example, Hobsbawm wrote, of “what the French call ‘haute vulgarisation’” (he did not mean this self-deprecatingly), and they became, in the words of one reviewer, “part of the mental furniture of educated Englishmen.”

Hobsbawm’s first marriage had collapsed in 1951. During the 1950s, he had another relationship which resulted in the birth of his first son, Joshua Benathan, but the boy’s mother did not want to marry. In 1962, he married again, this time to Marlene Schwarz, of Austrian descent. They moved to Hampstead, and bought a small second home in Wales. They had two children, Andrew and Julia.

In the 1970s, Hobsbawm’s widening fame as a historian was accompanied by a growing reputation as a writer about his own times. Though he had a historian’s respect for the Communist party’s centralist discipline, Hobsbawm’s intellectual eminence gave him an independence which won the respect of communism’s toughest critics, such as Isaiah Berlin. It also ensured him the considerable accolade that not one of Hobsbawm’s books was ever published in the Soviet Union. Thus armed and protected, Hobsbawm ranged fearlessly across the condition of the left, mostly in the pages of the CP’s monthly Marxism Today, the increasingly heterodox publication of which he became the house deity.

His conversations with the Italian communist, and now state president, Giorgio Napolitano date from these years, and were published as The Italian Road to Socialism. But his most influential political writings centred on his increasing certainty that the European labour movement had ceased to be capable of bearing the transformational role assigned to it by earlier Marxists. These uncompromisingly revisionist articles were collected under the general heading The Forward March of Labour Halted.

By 1983, when Neil Kinnock became the leader of the Labour party at the depth of its electoral fortunes, Hobsbawm’s influence had begun to extend far beyond the CP and deep into Labour itself. Kinnock publicly acknowledged his debt to Hobsbawm and allowed himself to be interviewed by the man he described as “my favourite Marxist.” Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as “New Labour,” which he saw, among other things, as historically cowardly, Hobsbawm was without question the single most influential intellectual forerunner of Labour’s increasingly iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.

His status was underlined in 1998, when Tony Blair made him a Companion of Honour, a few months after Hobsbawm celebrated his 80th birthday. In its citation, Downing Street said Hobsbawm continued to publish works that “address problems in history and politics that have re-emerged to disturb the complacency of Europe.”

Later years

In his later years, Hobsbawm enjoyed widespread reputation and respect. His 80th and 90th birthday celebrations were attended by a Who’s Who of left wing and liberal intellectual Britain. Throughout the late years, he continued to publish volumes of essays, including On History (1997) and Uncommon People (1998), works in which Dizzy Gillespie and Salvatore Giuliano sat naturally side by side in the index as testimony to the range of Hobsbawm’s abiding curiosity. A highly successful autobiography, Interesting Times, followed in 2002, and Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism in 2007.

More famous in his extreme old age than probably at any other period of his life, he broadcast regularly, lectured widely and was a regular performer at the Hay literary festival, of which he became president at the age of 93, following the death of Lord Bingham of Cornhill. A fall in late 2010 severely reduced his mobility, but his intellect and his willpower remained unvanquished, as did his social and cultural life, thanks to Marlene’s efforts, love and cooking.

That his writings continued to command such audiences at a time when his politics were in some ways so eclipsed was the kind of disjunction which exasperated right-wingers, but it was a paradox on which the subtle judgment of this least complacent of intellects feasted. In his later years, he liked to quote E.M. Forster that he was “always standing at a slight angle to the universe.” Whether the remark says more about Hobsbawm or about the universe was something that he enjoyed disputing, confident in the knowledge that it was in some senses a lesson for them both.

He is survived by Marlene and his three children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. (Dorothy Wedderburn died on September 20, 2012) — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2012

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Europe

More than a museum?

A year that will test the European Union’s new treaty

Nov 13th 2009 | from The World In 2010 print edition

Getty Images

After years of institutional wrangles, the European Union will in 2010 have new rules on decision-making, its own diplomatic service, a quasi-foreign minister and a new “president” to represent national governments—all the tools needed for the 27 members to speak with one voice on the global stage. At this moment of triumph, however, a doubt has set in: what if Europe speaks to the world, and nobody listens?

Talks will resume on enlarging the union

The fear of irrelevancy will haunt European leaders in 2010. They devised a new rule book, the Lisbon treaty, to come into force in 2010 and give their union the political heft to match its might as a trading and regulatory power. Its first year will reveal whether the design really does the job.

Spain will hold the rotating presidency of the EU for the first half of 2010, chairing meetings in all fields except foreign policy (which will come under the union's newly installed foreign-policy chief, or “high representative”). Setting out priorities for the presidency, Spain's prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, says Europe has to become an “indispensable power”. The challenge, he says, is to find a new economic model that is globally competitive and yet retains the European ideals of social “solidarity”. If Europe fails at that hard task, it risks becoming “a sort of huge museum of no weight in the world.”

For a few heady months in the early days of the global economic crisis, back in 2008, Europeans felt they were leading the world. The EU proclaimed itself a leader of global efforts to combat climate change, and European governments first demanded and then drafted new rules for global finance. Politicians in France, Germany and elsewhere announced the death of the “ultra-liberal” Anglo-Saxon economic model.

In 2010 those memories of European hubris will seem cruelly distant. Government intervention and protective labour-market rules limited a surge in European unemployment in 2009, but EU bosses fear jobless numbers will explode in 2010 (see article), putting pressure on battered public finances and tempting governments to indulge in protectionism. There will be sharp debates among countries that use the single currency, as some, such as the Germans and Dutch, push for an early exit from fiscal-stimulus policies that have sent public debts soaring, while others, such as the French, continue to call for borrowing and state investment.

