Friday 29 January 2016

A GIFT YOU WILL CHERISH LIFELONG!



It is the desire and the effort of every conference organizing team to arrange an outstanding conference, which the delegates remember for a very long time. In order to achieve this objective they try to chart out an outstanding academic programme, cater delicious food and ensure a comfortable stay. And as if that was not enough, they invariably offer something to carry back home with us – a gift, a memento or a souvenir.  I am sure you all have heaps of them lying everywhere in your clinic and home, being used as door-stoppers or your child’s play things. Yes, in the last thirty years I have received some useful gifts too – a camera bag, an umbrella, a silver letter opener, but the rest of the stuff is simply forgettable.


So I asked myself, what is that gift which has never been given till date in any conference and which each and every delegate will cherish throughout his/her life? What is that gift which the delegates will personally use and remember the conference every time they see it? What is that gift which every person will feel proud to possess and not give it to his/her clinic assistant or driver? And the answer is obvious, and I wonder why no one has thought about it so far! Friends, it is our National Flag! A tricolor with a collapsible flag post is the best conference gift which I have never received!


Every Indian should have his/her own national flag, which he/she should hoist on his rooftop or in his garden with his entire family in attendance on our Republic Day and Independence Day. By choosing the tricolor as a conference gift your Association will show the beacon of patriotism to all other medical and surgical associations, both in State and National level, and very soon all other associations will follow suit. Imagine how many extra rooftops will have the fluttering tricolor on the Republic Day of 2017! I am not only passing on this idea to our Association but also to all the sub-speciality associations like NABI, IAAPS, ISRM, etc and the Association of Surgeons of India. I would be obliged if you can help me with the Email IDs of Presidents of other associations like  I.M.A, A.P.I, Obs & Gyn, Ortho, Radiology, Urology, Neurology, Dermatology, Respiratory Medicine, Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology. Or just pass on the message to them. Let this be a National Movement, I am quite sure people will join us. Then when your neighbor who is not a doctor sees you hoist your flag, he/she too would feel encouraged to buy his/her own tricolor!


I have done some research and the Karnataka Khadi Gramodyog Samykta Sangh in Hubli, Karnataka http://www.khadifederation.com/ is the official manufacturer of our National Flag. Our friends in Hubli or nearby cities can always interact in person and facilitate the purchase. The tricolor is also sold in all Gandhi Ashram store all over India, but they might not be able to give bulk supplies.



Friends, I will request you all to give this a serious thought. The W.M.D which is ideally suited to fight terror, will not be made in nuclear plants and will not be sold by friendly western countries and will not be purchased by astronomical sums of money………it has to be ignited in our minds and hearts and it is called ‘patriotism’.

Wednesday 27 January 2016

OUR DEMOCRACY NEEDS A HEALTH CHECKUP



Our Indian democracy gets thumbs up for our massive electoral process, the civil liberties that we enjoy, a vibrant free press and a pluralistic society. However our democracy gets thumbs down because of mediocre political participation and political culture, ineptitude, massive corruption and opportunism. So when we decide to do a health checkup we need to know the history of the problem and then find the extent of the disease.


The establishment which has ruled our country for most of these 67 years had systematically seen to it that the nation was excluded from the natural political evolution from a British colony to a proud nation. It ensured that we remained mired in despotic and near tyrannical rule over polities that were politically and economically stagnant and functioned primarily to serve the interests of the despots and their immediate coterie, as well as Western interests, rather than those of our countrymen.


There was a time, before 1947, when people would look up to the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash Bose, Sardar Patel, Govind Ballabh Pant, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Mahamana Madan Mohan Malvia, Sir Syed Ali and Jawahar Lal Nehru and aspire to be like one of them! Then something went radically wrong. Personal ambitions crept into the mind of a few and the fate of the would be nation took a back seat. We were made to believe that the secular nation could not exist as one, and it was absolutely essential to divide it along religious lines. But, did these select few, on either sides of the religious divide, have the mandate of the people from Gwadar to Arunachal and from Kashmir to Kanyakumari? Who gave them the democratic right to sit across the table with a non sincere British mediator and arbitrarily divide our motherland? Looking back you now know why they did so. It was the easier alternative.

Leaders do what it right, and not what is easy. If leaders are swayed by the passion of the moment and go with the crowd then what you get is mobocracy and not democracy. Our freedom struggle did not start and end in 1947 with inputs from one family, it had a glorious history from 1857 and since then martyrs like Mangal Pandey, Khudiram, Binoy, Badal, Dinesh, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Rajguru, Sukhdev Raj and many more made the supreme sacrifice for our independence. And if you ever go to the Cellular Jail in Port Blair you will see that people from all works of life, all religion and all cultures went hand in hand to the gallows for this sacred cause. Did they opt for two separate nations divided by the sword of religion? I don’t think so.

