The New Nation - Internet Edition

Breakdown of society

DURING his recent high-profile visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI chided Americans for 'a moral breakdown' that he said had fueled the church's child sex abuse scandal. The pontiff berated the US Catholic bishops for their poor handling of the scandal surrounding sexual abuse of children in the church. Describing clerics who sexually abuse children as 'gravely immoral', he warned that scourge of paedophilia 'is found not only in your dioceses but in every sector of society.' It calls for a determined collective response, he said, but did not outline any firm action that the Vatican intended to take to purge the responsible priests.

Ahead of the Pope's visit, a polygamist compound owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Texas emptied of more than 400 children was the site of pervasive sexual abuse. Girls as young as 13 were 'spiritually married' to men who claimed several wives and were forced to have sex with their significantly older husbands for the purpose of having children. A number of the children recovered and removed were unable to provide names of their biological parents. The children are now in state custody.

Almost at the same time in another far away continent, widespread sexual abuse of children was ongoing in state care in South Australia for decades with an inquiry saying that the abuse was allegedly perpetrated by foster parents, social workers, teachers, priests and strangers. Some foster children were used at paedophile parties for sexual gratification as revealed by a former Supreme Court judge who is now heading an official inquiry. The abuse occurred in church institutions, the Salvation Army, government and non-government homes for children and youth shelters and foster homes and bear testimony of breakdown of the society as sounded rightly by the Pope.

Rice prices up again

A BUMPER BORO harvest was expected to drive down the price of rice. People of modest means pinned their hopes on this with the ample arrival of the new rice in the market. But shattering these expectations the price of rice is showing no sign of a stabilisation following the record harvest. There was noted no significant fall in prices as the Boro rice started coming to the market. Now, credible media reports say, the price of rice has registered a rise by Taka 80 on average per maund in the current week.

This fresh upward trend in rice price after the harvest of Boro crop is as beguiling as it is deeply frustrating for the consumers who were hoping that with a decline in the price of rice the prices of other essentials and services would also come down. The trend in the price of rice comes as a rude shock. Needless to say, government should lose no time in finding out at the soonest this aberration in rice price. It must act to help arrest this price upswing.

Some private rice traders are trying to sell the story of large scale foodgrain procurement by the government in the wake of the Boro harvest as driving prices of rice upwards. But observers also see the stocking activities by the ones in the rice business who are offering tempting prices to farmers to sell their produce to them. They are, of course, engaged in such purchases with the aim of stocking rice to sell the same later for more profits. The government may strengthen market monitoring activities immediately to guard against hoarding of foodgrains. Once it is noticed, appropriate actions must be taken-as swiftly as possible-to counter such mischief.

Dialogue should succeed

Md. Masum Billah

The country sees dialogues going on between the political parties and the interim government after the CA's address to the nation it also witnesses the reluctance of big parties to join the said dialogue. The parties retorted that the long awaited address of the CA to the nation has baffled them though they expected the address would satisfy their demands to get the country rid of the crisis it undergoes now. The government has lifted the emergency on some conditions and in a limited scale which has not saturated the demands of the political parties. They think democracy means chanting slogans at the top of mob's voice. It means blocking all the already jam-packed roads hour after hour to listen to their slogans. Democracy means exercising public anger through breaking the cars and panes of houses at the sweet will of the unruly mob. Democracy means exercise force and coerces the government or opposition to do whatever they like. Actually the wrong exercise of democracy has brought the untold sufferings and miseries to the common mass and irreparable loss to this impoverished nation.

The lifting of emergency in a limited scale and exercising political power, holding meetings and other activities of the party is not supposed to create any harm to exercise democratic rights of the people. They can utilize their agenda and fulfill promises to the nation. In order to do that they need not block the street causing serious and unbearable traffic congestion which has already panicked the nation and the nation is paying heavy loss everyday.

Politics and going to jail and arrest go together. Many great leaders of the world have spent the green and significant part of their lives in jail. Nelson Mandela who spent twenty seven years in jail, the most vital part of this life was spent in the jail. This is why Nelson Mandela is Nelson Mandela. He could get out of this ordeal by contracting or forgetting his ideals. I don't want to say that the leaders of the independent nations must be in the jails. I want to say that the political leaders perform great responsibilities, so their mistakes are also gigantic. This is a part of human nature. No human is perfect. Everybody is subject to mistakes and faults but we don't want to obey this truth. Rather we want to say and express that our leaders are either angels or almost like angels. Of course, this is part of democratic culture where reasons get little importance than emotion. Emotion reigns supreme in the way of democracy. Most probably this is why Socrates termed democracy as 'the politics of the mad and uneducated'. Indirectly we want to mean and say our leaders cannot do any fault or crime. They don't deserve to get arrested. When arrested, they must be freed without any condition. If not freed we will demonstrate and force the government to free them through mass upsurge or mass demonstration. It means we don't want to obey any law of the country. We are the law makers. So law will follow us. What we do is law. Actually it should not or cannot be the way.