Early 2010 will see increasing attention paid to Britain, and the prospect that the election there will be won by a deeply Eurosceptic Conservative Party. A British demand (assuming the Tories win) to “repatriate” employment policy and opt out from chunks of EU social legislation will prompt furious accusations of “social dumping” from continental politicians.

The European Parliament will throw its weight around, using new powers from the Lisbon treaty to oversee almost all areas of EU regulation. Debate will begin in 2010 on the future shape of the EU budget ahead of actual budget negotiations two years later, and the parliament will want a big say. Spending on farm subsidies will provoke a fight.

It will not all be gloom. After a two-year pause, talks will resume on enlarging the union still further: a policy that has proved to be the EU's most successful source of soft power across central and eastern Europe. Croatia could become the club's 28th member at the end of 2010, or soon after. Tiny, recession-hit Iceland will open entry talks in early 2010. Success may hinge on how much autonomy the EU is prepared to give Iceland in managing its rich fish stocks.

Spain will try to breathe new life into Turkish entry talks with the EU, which have slowed to a crawl amid rows with Cyprus about direct shipping and trade links, and vocal hostility from leaders such as Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Mr Zapatero calls Turkey a “great country” that has waited too long at Europe's gates.

This may be the last time a country uses the presidency to shape the agenda so visibly. Federalist-minded Belgium takes the chair in the second half of 2010, and intends to “break” for ever with the idea of a powerful rotating presidency. It wants to give the new treaty a chance to work, its diplomats explain: the new president and high rep must become Europe's true spokesmen. That is, if anybody's listening.

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http://www.indiaeveryday.in/fullnews-water-management--our-ancestors-knew-it-well-1005-4522878.htm

October 6, 2012 23:55 IST

Water management — our ancestors knew it well

L. S. Sathiyamurthy

Communities blessed with water wealth should come forward to share it with the people of water-stressed areas.

Water is a precious natural resource and basic need sustaining the life of all living creatures. It cannot be produced or added electronically or hydrologically or by any other technology, though it can be recycled to some extent. On the earth, 75 per cent of surfaces are covered with water. Yet, people living in the remaining surfaces are suffering without potable water for their basic requirements. The United Nations Report on Water for Life 2005-2015 estimates that one out of six people — more than a billion population — does not have adequate access to safe water. All major claims and conflicts over water in the world arise in respect of the share and distribution of three per cent of fresh water, which occurs in ice poles, glaciers, rivers, ponds, and other waterbodies.

Access to water for all people was considered a primary need and given priority in governance during the pre-colonial days. Wells, tanks and other waterbodies were created and managed by people themselves with their traditional knowledge.

Official data by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) reveal that 6,76,000 big structures for rainwater harvesting were in use, some of them 1,000 years old. They were constructed and maintained by villagers for their life and development. Water governance was articulated as an art and inherited by generation after generation as an integral part of life. Even without any code or law, waterbodies and irrigation, were regulated by custom.

The present sovereign power over waterbodies and rivers is a concept introduced by British rulers and it prevented communities from participating in preserving the waterbodies for their proper use. The doctrine of public trust, which is embedded in the Constitution, had prevailed in India prior to the British administration. But the Northern India Canal and Drainage Act, 1873, the first law on water resources, introduced the doctrine of Eminent Domain and declared the state’s right over water sources. Subsequently, other laws such as the Easements Act, 1882, which determines the right and ownership of private parties over enjoyment of water flow, were enacted. The British laws had minimised the participation of public-spirited people in water governance.

Since the adoption of the Constitution, water has become a State subject under List II. Hitherto, more than 32 Central Acts enacted by Parliament and two national water policies, 1987 and 2002, have been drafted. Consequently, a natural resource has become a legal subject resulting in the common public expecting schemes and projects from the Central and State governments for maintenance, desalination and reconstruction of tanks, ponds.

The inherited art of water harvesting has been conveniently forgotten by people. After the state became the absolute owner of all public waterbodies, the involvement of its citizens in safeguarding them was given up and community involvement drastically diminished. Today, water governance is suffering from institutional paralysis at the hands of unaware and inattentive users.

The lack of awareness of water sources leads to a tragedy of converting water bodies into land areas. In a case before the Madras High Court, (W.P. (MD) No. 2779/07 dt. 12th November 2007 Dr. R.S.Lal Mohan Vs Executive engineer, WRO), the shrinking of water sources was brought to the notice of the judiciary, by a pro bono public petition. The court expressed its anguish over t he disappearance of tanks. As per the census taken in 1962, in Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, more than 3,500 waterbodies were noticed and identified, but in 1998 more than 1,000 of these tanks were lost.

The arbitrary use of waterbodies for various other purposes by the state without considering the ecological consequences and the lack of response from the community are the main cause of groundwater depletion. Thus, the people who raise their voice for the right to water have to realise their own faults and failure to protect the natural water harvesting bodies.

Therefore, water-sensitisation is a prerequisite to claim rights and entitlements. Creating awareness among and engaging local bodies and their representatives in the maintenance of water harvesting and storing structures is an important preliminary work to be undertaken by the state and non-governmental organisations.

India possesses five per cent of the world’s water wealth, but has 20 per cent of the world population. Digging wells and tanks was once considered a meritorious service. Despite all the importance attached to water, there has been no effective mechanism adopted to prevent its pollution.