So, did we start our nationhood on a democratic note? Or were a few people in a hurry to grab power and become important? This is a very uncomfortable question and we have repeatedly dodged it. Historically there was a leadership crisis for which we are paying the price with crippling interest today. We sidelined democratically chosen leaders like Subhash Bose and opted for handpicked ones. Handpicked leaders do not represent the Nation, they represent their coterie, their party, their commune, their religion, their caste, their linguistic group……but not the NATION!

In democracy there can be no short cuts. The people have to choose the leader and even if it is a herculean task to know the minds of over a billion people, it has to be done and their opinion needs to be respected and not distorted lest we make the same mistakes all over again! The task is not easy - an estimated 814.5 million people were eligible to vote. This is up from 713 million voters in 2009, representing an impressive 14 percent increase, with the largest increase in voter registrations coming from younger Indians. Elections were held in 28 Indian states and 7 union territories. The Election Commission required a polling place within 1.2 miles of every voter. To fulfill this mandate it had 10 million polling officials and security personnel in 930,000 polling stations. So the first challenge our democracy faces is size.

The second challenge is that elections do not guarantee a decisive result. We have two national parties and well over 50 regional or state political parties and taking federalism to a bizarre limit it was the regional parties that were, till recently, collectively deciding the fate of the Central government by bringing parties with contrasting ideologies together into unholy and opportunistic alliances. Unwieldy and sometimes uncooperative coalitions often hinder economic reforms and foster corruption, as we saw in the last government.

The third challenge is the increasing criminalization of our politics. 30 percent of the candidates have a criminal case against them. India's National Election Watch announced that of the 162 parliamentarians involved in 306 criminal cases, 76 were charged with serious crimes like murder, attempted murder and kidnapping. How can they be trusted with the job of governance?

The fourth problem is from the corrosive influence of money in elections and more than 75 percent of the source of funds to Indian political parties is unknown. Of the sources that are known, 87 percent of the funding comes from the corporate sector or business houses. If business houses pay the leaders to get elected, then why should they not expect a quid pro co?

The fifth problem with our democracy is its failure to produce representative results. Let me give you an example. There are 10,000 votes in a constituency: 5,000 abstain, 2,000 vote for the lesser parties. The winning candidate gets 1,600 votes, the second candidate gets 1,400. The candidate with 1,600 votes out of 10,000 wins! So this result is hardly representative. To address this we need to make voting compulsory by law but then the election is a mechanism, which ultimately represents the will of the people. Not allowing a person to vote negatively defeats freedom of expression and (the right to liberty in) Article 21!! So there are no easy answers.

Yes, we have done well to choose democracy and we are trying to nurture it but if we do not root out the influence of money and muscle power in our elections and ensure accountability of our elected representatives, we may end up like many other failed democracies.

Monday 25 January 2016

HERO WORSHIPPING HAS NO PLACE IN DEMOCRACY


Happy Republic Day!

A charismatic leader is always an asset but idolizing him or her like a demigod has no place in a democracy. While patriotism or Desh-bhakti is non-negotiable, idolizing a leader or Wyakti-pooja , as is so often done in our country cannot be good for democracy. In devotion there is an abject surrender and blind following, and while this may be all right in religion, though I am not very sure it is, it certainly has no place in politics and building of a democratic nation. It is not unethical to seek praise for one’s work but to seek it in ways which reek of sycophantic gestures is undoubtedly an annoyance, leaders should avoid.

Dr. Ambedkar was truly wary of the blind faith and excessive adulation the people of pre independent India had for Gandhi ji and very poignantly pointed out that “there is nothing wrong in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness”.  Even after independence he could see the enormous prestige that men like Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel commanded. The years they had spent in jail and the lifelong services to the country they had delivered gave them an iconic and almost divine halo.  And Dr. Ambedkar rightly wondered whether their actions or ideas were immune from critical scrutiny? Was their record of patriotism enough reason for the ordinary citizen to follow them implicitly and unquestioningly?

Jawaharlal Nehru himself was not unaware of the dangers of blind adoration. In November 1937, the Modern Review of Calcutta carried a profile of Nehru, which spoke of “intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and inefficient”. It noted that his conceit was “already formidable”, and worried that soon “Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar”. It was later revealed that the piece was written by Nehru himself, under the pen-name of Chanakya.

Smt.Indira Gandhi however was a prisoner of her own halo which she had acquired after abolishing the princely states and winning the 1971 war, by which she thought that she created Bangladesh! By her dictatorial attitude she demanded that citizens venerate her and those who dared to differ were not treated kindly as the infamous Emergency later showed. She managed to cultivate her own personal admiration society of congressmen, writers and artists. M.F. Husain portrayed her as Durga. Deva Kanta Barooah, a poet of considerable distinction in his native Assamese, famously said that “India is Indira and Indira is India”. This blind devotion to Indira Gandhi led to as Ambedkar had warned, “degradation and to eventual dictatorship”, as manifest in the jailing of her political opponents and the promulgation of the Emergency.
Regional leaders too in India have acquired this devotional halo from time to time. Shivaji Maharaj and Bal Thackeray in Maharashtra, M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalitha in Tamilnadu and N.T. Rama Rao and Y.S.R. Reddy in Andhra Pradesh have been elevated to a sort of superhuman status. While our countrymen in South India bring their celluloid adulation to the political arena almost seamlessly, a new devotion has now crept in which Dr. Ambedkar could not even think of. We now have allegiance and devotion to political families and quite naturally the head of the family acquires the devotional halo and his/her successors shine in his/her reflected glory! Thus we have Gandhi, Laloo, Mulayam, Thackeray, Y.S.R, Karunanidhi, Patnayak who happen to be our new age cult heroes, competing for our devotion. And, ironically, there is even a posthumous cult of Ambedkar himself.