There are many inter-State water disputes and intra-State water conflicts pending before courts and tribunals without a permanent solution. The sharing of the scarce water resources among people even poses threats to the federal structure of the country. Water activists say that a comprehensive code has to be drafted with clear definitions of individual rights, riparian rights and the rights of the State parties in inter-State water sharing.

However, the right to water means easy, affordable, access to everyone for basic needs. River-water-sharing between two or more States does not directly come under access to water for an individual. The other argument put forth by activists is that in inter-State conflicts, the ultimate stakeholders are the people.

Nonetheless, for the purpose of determining the right in global perspectives, water for drinking, sanitation and household purposes has been measured at 150 litres a day per capita. This definition has been generally accepted to approach the claim of right to water in human rights perceptions.

The Supreme Court has recognised the “Doctrine of Public Trust” as an integral part of water jurisprudence. In M.C. Mehtha vs. Kamalnath and others (W.P.NO. 182 of December 13, 1996), it held that the doctrine primarily rests on the principle that natural resources like air, sea, water and forests have such importance to the people as a whole that it would be wholly unjustified to make them a subject of private ownership. Being a gift of nature, these resources should be made freely available to everyone.

The right to water is not only an inalienable basic right of an individual and it is a factor that creates gender equality. It acts as a bridge between water-scarce communities and those with water wealth. As a humanitarian gesture, communities blessed with water wealth should come forward to share it with the people of water-stressed areas. The basic fact that water is nature’s gift and a shared heritage for all has to prevail in the minds of everyone.

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http://www.indiaeveryday.in/fullnews-debate-on-copyright-gets-lively-1005-4542288.htm

October 11, 2012 11:53 IST

Debate on copyright gets lively

Vijetha S. N

JNU Professor Nivedita Menon speaking at a debate on “Who is Afraid of Copyright Infringement?” at Delhi University on Wednesday. Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma

The HinduJNU Professor Nivedita Menon speaking at a debate on “Who is Afraid of Copyright Infringement?” at Delhi University on Wednesday. Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma

Racy, heart-thumping mystery novel or serious academic material -- writers write to be read, and nobody knows this better than the authors themselves. Therefore, when big international publishing houses take one tiny photo-copying shop in one Delhi University college along with the university itself to court for “copyright violations” – restricting readership to a “niche” audience who can afford the high price of their books – it calls for a serious debate.

“Who is afraid of copyright infringement?” was organised on the lawns of Delhi School of Economics on Wednesday by students running a campaign to save the “offending” photocopying shop. The public meeting saw speeches by several eminent academics who have been published by the “petitioners” -- Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor and Francis Group as well as other publishing houses.

“If I see one of my books being sold at a traffic signal, then I can die happy,” said writer and Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Nivedita Menon, while admitting that the publishers did not pay the academic author the sort of money that would ever put the author at a financial disadvantage, if copyrights were infringed. “We do not get our work published for the money; instead for the luxury of getting our ideas across,” she said, adding that the publishers were also not put to such extensive financial losses that they claimed and that it was downright wrong of them to take the high moral ground on copyrights. “Please do not speak in the name of the “poor author”, you are violating the author’s right to be read...there is not one single academic that I know who is not disgusted by their actions,” she said. The sentence was aimed at the publishing houses’ claim that the royalties of the author were severely affected by the alleged “copyright” violations of Rameshwari Photocopy Service and Delhi University.

Her sentiments were echoed by DSE Sociology professor Satish Deshpande who said that his published work had got him a total of Rs.30,000.

“It was one-third of what I make in a month. The book took me three years to make,” he said, adding that the sales of the books had no bearing on the reasons that compelled an academic to publish. “We do it for the prestige, it looks good to be published by houses like OUP when you go looking for a job,” he admitted.

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies professor Aditya Nigam spoke about his initial experiences with big publishing houses.

“They made me sign away eventual “television rights” of my book,” he said to resounding laughter, adding that rampant commercialisation was eating into the very foundation of academic life.

The illegality of the whole issue was also debated at length. “Course packs are not illegal; we were appalled by the illegal action taken by these publishing houses,” added Prof. Menon, reinforcing the fact that publishers gained to lose very little in the whole business.

“Today you have open access publications where the author pays to get published, if you are rich, you get published…academic work has come down to this…your fight is our fight…we are with you in your campaign,” she said.

Eminent authors like Amartya Sen have also commented on the issue in his personal letters. “I am personally distressed as an OUP author to learn about this policy decision. I hope something can be done to make the academic arrangements for the education of students less difficult and more sensible.”

This was put up at the venue along side posters that said: “We have the photocopies, sue us instead along with the Indian education system…sue everybody who cannot afford your books.”

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October 13, 2012 07:39 IST

The fascinating possibility of brain-to-brain communication

Ramya Kannan

Dr Christopher James, during an interview with “The Hindu” in Chennai. Photo : R. Ravindran

Christopher James’ visiting card says he is professor of Healthcare Technology, and Director, Institute of Digital Healthcare at the University of Warwick. What he actually does at his lab is far more fascinating than that description can match.

Prof James and his team are examining applications for Brain-to-Brain communication, primarily to help patients who cannot talk to the world outside except with the aid of a machine. The team sticks electrodes on assorted skulls, hooks volunteers up to EEG machines, wires test subjects up to the computer, flashes LED lights at them, and Prof. James also gets his daughter and son to assist.

They are at the cusp of delivering a product to the homes of those with severe motor impairment - an affordable, manageable device that will help them communicate. Currently these devices can transmit simple binary codes, but in the future lurks the possibility of sophisticated communication, thought-to-thought, brain-to-brain, a machine in between.

Neural engineering

“The area I work in is a big chunk of neural engineering - to understand the brain, to diagnose but to also understand the way the brain functions,” Prof James says. He spoke to The Hindu during a visit to the city to deliver the Wheatstone lecture organised by the Institution of Engineering and Technology. If you must slot his intriguing work, feel free to slip it under the category, Brain Computer Interface (BCI).

BCI facilitates communication with the outside world through a machine. “Any form of communication requires muscle movement,” explains Prof. James. “There are people, who because of trauma or stroke, have almost intact brain (in terms of cognitive function) but no ability to move muscles. In the past these people were ‘locked in’; they had no way of communicating with the outside world. We can glue electrodes into the scalp, or implant them into the brain. We can eavesdrop on brain activity and use that to assess the level of cognitive ability.”

You will put to a cognitively-aware person the simplest form of communication – yes and no, Prof. James adds. “You can do that by setting up specific types of activity in the brain- where you know what the response is going to be. You ask someone to imagine anything to do with movement. Imagine moving the right arm for yes, and left leg for no. This gives us activity on the motor cortex. We pick that up and can tell the difference between left and right movement. Here is a rudimentary communication system.”

It is possible to make that a little more fancy, where flashing LED lights trigger a recognition response in the brain. The signal processing algorithm then detects the response to figure out what was being looked at. “It makes that more than a binary yes or no.”

But brain-out communication, or BCI has been around for a decade or more. Prof. James is trying to go beyond. “Brain-to-brain communication. This is possible in a very limited sense, now. We thought why don’t we put two BCI systems together,” he explains. On one side, someone is linked to the EEG equipment that reads brain activity and does the binary yes/no experiment. This is then transmitted over the internet and converted to flashing LED lights. “My daughter in the other room is looking at the lights, hooked up to the EEG machine. From her visual cortex, we are picking up the 0s and 1s that the first person is transmitting. That is brain-to-brain communication…It originates from some one else’s intention.”

This is passive reception of information. “Instead of me putting information into visual cortex, imagine if I put it into various brain sites. We could have brain to brain communication of the range that people imagine it to be. We have the technology to do it… But do you want to do it?” Especially, if it means drilling the skull to put electrodes in.

The larger question though, Prof James says, is that people need this, not in the lab, but at home or in a care home. His lab is working on an affordable, robust system, usable by caregivers who are not clinicians. By passing the expensive clinical, multi-channel EEG, they instead use a two-channel, cigarette-box sized tool with blue tooth. The algorithms used make it easy for carers to slap the electrodes on roughly in position.

“If a person has a particular issue and they come to us, we can go home, test their ability to communicate,” he says, outlining future plans. They leave behind the low cost device, that they can use for their communication needs. In exchange the lab gets data on real time use.

For BCI, there are different paradigms, each requiring different levels of attention. At the very basic level you just have to look. The best ones are the type of activities that are self initiated – where you close your eyes and imagine moving left and right. A robust BCI system will pick up only the relevant signals and ignore the rest.

There are two areas where the team needs to move forward. The signal processing ability has to measure up. Every thing needs to be done online, and real time. It is a matter of time, but things are getting faster. “People are now trying to make the paradigms faster and more accurate. But I want to jump all that and come up with new paradigms. When that happens, coupled with better technology, we will have elaborate BCI systems. A situation where we will have mental conversations with some one, however, is way, way out there.”

Clearly, once information is out of the brain what you do with that is entirely up to you, Prof. James explains. Which means, there are applications in utilites as well. “Can I think and turn the light off at home? If you go around with electrodes stuck in the brain and an external device, it is doable. But once again, do you want to do that. It is a question of balancing the benefits with the costs, both monetary and health wise.

However, there are some BCI gaming headsets in the market already, costing less than a 100 USD. In theory it is good, but in practice, there are very few electrodes, they are in the wrong place, and end up recording something – not brain activity, maybe muscle movement. This is fine in a gaming environment, not in healthcare. It is encouraging that the technology to map brain activity could be made cheap.

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Ganga is now a deadly source of cancer, study says

Anirban Ghosh | Oct 17, 2012, 12.52AM IST

Ganga is now a deadly source of cancer, study says

Ganga so full of killer pollutants that those living along its banks in UP, Bihar and Bengal are more prone to cancer than anywhere else in the country, says a study.

KOLKATA: The holy Ganga is a poison river today. It's so full of killer pollutants that those living along its banks in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal are more prone to cancer than anywhere else in the country, says a recent study.

Conducted by the National Cancer Registry Programme (NCRP) under the Indian Council of Medical Research, the national study throws up shocking findings. The river is thick with heavy metals and lethal chemicals that cause cancer, it says.

"We know that the incidence of cancer was highest in the country in areas drained by the Ganga. We also know why. Now, we are going deeper into the problem. Hopefully, we'll be able to present a report to the Union health ministry in a month or two," NCRP head A Nandkumar said.

The worst-hit stretches are east Uttar Pradesh, the flood plains of Bengal and Bihar. Cancer of the gallbladder, kidneys, food pipe, prostate, liver, kidneys, urinary bladder and skin are common in these parts. These cases are far more common and frequently found here than elsewhere in the country, the study says.