And now we have newly emerging cult of Narendra Modi. This is a new phenomenon for the B.J.P, which had till now, steered clear of ‘wyakti puja’.   Even till recently L.K. Advani, M.M. Joshi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, all of whom were accorded equal status in party propaganda. After Vajpayee became prime minister he was elevated above the rest, but only marginally —he was first among equals. But Modi, the most successful B.J.P. Chief Minister for 13 years, single handedly won the 2014 election and signaled the start of a new cult. He has been presented as a Superman who will clean up government, grow the economy by 10 per cent a year, take on Pakistan and China, and make India a Great Superpower. His hero-worship club, particularly its cyber wing, is neither tired of praising him nor tired of abusing those who do not subscribe to the Myth of the Great Messiah.

The advantage with Modi is that he is invariably compared to a silent Manmoman Singh, who would let unelected and non-constitutional bodies take policy decisions. As a complete opposite today there is a growing political culture of concentrating power in the hands of a single-leader alleged to hold the key to all solutions. Even if there is collective leadership, it is not very apparent. Modi is visible on television, in press releases and on Twitter on Facebook, in the radio and to his credit, it must be added, he keeps on asking for suggestions to improve his performance. The problem is not with him, the problem is with his devotees.  As Ambedkar had famously said ‘Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship’.


Cult leaders can succeed in countries which are not democracies – Vladimir Putin in Russia, Chairman Mao in China, but not in India. Here the Prime Minister has to work with others, be able to compromise, plan ahead and see the big picture.  He must be willing to accept reality and do what can be done, not waste his energy trying to accomplish the impossible and he must be thick of skin, because no one gets out of this job with his popularity intact. He must be ever vigilant, because those who pretend to support you are always ready to stab you in the back, his predecessor Rajiv Gandhi learned it the hard way!

Saturday 23 January 2016

THE VANQUISHED NEVER WRITE THE HISTORY




Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?' History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. The losers do not live to tell their tale. History is always written by the victor and never by the vanquished.  This is fair game because generations to come must know how success was achieved and not how their ancestors failed.

Have you ever imagined why history has treated Alexander and Hitler so differently?  Alexander the Great is perceived generally as well, great. Alexander stabbed and slashed through so much land and so many people yet remains a hero for his conquering ways. Hitler on the other hand did almost exactly the same, annihilated the jews and is painted as the devil’s incarnation! Both leaders had a magnetic personality and an enviable attitude. The two, although centuries apart, steamrolled opposing armies and inflicted untold hardships and miseries on the civilian enemy population. Yet to this day Hitler is remembered as among the most vilified men on the planet while Alexander is a sterling example of courage and demonstrated a superb ability to forage for his army's food despite ineffective supply chains; something Hitler was unable to overcome in the diesel department. How heroic would he have been portrayed in victory I often wonder?

Cleopatra ruled Egypt exceptionally well for two decades. She was charismatic,  spoke many languages,  was skilled in the sciences and attracted a lot of scholars to Alexandria. But as soon  as she and her lover Anthony were defeated, the first Roman emperor Augustus had history rewritten. Her statues and carvings were destroyed and his historians portrayed her as a siren and seducer and not a scholar and piticician that she truly was.

Up to two decades ago, the history of America was taught as the wanton aggression of the Native Americans, the so-called Red Indians, on the gentle white settlers who simply wanted to farm and raise their families in a wide land that had room for many people. This was the predominant view of Christians and of educated Europeans in America. The real history was one of the genocide of native peoples and their cultures in a greed for land and power. The so-called savages honored all treaties. The so-called civilized white man didn’t honor any.

The European history of Africa followed similar prejudices, with the native blacks as uncivilized barbarians that had to be civilized by the white Europeans. That the Africans did have venerable and rich old cultures and were really the target of exploitation and genocide was all covered up. The same phenomenon occurred throughout the colonial world, including Asia, where native peoples were subjugated and their cultures denigrated. Like the Africans, some Asians were turned into slaves or serfs, uprooted from their land and taken to foreign countries and commercially exploited. This was also done in the name of civilizational advancement through Christianity and European culture. That is how over a million Indians ended up in the Caribbean in Trinidad and Guyana.