Even more frightening is the finding that gallbladder cancer cases along the river course are the second highest in the world and prostate cancerhighest in the country. The survey throws up more scary findings: Of every 10,000 people surveyed, 450 men and 1,000 women were gallbladder cancer patients. Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar's Vaishali and rural Patna and the extensive tract between Murshidabad and South 24-Parganas in West Bengal are the hot zones. In these parts, of every 1 lakh people surveyed, 20-25 were cancer patients. This is a national high. Relentless discharge of pollutants into the riverbed is responsible.

"This is the consequence of years of abuse. Over years, industries along the river have been releasing harmful effluents into the river. The process of disposing of waste has been arbitrary and unscientific. The river and those living along its banks are paying a price for this indiscretion," Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute director Jaideep Biswas said. The Kolkata-based cancer institute is an associate of the National Cancer Registry Programme.

Biswas, a senior oncologist, said Ganga water is now laced with toxic industrial discharge such as arsenic, choride, fluoride and other heavy metals. Dipankar Chakarabarty, director, Jadavpur University School of Environmental Studies, concurs. "We've been extremely careless. Indiscriminate release of industrial effluents is to blame for this."

"The arsenic that's gets into the river doesn't flow down. Iron and oxygen present in the water form ferroso ferric oxide, which in turn bonds with arsenic. This noxious mix settles on the riverbed. Lead and cadmium are equally heavy and naturally sink in the river. This killer then leeches back into the groundwater, making it poisonous," Chakrabarty explains.

Surface water, Chakrabarty explains, is treated before use. But that's clearly not the case with groundwater and it's mostly consumed raw, often straight from source. The impact is devastating. "The consequences of using or drinking this poison can manifest earliest in two years and latest in 20. But by then, it's way too late." Those who've been bathing in this poison river are equally at danger, says Biswas. The need of the hour is to strictly implement laws regulating discharge of industrial waste into the river.

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Published: October 22, 2012 23:54 IST | Updated: October 22, 2012 23:54 IST

For licence to hit and run

Jyoti Punwani

Appeasement of all kinds of influential law-breakers over decades has led the Muslim community and Urdu press to demand similar treatment for the Azad Maidan rabble-rousers

It was a perfect scenario. Horrific violence by Muslims against policemen and the media, handled sensitively by a police force known for its anti-Muslim prejudice. The entire community apologetic for the violence of a few. Revulsion against rabid ‘religious’ leaders. Respect for a courageous Police Commissioner.

This was the scene in Mumbai immediately after a meeting on August 11 — called by some Muslim religious leaders — turned violent midway. Called to condemn the violence against Muslims in Assam and Myanmar and the inaction of the government, the meeting attracted a 20,000-strong crowd, carrying placards with inflammatory and abusive images and slogans.

Back to square one

Two months later, things are back to square one: Muslims are bitter about the police and the government, all signs of remorse have disappeared, and the Urdu press is at its irresponsible best. If there’s any ray of hope, it’s with the courts.

The blame for this has to be laid at the door of the Maharashtra government. Two days after Raj Thackeray took out an (illegal) rally demanding the ouster of the Police Commissioner and the Home Minister for allowing “Marathi” policemen and women to be attacked by “Bangladeshi Muslims who had come to Mumbai from Bihar and U.P.,” Commissioner Arup Patnaik was sent packing (to a punishment posting). The message to Muslims couldn’t have been clearer — no cop worth his uniform can be ‘soft’ when you guys riot. The second but equally important message was that a known instigator of communal violence like Raj Thackeray could call the shots with the ‘secular’ Congress.

That wasn’t all. No arrests were made at the spot of the violence but Muslims who returned at night with friends to collect their bikes parked there were pounced upon, assaulted, arrested and charged with offences ranging from murder, to rioting with arms, to molestation. Twenty of them are still in jail, with the police vehemently opposing bail, though by their own admission, they do not figure in the videos of the violence. A magistrate found that 12 of them were so badly assaulted in Arthur Road Jail by jail staff that three days later, their bodies still bore marks of injury. His report, submitted more than six weeks ago, is yet to be acted upon.

It was only after the Bombay High Court observed during the bail hearing of two of these 20, that prima facie charges of murder and attempt to murder were not made out against them, that the new Police Commissioner acknowledged publicly that these charges had been wrongly applied — before he took over, he added pointedly. He took over on August 23. What was he doing since then? The parents of these 20 youth and social workers have since made umpteen trips to the police asking that these particular youngsters be let off on bail. Why didn’t the Commissioner order that Sections 302 and 307 of the Indian Penal Code be removed, so that bail could be granted?

Glaring inequity

Then there’s the glaring inequity of the rabble-rousers being left untouched. The organisers of the August 11 rally were named as accused in the FIR filed on the day of the incident. They made inflammatory speeches, to which the crowd responded with slogans, says the FIR. It even names the man after whose speech 3000 from the crowd started moving out excitedly. But none of these organisers has been arrested. Why, ask the families of the youngsters behind bars. They aren’t unaware of these men’s political links. Everyone has seen State Home Minister R.R. Patil of the NCP come calling at the residence of one of them, whose brother is an NCP corporator. Another, a known rabble-rouser, heads an organisation involved in another riot in 2006, in which two policemen were lynched in Bhiwandi. Asked to explain their inaction, the police simply reply: “We are going through the evidence.” That’s the same reply they give when asked why they are opposing bail to the first batch of 20 youth arrested! For one group of accused, that explanation means a licence to roam free; for another, an obstacle to even conditional freedom.