Stalin's pogrom and Hitler's genocide were both brutal. Yet nobody views Stalin in the same light as Hitler, even though Stalin was responsible for the death of about 20 million people and that too not through war! People still name their children Stalin, but nobody names them Hitler. After dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the Americans lost the Second World War, they would have been treated as war criminals.  Instead they won and wrote history.  Same might go for German.  They leveled Dresden. The same with Mao too, the great cultural leap forward was brutal, but people still refer to Mao as the venerable chairman. Of late Iraq was attacked and bombed back to Stone Age by the western allies because of some fictitious weapons of mass destruction which were never found. Yet historians are not asking any tough questions to the victors but are busy vilifying Saddam Hussain, why……because history has a history of treating the winner with respect and kindness.

The European treatment of India was the same as that of America and Africa, starting with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, who brought the cruel ways of the inquisition to India. The Dutch and the British followed the same pattern and the Muslims rulers were then responsible for religious and economic exploitation as well as genocide and plunder. But as the British scholars wrote the history of India and the British educated Indian elite took the baton from them and our history has always been very kind to the invaders. The native Indians did not lose independence only, they lost the opportunity and the authority to write their correct history. Liberals and leftists in America sympathize with the native cultures of Africa and America and their need not only for correcting historical accounts but also for restoration for historical wrongs. But, strangely, leftists in India still vaunt the colonial view that India was uncivilized before the British and denigrate their own native traditions! But why have we not corrected our history even 68 years after our independence is a question which baffles one and all.


History is not a material science like physics that deals with hard facts and even physics textbooks are continually being updated. The West has often tried to give its version of history the finality of science, but political changes since the end of the colonial era have revealed the biases behind its accounts, particularly of Africa and Asia. The western account of history cannot be given the finality of the physical sciences and should be expected to change radically over time. Victor’s power to write history is in inverse proportion to the elapsed time between the end of the war and today, but victor’s power to influence the general perception of the outcome of the war remains stable over time. So, no matter if the winners write a distorted version of a conflict it's just a matter of time until the defeated version hits the bookstores (or the Kindle Store), but that doesn't means that the general perception of the outcome would change after all the facts are balanced. You will just have another point of view……..but even that is better than a prevailing wrong view!

Thursday 21 January 2016

HISTORY BOOKS ARE NOT SERVING THEIR PURPOSE


If Lord Macaulay set out to create a class of persons who were Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect I have no doubt in my mind that he is smiling in his grave. Our history books that are taught in our schools have seen to it that his dream comes true.

Why do you think is history taught to children all over the world? It is done to instill a sense of national pride and honor. Whether it is the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany or China, this is certainly the case today and has been so as long as these countries have existed as modern nations. The lives of their great leaders, particularly the founders of their country are highlighted, the continuity of the nation’s history is emphasized, and the importance of the nation in the history of the world and the greatness of the national culture are stressed. Students are expected to come away from reading accounts of their history with a sense of national pride, greatness and purpose, not only for the past but also for the future.

In India however we see a strange phenomenon. Written by the British, who ruled for 200 years or the Left and Left of Centre Thinkdom (LLCT remember!) our history books are nothing but apologetic about our glorious Hindu cultures and traditions. These historians have largely kept intact the British approach to Indian history devised in the colonial era. History books in India try to ignore the dominant Hindu ethos of the country and its history before the Islamic period. India’s greatest historical and cultural document, the Mahabharata, is hardly given any attention in the schools. So too, the Vedas, Ramayana, Puranas, Buddhist Jatakas and other prime historical and cultural documents of the country are ignored because of their religious overtones. If our history books do address India as a nation, it is only India of the independence movement that they acknowledge, as if prior to 1947 India did not really exist. While Nehru is made important, despite his political defeat in Kashmir and military defeat in the Indo-China war, older kings from the Rig Vedic Bharatas to Yudishthira of the Mahabharata period to the Marathas of the eighteenth century, the Chandraguptas and the Vikramadityas are hardly mentioned. There is no real sense of any historical continuity to the culture, much less to the country. While Mahatma Gandhi is emphasized, the greater spiritual traditions of India and its great teachers from the Vedic rishis, Vedantic, Buddhist and Jain sages to modern savants like Sri Rama Krishna Paramhansa, Sri Aurobindo and Guru Nanak are not given much attention.

What is even worse is that textbooks in Marxist ruled states of India like Bengal and Kerala leave their students with a sense of the greatness of communism and communist countries like China or even Russia which is no longer communist, rather than any real regard for India and its great traditions. The fact of the matter is that Marxism and communism in India were largely anti-national movements. Marxists in India sided with China against India during the Indo-Chinese war of 1962 and raised no criticism of China for its attack. They sided with the British during the independence movement. As against this, communism in Russia, China and Vietnam were part of larger nationalistic movements. This is because Indian Marxists came mainly from a British Marxist background and did not participate in anti-colonial struggles, as did the followers of Mao and Ho-chi-minh. They were largely intellectuals from wealthy families, educated in England, not workers in the field, much less freedom fighters. They were the fore fathers of our LLCT.