Perhaps it is this typically cussed and arbitrary conduct of the police and the government that makes even the families of the boys caught in the video footage of the incident, defiant. Some point out that though their sons can be seen in the video, they are just standing there. Others, whose sons can be seen holding a matchbox near an OB van, or a police rifle, or kicking the Amar Jawan Jyoti memorial, are hard put to deny the guilt of their progeny. But their acts are ascribed to other factors: incitement by irresponsible leaders in the month of Ramzan when “fasting makes you short-tempered;” lack of education and, interestingly, of street-smart guile; even the absence of job reservation for Muslims which would have given their sons regular jobs and made them act more responsibly.

These excuses are perhaps understandable. What is not is the common defence taken by these relatives — everyone indulges in violence, but only Muslims get punished. This comes straight from the Urdu press, which, if one is to believe these families, has now begun to continuously report instances of violence from across the country — adding that no one has been arrested for them. The vandalism of Raj Thackeray’s men tops these reports.

But no one gets away with attacking the cops, you say, not even Shiv Sainiks. Immediately come the counter-questions — what about Congressmen attacking cops in Orissa, a female constable being molested during the Ganpati festival in Lalbag? Was anyone arrested? Some people are above the law, you explain, but there are no takers for that argument, as there shouldn’t be. “Then where is justice? Is this democracy?” ask veiled mothers aggressively.

So, the chickens have finally come home to roost. Decades of appeasement of political Hindutva, and dominant caste rowdies, have resulted in others asking for the same. A community known to stay quiet once it was “taught a lesson,” now refuses to do so. If vandalism by a select few goes unpunished, why should we be punished for doing the same, asks the new generation of Muslims. This logic, coming from the vandalisers, though repugnant, is perfect. But coming from the press?

Selective reporting

The Urdu press in Mumbai is aware that the Muslim rioters of August 11 weren’t just attacking the media and police in an outburst of “secular pent up” rage. It was an outburst of communal mayhem — not rage — for the videos make it clear those burning the vans were having a great time. The police have shown community leaders and journalists the videos. The latter have heard the abusive slogans raised by the rioters. Photographers attacked that day can testify to the fanaticism of their assailants. Muslim eye-witnesses have shared experiences of conduct by the rallyists that can only be explained by hatred for all non-Muslims. But the Urdu press has chosen not to report any of this to its community, like the Gujarati press in 2002, which blacked out the violence by many Gujarati Hindus, and focused only on the burning of the Sabarmati Express by some Godhra Muslims.

Like the Urdu press, Muslim community workers too, refuse to engage with this new generation of lumpens, who laugh as they recount how they brandished sugarcane stalks grabbed from stalls (“they weren’t swords, just sugarcane”), how their compatriots dived into police vans to pick up rifles and dance with them (“they didn’t use the rifles”). Most of those caught on video are self-employed school dropouts, living in large joint families in poor ghettos, doted on by grandmothers (“he wouldn’t sleep till I fed him with my own hands”), namazis who obey their local imam, have no contact with other communities, but own the latest mobiles equipped with Bluetooth et al.

Many of these youngsters belong to the NCP and even Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Loyal Congress workers had been asked to stay away from the openly anti-Congress rally. Today, neither the NCP nor the Congress can afford to be seen helping even the innocents among these boys. But behind the scene efforts are on to reach “Madame” in Delhi. Interestingly, it’s common knowledge that Prithviraj Chavan, the Congress Chief Minister, had for long resisted ally NCP’s demand to replace Commissioner Patnaik with the current incumbent.

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October 23, 2012 01:56 IST

Embracing the darkness

Jyoti Malhotra

LOLZ: The British Foreign Office says that the U.K. has a broad range of interests in Gujarat. The picture shows British High Commissioner James Bevan (right) with Narendra Modi at a meeting in Gandhinagar on Monday.

AP LOLZ: The British Foreign Office says that the U.K. has a broad range of interests in Gujarat. The picture shows British High Commissioner James Bevan (right) with Narendra Modi at a meeting in Gandhinagar on Monday.

The British decision to end its decade-long boycott of Narendra Modi speaks volumes of how human rights are so easily sacrificed at the altar of commerce

In the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, Judas Iscariot agreed he would hand over Jesus to the priests for 30 pieces of silver. Last week when the British government agreed to embrace Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, it should have lent an ear to one of its own citizens, Yusuf Dawood of West Yorkshire, two of whose brothers were lynched by a rampaging mob in the Gujarat riots of 2002.

Saeed Dawood, 42 at the time, and Sakil Dawood, 37 at the time, were travelling to Surat along with Mohammed Aswat and Imran Dawood on February 28, 2002, when their car was attacked by a mob about 70 km from Ahmedabad. All four were British citizens.

Aswat’s body was found alongside Imran Dawood in a field, but at least Imran was alive. He was flown back to the United Kingdom, while Aswat was buried in a village near Surat. The other two went missing, but a month later in March, DNA from bone fragments found in an abandoned factory supposedly near the site of the attack was matched to a sample from Saeed Dawood’s mother.

The Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory, in a report to the British High Commission on May 8, 2002, concluded that Saeed Dawood had been killed by a mob. The BBC reported last week that “an internal British report at the time (had) described the violence as pre-planned with the support of the state government.”

Clearly, the David Cameron-led government has now decided that 10 years is long enough in the life of a nation to wipe the tears from the eyes of one of its own — and move on.

In the spotlight

The British Foreign Office Minister Hugo Swire didn’t forget to pay lip service to Dawood and his friends killed in Gujarat 10 years ago, when he commanded the British High Commissioner to India to visit Gujarat and meet Modi. “This will allow us to discuss a wide range of issues of mutual interest and to explore opportunities for closer cooperation...The U.K. has a broad range of interests in Gujarat. We want to secure justice for the families of the British nationals who were killed in 2002...” Swire said.