The distortion of our history has been done intentionally by many modern Indian historians belonging to the LLCT with the sole purpose of covering up historical wrongs against Hindus. They came to the conclusion that if independent India, fresh from a religious divide, and claiming to be secular, faced its past of Hindu oppression by the Muslim invaders, there may be a Hindu backlash that may offend minorities in the country. Also these minorities may not resonate with the older Hindu and Buddhist cultures of the country and may not feel the pride. The Indian mutiny of 1857 occurred because the British brought in aggressive and intolerant missionaries and had the country in the grip of a cruel economic exploitation. Yet such oppression has been left out of the history of India as told by the Europeans and the LLCT has not rewritten the record adequately. The destruction wrought during the Islamic period, which was worse than the British period in terms of religious and economic exploitation as well as genocide, has been similarly ignored or downplayed so as not to offend minority communities. So a false history was orchestrated to prevent the majority community from awakening from its colonial and religious oppression, fearing this would increase communal disharmony. The result is that our country lacks a genuine national pride and a sense of its continuity to ancient times. Even today our greats from Gurudev Rabindranath Thakur to Kailash Satyarthi are first discovered by the world and then by us!

The Left and left of Centre Thinkdom believes that by altering our history our present can be changed. They pretend that the generally cruel Muslim rule in India was benign and secular so that this account will serve to make modern Hindus and Muslims more benign and secular and help them bury the past. But the opposite is true. If a nation does not face its true history, it has no future and its present remains confused. And that is what we are today. That is why we have a Ram Janma bhoomi and Babri Masjid smoldering fission reaction, waiting to burst.
Only now the LLCT has been vanquished and the alternative thinkdom has annexed power. In recent years, the government of India and several state governments have decided to revise history books, particularly relative to the ancient period, bringing up recent data that calls into question the Aryan invasion and the many theories that have arisen from it. Over the past few decades numerous archaeological finds have been made throughout North India, considerably widening the civilization of the region and uncovering its continuity through time, rendering the Aryan Invasion idea obsolete.

Quite predictably, the LLCT in India is raising cries of tampering with history, and intellectual intolerance! History books are always being rewritten the world over and they should be, as new information comes in and our understanding of culture widens. This does not mean that history should carelessly be rewritten to suit an ideology, as in communist Russia or in Nazi Germany.  The accounts of history as written by the LLCT cannot be a sacrosanct and unalterable dogma. We will again raise our voice if we see mindless safronization, but right now the pseudo-intellectual left and left of centre history should be taken to the grave where it truly belongs.`

Wednesday 13 January 2016

DRUGS AND TERROR – THE PERFECT SYMBIOSIS


Pathankot and Malda are 2,500 Km apart and were the hotbed of terror recently. What do you think was common in between the two? They both are border towns guarded by officials who are paid peanuts and expected to be of impeccable morals! First the exchanges across the border are benign like sugar, vegetables and food stuff, then it becomes perfumes and pirated Bollywood movie DVDs, then alcoholic beverages and finally, once a weak link in the chain is identified and the price of his morals ascertained the smuggled items are narcotics and other drugs of abuse. By now, money traps and honey traps succeed in trapping the weak links into a blackmailing web and the last logical stuffs to be smuggled across the border are arms and terrorists.

Illicit drug traders and terrorists are not some mysterious entity. Rather they are usually groups and networks that operate in ways that can be understood, identified, tracked and ultimately disrupted, but there has to be a will to do so. If states start utilizing them to appease a section of the population by closing their eyes to illicit opium cultivation, eliminating all police records by burning police stations and allowing unauthorized immigration as seen in Kaliachak in Malda, and eliminate all evidence of arms trail and terror as seen in Burdwan in recent past, we are looking down the barrel of the gun called ‘narco-terrorism’! We need to integrate our work to build up more effective and efficient networks so that we may defeat these illegitimate networks that perpetuate so much destruction throughout the world and this remains a far more important aim than winning the next election by changing the demography of a state.

All terrorist organizations need to raise funds to sustain their violent activities and resort to illegal means to finance their illegal acts. Drug trafficking comes at the top of this list of illegal money raising activities. Terrorism and crime are inextricably linked. International and Domestic Terrorism Organizations and their supporters engage in a myriad of crimes to fund and facilitate terrorist activities. These crimes include extortion, kidnaping, robbery, corruption, alien smuggling, document fraud, arms trafficking, cyber crime, white collar crime, smuggling of contraband, money laundering and certainly drug trafficking and arms trafficking. Where do you think the Maoists are getting their Chinese and Pakistani arms from?

Worldwide economic, political, social, and technological changes have resulted in a more dispersed, complex, asymmetric threat to our nation. Terrorists, criminals, and foreign intelligence collectors have significantly benefited from these rapid changes, which have permanently shrunk the world. The result is a world that is more integrated with activities that are significantly less discrete. Terrorist acts, crime, and foreign intelligence activities are no longer distinct activities, but rather profound fluid enterprises that through their very existence have a reverberating impact on our national security. Terrorism and crime respect no borders and threaten civilized countries throughout the world.