Perhaps, the fact of being condemned to lowly economic growth, between 1-1.5 per cent since the recession kicked in four years ago, is enough to alchemise your principles; and, all the big names, from Ratan Tata to Mukesh Ambani and even Amitabh Bachchan have been successfully wooed by Narendra Modi, so why should the British be left behind?

Modi has recently returned from Japan where he was treated like a prime minister-in-waiting. The Gujarat investment summit in 2013 lists the Australia India Business Council, the U.S. India Business Council and the Japan External Trade Organisation as partners.

It’s clear the U.K. is just about broke — remember the furore some months ago when Britain lost the $11 billion contract to sell 126 fighter jets to India to the Europeans? — and seems ready to sacrifice human rights at the altar of common commerce. Maybe it will now stop meddling in Kashmir?

December elections

More than likely, the British move on the eve of the Gujarat elections in December, is meant to anoint itself as one of Modi’s cheerleaders, since he is expected to win the vote hands down; all that remains to be seen is the margin of victory, and if this is respectably large, then not even the naysayers inside the Bharatiya Janata Party today can deny him his move to Delhi as prime ministerial candidate for 2014.

The British can then say to their friends and allies the Americans who continue to hold out, that we were there first. The irony is that London is reaching out to Modi within weeks of the jailing of one of his closest aides, Maya Kodnani, for 28 years for her role in the Naroda Patiya riots in which 97 people were killed.

Suffice to say Britain’s got it all wrong. This is a common problem with former powers who somehow fail to read the present correctly. Even if Narendra Modi wins the elections in December, his fourth after the Gujarat pogrom, the fact is that India is changing. Yusuf Dawood may have been betrayed by his own government, but India will remember and one day, avenge the injustice.

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Cell use, towers health hazard: Global survey

By Durgesh Nandan Jha, TNN | Jan 8, 2013, 03.00 AM IST

Months after WHO classified radiofrequency electromagnetic field as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’, another global report has red-flagged the use of such technology, citing health risks, including growth of brain tumour and loss of fertility in men.

NEW DELHI: Your fear about excessive use of mobile phones causing serious health problems was not ill-founded after all. Months after World Health Organization classifiedradiofrequency electromagnetic field (EMF) as 'possibly carcinogenic to humans', another global report has red-flagged the use of such technology, citing health risks, including growth of brain tumour and loss of fertility in men.

BioInitiative 2012 — which is a collaborative effort by 29 authors from 10 countries, including the chair of the Russian national committee on non-ionizing radiation, a senior adviser to the European Environmental Agency and two professors fromJawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi — calls for a review of public safety limits.

It says "bio-effects" occur in the first few minutes of use at levels associated with cell and cordless phone use. These can also take effect after just minutes of exposure to mobile phone masts or cell towers that produce whole-body exposure. Infants, children, elderly, those with pre-existing chronic diseases and those with developed electrical sensitivity have been described as being the 'sensitive population' that should have the least exposure to this radiation.

"Many of these bio-effects can reasonably be presumed to result in adverse health effects if the exposures are prolonged and chronic... they interfere with normal body processes, prevent the body from healing damaged DNA (and) produce immune system imbalances, metabolic disruption and low resilience to disease," the report says.

"Essentially, body processes can eventually be disabled by incessant external stresses (from system-wide electrophysiological interference) and lead to pervasive impairment of metabolic and reproductive functions," it adds.

Cindy Sage, co-editor of the report states, "Human sperms are damaged by cellphone radiation at very low intensities (0.00034 - 0.07 microwatt per centimetre square). There is a veritable flood of new studies reporting sperm damage in humans and animals, leading to substantial concerns for fertility, reproduction and health of the offspring. Exposure levels are similar to those resulting from wearing a cellphone on the belt or in the pant pocket or using a wireless laptop computer on the lap."

The researchers have profiled 155 new papers that report on neurological effects of radiofrequency radiation (RFR), published between 2007 and mid-2012, in the report. Of these, 98 (63%) showed the effects and 57 (37%) didn't show any.

Lennart Hardell, MD at Orebro University, Sweden, who participated in the study, said there is a consistent pattern of increased risk for glioma (a malignant brain tumour) and acoustic neuroma (a slow-growing tumour of the nerve that connects the ear to the brain) with use of mobiles and cordless phones. "The existing public safety limits and reference levels are not adequate to protect public health," he added.

The government of India has taken several steps to deal with the health concern, said R K Bhatnagar, adviser (technology), department of telecommunications (DoT). He said that the radiation exposure limit for cellphone towers has been reduced from 9.2 w/m2 to 0.92 w/m2, and the specific absorption rate (SAR), a measure of the amount of radio frequency energy absorbed by the body while using a phone to 1.6 watt per kg from 2 units.

The DoT has also issued a public advisory on how to use mobile phones safely which includes use of a headset, keeping the handset away from the head and limiting the length of mobile calls. "The data on neurological damage and fertility-related issues is not conclusive. We need more large-scale epidemiological study on humans to confirm the cause and effect relation between radiation and its health effects. Till then, precaution is advisable," says R S Sharma, deputy director general of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), who is heading one such study.

Dr Ashok Seth, chief of cardiovascular sciences at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, says he already advises his patients with cardiac implants, for example a pacemaker, to use mobile phones with caution. "We cannot and must not wait for the final conclusive data," he says. According to Dr J D Mukherjee, director, neurology at Max Hospital: "We get patients complaining about a tingling sensation in the head and numbness due to excessive use of phones. But brain tumour cases cannot be related to radiation from phones or cellular towers without a proper study."