India is not unique to this design. Internationally drug trafficking and terrorism go hand in hand and today even the United Nations recognizes it. Drug trafficking has provided funding for insurgency  in various regions throughout the world. In some cases, drugs have even been the currency used in the commission of terrorist attacks, as was the case in the Madrid bombings.

The ties between international terrorist organizations and drug trafficking varies greatly from organization to organization. For example, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), aka the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, is strongly tied to drug trafficking in Colombia and their objective is to overthrow the established order in Colombia and replace it with a socialist dictatorship. The Shining Path cut a brutal swath through Peru from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, largely funded by levies the group assessed on cocaine trafficking. The Al-Ittihad al-Islami, or AIAI, Somalia's largest militant Islamic organization, is suspected of smuggling an illegal narcotic leaf known as Khat ("cot") into the United States. Proceeds from East African Khat sales are likely remitted to Middle Eastern banks via Hawala network and wire services. All terror organizations without exception, have a drug peddling side arm whether they are our own Kashmiri militant groups, or the now dead Khalistani terrorists, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)  in Sri Lanka, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in Central Asia, Hizballah in Middle East, Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey and Iraq, Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) in Spain….. you name it.

Historically, Afghanistan has been a major source of heroin throughout the world. The heroin, grown and processed in Afghanistan and Pakistan is channeled through conduit countries including India to the U.S. Profits from the sale of the heroin are then laundered through Afghan and Pakistani owned businesses and then sent back to associates of terrorist organizations. Criminal and financial links to the Taliban regime and their involvement with Al-Qa'ida are well established.

Links between terrorist organizations and drug traffickers take many forms, ranging from facilitation protection, transportation, and taxation - to direct trafficking by the terrorist organization itself in order to finance its activities. Traffickers and terrorists have similar logistical needs in terms of material and the covert movement of goods, people and money. Drug traffickers benefit from the terrorists' military skills, weapons supply, and access to clandestine organizations. Terrorists gain a source of revenue and expertise in illicit transfer and laundering of proceeds from illicit transactions. Both groups bring corrupt officials whose services provide mutual benefits, such as greater access to fraudulent documents, including passports and customs papers. Drug traffickers may also gain considerable freedom of movement when they operate in conjunction with terrorists who control large amounts of territory. So this is a perfect symbiosis and if state fails to nip at the bud and use terrorism as a state policy to bleed the neighbours, then no policy can be more short sighted than this one, as Cuba, Iran, Pakistan and Libya have learnt it the hard way.

“Charitable” and other non-governmental front organizations are used by worldwide terrorist organizations, such as al Qaeda and Hizballah, to channel funds to their affiliated terrorist groups. The Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) is an example. Not only does it provide funds, it also furthers the strategic objectives of the terrorists.


This is a global battle and it cannot be won in Pathankot and Malda……..but the fight has to start from there. The state cannot brush its hands off the menace and shrug helplessly. A brutal response is needed and laws against drug smuggling should be such that the justice delivered is swift and punishment is nothing short of capital!

Friday 8 January 2016

AT AN ETHICAL CROSSROAD



I have, for a considerable time, taught in a private medical institution and whatever I have perceived is first hand. I realize that the students in private medical and dental colleges and their family are in an unenviable position. Medical fees have become exorbitant. Private medical colleges charge huge amounts extra for seats. Large sums of money are needed to break bonds which have been signed. Therefore there is an overwhelming need to make up this investment in practice. Hence the bending and/or alteration of ethical and moral rules have become commonplace. I sympathize with the younger lot who are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and can only suggest that they be guided by their conscience and that they make a decision that does not harm patients, and most important, one that they can live with.

But one’s conscience, like one’s morality, is a very ambivalent thing; when you do a repeated wrong your conscience rationalizes it to accepting it as the right thing to do, and then you do it with no regrets. Relying only on one’s conscience can be a dangerous downhill journey. But I am not ready to believe that “Ethics is a dying subject”. Then this profession is DEAD and I for one am not willing to let it die for it has been the raison de etre of my existence.

Even those who have been given the responsibility of upholding the moral values and ethical standards in our profession have betrayed our faith, and it is not at all surprising that the President of Medical Council of India was behind bars till very recently! The nexus between the pharmaceutical companies and doctors has metamorphosed the structure of a prescription with newer and costlier antioxidants and probiotics competing to find a place in it and burn a hole in the patient’s pocket.

This ethical degradation is most certainly not restricted to the medical fraternity. With the continuously surfacing scams, particularly in the previous government and scandals in Corporate India, Satyam turning into Asatyam and IPL becoming a cesspool of slush money, the idea that any form of ethics exists in politics and business is suspect. We are also seeing similar situations within the ranks religious leaders and everywhere the Pope goes he has to apologize for the appalling behavior of his brothers. And, the lack of ethics is not confined to India alone. Recently we saw the fiasco with FIFA with suspension of two heavyweights Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini. So, the problem is global! And if the global meltdown had one aetiology it was the melting down of all moral codes and ethical standards!