Girish Kumar, professor in the department of electrical engineering at IIT Bombay, whose research on hazards of cellphones is being used as a reference for most policy decisions in India, said in India the new radiation exposure limit for cellular towers is still high. "We need constant monitoring of the exposure from towers to ensure that the companies are not defaulting as has been observed in many areas in Mumbai where the government has started a public grievance mechanism to address the issue," he said.

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January 22, 2013 12:12 IST

Supreme Court bans tourists from taking trunk road passing through Jarawa area in Andamans

J. Venkatesan

A 2007 file photograph of the highway through the Jarawa reserved areas in the Andaman Island.

Order follows Andaman and Nicobar Administration’s January 17 notification

The Supreme Court on Monday banned tourists from taking the Andaman Nicobar Trunk Road that passes through the area where the Jarawas live. The road is used to reach the Limestone Cave.

The court has already banned all commercial and tourism activities within a five-km radius of the Jarawa Tribal Reserve on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

A Bench of Justices G.S. Singhvi and H.L. Gokhale passed the order, taking on record the Andaman and Nicobar Administration’s January 17 notification to comply with the court directives issued last year.

Except 30 villages notified in the schedule, the notification declares a buffer zone of an area up to a five-km radius, adjacent and contiguous to the Jarawa Tribal Reserve Area — starting from the Constance Bay in South Andaman to Lewis Inlet Bay in Middle Andaman. No person shall operate any commercial or tourist establishment directly or indirectly in the buffer zone. Furthermore, no one shall carry out any activity, which may be prejudicial to the safety, security and interests of the Jarawas in any of the settlement villages.

The Bench directed that only government officials, persons residing in the reserve and vehicles carrying essential commodities for the Jarawas would be allowed on the Trunk Road.

Justice Singhvi told counsel, “You provide helicopter service to… tourists to reach the cave as there is a total ban in the buffer area.”

“File affidavit”

The Bench directed the Andaman and Nicobar Administration to file an affidavit, along with a detailed map indicating the areas of Jarawas and settlement of others. It posted the matter for further hearing on February 26.

The October 30, 2007 notification, imposing the ban, was quashed by the Calcutta High Court.

On an appeal, the Supreme Court, stayed the order and asked the administration to strictly enforce the notification till it was considered by the court. This was followed by the January 17 notification.

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TODAY'S PAPER » NATIONAL

KOLKATA, January 23, 2013

Netaji’s kin to take out protest rally on his 116th birth anniversary today

IPSITA PATI

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Want Centre to declassify papers related to his death, fresh debate in House on Mukherjee report

Mamata’s assurance:West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee visited the ancestral house of Netaji (seen in the picture) at Kodalia on her way back to Kolkata on Monday night and paid homage to the leader. She assured the villagers that the government would initiate steps to make the building a heritage structure.— PHOTO: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury

Some members of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose’s family, including two of his nephews, four nieces and a grandnephew, will take to the streets here on his 116th birth anniversary on Wednesday protesting against the refusal of the Indian government to declassify documents related to his death.

Demanding on Tuesday that the Centre do so without further delay, they also asked for a fresh discussion in Parliament on the report of the Mukherjee Commission.

“The government does not want to release the documents because of national security. But Netaji was a freedom fighter; anything related to him is not government’s property that it can hide it. People have every right to know about the secrecy concerning his death. How can the government deny people the right to know the real history?” asked Chandra Kumar Bose, nephew of Netaji, at a press conference.

Many stories

“There are many stories going around related to Netaji’s death. Some believe that he died in a plane crash at Taiwan in 1945. According to some, he escaped from Taiwan and entered Russia where he was killed. Even some believe that he came back to India and remained disguised as a saint. We, as a family, are unable to deal with all these stories. We want to know the truth,” said Mr. Bose.

Criticising the report of two of the inquiry commissions concerning the leader’s death, he said: “Those in the two inquiry commissions set up by the Centre to look into the matter — the Shah Nawaz Khan Commission and the G.D. Khosla Commission that stated that Netaji died in a plane crash on August 18, 1945 at Taiwan — never visited Taiwan before placing their report.”

Claiming the Mukherjee Commission report to be more accurate, he said: “The Mukherjee Commission presented the correct facts as it visited Taiwan and interviewed more than 200 people before concluding that Netaji was not killed in a plane crash at Taiwan.”

Questioning the reaction of the Indian government to the Mukherjee Commission, D.N. Bose, another nephew of Netaji, said: “How can it reject the Commission report without a proper discussion in Parliament? The report clearly mentions that on that particular date [August 18, 1945], no plane crashed at Taiwan.”

“Thirty of our family members have written a letter to [West Bengal] Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee about one-and-a-half month ago requesting her to speak to the Prime Minister for declassification of the documents related to the death of Netaji and we are yet to get a reply from her,” he added.

The author of the book India’s Biggest Cover — up , Anuj Dhar, said: “The Intelligence Bureau has 77 files related to Subhas Bose. For the sake of fair play and transparency, each and every record related to Netaji should be declassified.”

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Pictures, Photos of Mt. Abu, Rajasthan, India

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dilwara temple pictures - Google Search

Gardens by the Bay - Singapore - Reviews - TravBuddy

Straits Times: Gardens by the Bay opens on June 29

Tuesday, September 18, 2012