By definition, ethics reflect the type of morally permissible standards of conduct a group places upon themselves. It is basically a contract with the society an entity serves. Greed, the desire for power, and blind ambition are some of the factors that have all but eliminated ethical standards. We have lost our conscience. It seems that anything one can get away with to reach their defined pinnacle of success is becoming more and more acceptable. But then again, if the size of the bank balance and diameter of the diamond are the only criteria of success in this materialistic world, and if a con man is more respected than an honest school teacher, we have tossed our ethics, morality and conscience for a six!

Once we could say that a strong religious orientation was a good standard to govern our ethical conduct. But today, when religious zealots kill in the name of their God, they taint the idea that religious beliefs always produce ethical behavior. Patriotism was once considered a driver of ethical behavior. Today we see paid news channels going hammer and tongs against the death sentence of a proven terrorist, only because sensationalism sells! This is freedom of speech and expression almost to the point of being treasonous and farthest from journalistic ethics. These are scary times.

But the truth of the matter is that a society without rules is a society that is on the brink of chaos and self destruction. Likewise, a society with the wrong kind of rules will ultimately suffer the same fate. Fortunately we still have much residual ethics left in the world to overcome the current trend. But, like a natural resource, our supply is getting lower and we must reverse this downward spiral otherwise a valuable fabric of human society will disappear.

What about you? Do you have your own personal code of ethics that form the core of your decision making process? Allowing a small slip today, without a checks and balance system, can ultimately lead to a major spill. Bad habits start small and can quickly grow into an unethical monster. Without conscience serving as a standard of measurement, ethics disappear. Start with yourself. Hold "you" to high standards and morally sound ethical principles. By your example, others will begin to see the soundness of your actions. Your life can affect the life of friends and family. Don't underestimate the power of one. Make a difference by teaching the world to return conscience to decision making.


Tuesday 5 January 2016

GREEN AND GROWTH – A VERY TURBULENT PARTNERSHIP!




Whether it is the disappearing winter days in North India or the scary floods in Tamilnadu, or it is the cyclone tormenting coastal Odisha and Seemandhra we have been putting the blame on ‘global warming’, but do we really understand this much used term? Global Warming is the increase of Earth's average surface temperature due to effect of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, which trap heat that would otherwise escape from Earth. This in turn results in a type of greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gases, which include water vapor and carbon dioxide, absorb heat in the lower atmosphere and reflect it back to the Earth, thus heating it up.

The most significant greenhouse gas is actually water vapor, not something produced directly by humankind in significant amounts. Water vapor can easily condense or evaporate, depending on local conditions and do not bother us. The second greenhouse gas is Carbon dioxide (CO2) and even slight increases in atmospheric levels of CO2 can cause a substantial increase in temperature. Trees utilize CO2 and deforestation further adds on to the total CO2 pool, which tends to remain in the atmosphere for a very long time (time scales in the hundreds of years). Human beings have increased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by about thirty percent, which is an extremely significant increase, even on inter-glacial timescales. This we have done by burning fossil fuel for electricity generation, transportation, and heating, and also the manufacture of cement and a host of other products essential for development. The total worldwide emission of about 22 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year is alarming. About a third of this comes from electricity generation, and another third from transportation, and a third from all other sources. Before the late 18th century, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million and currently, it’s approximately 390 parts per million. And this is causing global warming.

Naturally the next question is what does the global warming do to us and our planet. Many of the following "harbingers" and "fingerprints" of global warming are now well under way:
1.      Rising Seas - inundation of fresh water marshlands (the everglades), low-lying cities, and islands with seawater.
2.      Changes in rainfall patterns - droughts and fires in some areas, flooding in other areas.
3.      Increased likelihood of extreme events - such as flooding, hurricanes, etc.
4.      Melting of the ice caps - loss of habitat near the poles. Polar bears are now thought to be greatly endangered by the shortening of their feeding season due to dwindling ice packs.
5.      Melting glaciers - significant melting of old glaciers is already observed.
6.      Widespread vanishing of animal populations – following widespread habitat loss.
7.      Spread of disease - migration of diseases such as malaria to new, now warmer, regions.
8.      Bleaching of Coral Reefs due to warming seas and acidification due to carbonic acid formation - One third of coral reefs now appear to have been severely damaged by warming seas.
9.      Loss of Plankton due to warming seas - The enormous (900 mile long) Aleutian island ecosystems of orcas (killer whales), sea lions, sea otters, sea urchins, kelp beds, and fish populations, appears to have collapsed due to loss of plankton, leading to loss of sea lions, leading orcas to eat too many sea otters, leading to urchin explosions, leading to loss of kelp beds and their associated fish populations.

So does that mean that Greenhouse gases are out and out bad? On the contrary Greenhouse gases are important. Without them, the Earth would lose heat too quickly and life as we know it would be impossible to sustain. But too much of them would heat up the earth and cause the same effect. So a delicate balance needs to be maintained.


Now that the Earth is heating up is there any way of reducing global warming? The problem is so big that there is no one technological silver bullet for fixing things. We must reduce our energy usage, increase the efficiency of the energy we do use, look for alternate source of energy other than fossil fuel and look at solutions like carbon capture and storage. We are currently investigating the safety and viability of capturing CO2 emissions from power plants and storing them deep underground as this is one of the only options that would allow us to continue using fossil fuels. Solar energy, Wind energy, and Nuclear energy are costly alternatives of fossil fuel energy, but time has come to bite the bullet and take stock of the ‘cost’ holistically and not simply in terms of Rupees, Dollars, Pounds and Yen.

Clearly, a coal-based development strategy, that has helped the industry rich western world to get rich all these years, is incompatible with the green growth agenda. Today they are prepared to change course to a costlier energy model and they expect the developing world to do the same. This is where the two worlds do not see eye to eye. Those responsible for polluting the atmosphere are today preaching developing nations to go green, when it is the latter’s turn to get developed. Why should villages in the developing world remain dark without electricity, when they now have an opportunity to brighten up their lives? The developed world must recognize that they have to atone for the historical carbon emissions that they have been putting out in the atmosphere for over 150 years in their search for prosperity. The entire prosperity of the world has been built on cheap energy. And suddenly we are being forced into higher cost energy. That's grossly unfair. India has been insisting on a common but differentiated responsibility based on equity that calls upon developed nations to scale up mitigation and allow developing nations to grow. The demand of developing nations is for an equitable and balanced agreement that takes into account their huge development needs including access to funds and technology. This is the only way to ‘Climate justice’.

India is expected to grow at such a rapid rate over the next two decades that it could build approximately 80 percent of the physical assets—including infrastructure, commercial and residential real estate, vehicle stock, and industrial capacity—that will constitute the India of 2030. Growth of this magnitude will bring tremendous benefits, but it also poses many challenges, particularly regarding sustainability. We will need to expand our capacity to generate electricity to meet increasing industrial and residential demand, which will impel a corresponding increase in greenhouse-gas emissions. Renewable energy sources are more expensive than coal and so moving away from coal-fired electricity will incur both economic costs, and political resistance.

India’s remarkable growth record, so far, has already been clouded by a degrading environment and growing scarcity of natural resources. Mirroring the size and diversity of our economy, environmental risks are wide ranging and are driven by both prosperity and poverty. 13 of the 20 most polluted cities are in India with a wide range of health hazards for its citizens. Simultaneously, poverty remains both a cause and consequence of resource degradation: agricultural yields are lower on degraded lands, and forests and grasslands are depleted as livelihood resources decline. To subsist, the poor are compelled to mine and overuse the limited resources available to them, creating a downward spiral of impoverishment and environmental degradation.

With cost of environmental degradation, environment could become a major constraint in sustaining future economic growth. Further, it may be impossible or prohibitively expensive to clean up later. So, though we have to chart a much more difficult and costly development model than our western counterparts, climate justice demands that our path to progress is aided by the true polluters of this Earth. We, on our part should not consider this challenge as a handicap but an opportunity to innovate and become a world leader in alternate sources of energy.



Friday 1 January 2016

HAPPY NEW YEAR!


While holidays are a plenty in India, almost coming in rhythmic succession – tuned to the harvest or the hunt, rituals spaced throughout the year to bring the rain, praise the sun, dip in the river and pray, climb the mountain and pray, mark the time between solstices and equinox, celebrate birth, honour death, the New Year’s Day is different. It is time to take stock of the year gone by, pause, reassess and change course for a better year. But above all a New Year’s Day is the first holiday of the year!
Our forefathers could never agree when the cycle of the year should begin. Indians celebrate the New Year with the month of Baisakh in mid April. The ancient Egyptians celebrated the New Year as the Nile rose at the end of August. The Incas picked the year’s shortest day which is June 21 in the Southern Hemisphere, while the Chinese New Year usually falls on the day of the second new moon after the winter solstice. It was Pope Gregory in 1582 who finally settled for January 1 for the Europeans. But whenever we choose to observe the day it serves its purpose: the past falling away, its demons chased out by conch shells, drums, bells and whistles, and a pristine New Year is born with no mistake in it yet, just resolutions!
Time has no divisions to mark its passage. There is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
The first 15 years of this century is behind us. It came with a lot of promises, but left us with bewildered, bemused, grossly divided and threatened to the point of extinction.We are today fighting war in four fronts - terror, poverty, illiteracy and climate and it doesn't seem that we are winning in any of them. The very definition of success is now different, fundamentally different, and the earlier we recognize it, the better it is for us as a species. There is still enough for everyone’s need but there is never enough for few men’s greed. We will open the book of the New Year today. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called "Opportunity" and its first chapter is New Year's Day of 2016!
We are blessed by God as we are in the profession of healing. If we resolve to make at least one person happy every day, which is not a tall task for us at all, in ten years each one of us may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy! Imagine the collective impact then. Will this not mean a much happier 2026? Will this not usher a much welcomed ‘global warming’ of warmth, affection, love and friendship? And it is something which is immensely achievable.
Happy New Year!