The world wide food crisis has seriously jerked this nation. The poor are undergoing untold sufferings and ordeals. I visualize the scene, what would happen if there were political government in the country during this juncture of the nation. Had there not been emergency in the country serious chaos, confusion and anarchy would grip the nation. several countries have to impose Martial Law to quell peoples' unrest and anarchy originated from food crisis and sky rocketing prices of commodities. our country would see the same situation because it was far beyond the control of any political party to quell serious public unrest emanating from food crisis. Hunger does not know or follow any law.

This hunger would invite the situation which could go beyond the controlling capacity of any political movement Our political leaders don't have such kind of girt to control and soothe it. Rather the country would witness serious chaos as it unfolded as beyond the solution in the normal course by the government.

The opposition would take the full advantage of their weakness and incite all other parties and the citizens to create serous chaos in the country. The country has been saved at least from that situation.

According to the address of the CA the government has started dialogue with the political parties. The small parties have started responding to the call of the government but the big parties show reluctance to participate in the said dialogue with the plea that their demands must be fulfilled first. Some of them also threaten to incite public unrest and mass movement.

The political thinkers visualize that the situation may go worse even than the present one if the big political parties don; t respond positively to the government invitation.

it is not an unknown fact that our leaders resorted to all sorts indiscipline in the society. They took all the people of the country hostage and used to do whatever they liked. But now the situation has gone changed which we must accept. The big political parties still threat to start demonstration in the country means creating chaos and indiscipline.

They don't want to understand that the people of this country have become fed up with this situation. They don't want to see and want to listen to such kind of chaotic situation. Big parties' irresponsible and undemocratic behavour have given rise to this situation. Still they tend to farther to make the situation worse.

For the restoration of fruitful democracy participation of the political parties in the dialogue is a must. Through the dialogue the must build up a code of conduct which must be followed by all parties. The culture must be developed to tilt the nation towards development and the language of the movement and political demands must be changed.

Hartal, strike, slogan in the crowed streets, burning cars must be stopped once and for all. No destructive work will be allowed to do further whatever happens the langue of the protest must not be hartal or any programme which invite public sufferings.

This poverty stricken nation wants to go ahead and so calls for free movement and free passport. Nobody and no party has any right to give destructive political agenda national to deter development process. We have not yet ensured electricity for the everyday activities of the country. What we have done for so long years. Time has come ask us questions like this, not to give new destructive and chaotic agenda to further destabilize the national economy. Rather we should try to evolve something better to lead the country towards a meaningful democracy through the dialogues.

Terror cannot fight terror

Praful Bidwai

The Jaipur bomb blasts, which claimed 66 precious lives, are a horrible reminder of how vulnerable Indian citizens remain to the depredations of fanatics who consider mass murder a legitimate means to further political goals. Police and intelligence agencies haven't so far been identified the crime's perpetrators.

It isn't clear if the motive was to ignite communal strife, or sabotage the India-Pakistan peace process, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh alleged. But the blasts need a rational, cool-headed, resolute and united response.

However, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules in Rajasthan, has politicised the issue to polarise opinion. It has tried to cover up its police's ineptitude by accusing the Congress of being "soft" on terrorism.

This is doublespeak. The BJP said for four years that terrorists were striking at Congress-ruled states, but not at Gujarat-thanks to Narendra Modi's "tough administration". Yet, the BJP is speechless at Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje's statement that she won't allow Rajasthan to become a "Gujarat"-through anti-Muslim violence.

Raje claims the culprits have "external links", but the men haven't even been identified. After accusing the Centre of asking her to create a "Guantanamo Bay" by detaining Bangladeshis, she's arbitrarily rounding up scores of Bengali-speakers, many from West Bengal, for "infiltration".

Their demonisation is similar to the abuse ("asylum-seekers") that poor South Asian migrants face from Western xenophobes. The BJP attributes political motives to people who migrate for survival from a dirt-poor to a slightly less poor society. They deserve compassion, not hatred.

The BJP is clamouring for an anti-terror law like the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1985, or its nationally aborted successor, Prevention of Terrorism Act. It also wants a special federal agency created to deal with terrorism.

The BJP demands a "hard state", which would practise maximal violence against terrorists. Some retired police and intelligence officials also advocate tit-for-tat approaches to terrorism-even if this means blatant human rights violations.

They contend that terrorism has now entered a particularly malicious phase. It can only be fought if the state wages all-out war and resorts to intrusive surveillance and allows preventive detention, reverses the burden of proof, and admits confessions to the police as evidence.

These arguments are silly knee-jerk reactions to Jaipur. The cures they propose are worse than the disease.

To start with, the utility of a harsh law will at best be limited to punishing, not preventing, terrorism. It's unlikely to deter suicide-bombers. A law is no good if its enforcers are incompetent, corrupt or both.

Regrettably, that's true of much of South Asia's police, in which recruitment involves hefty bribes. The police routinely violates its own procedures-for example, writing station diaries in serial order in tamper-proof ink.

It rarely exercises care even in investigating ordinary crimes-witness the Noida murder case.

India already has countless surveillance measures, including roadblocks, metal detectors and closed-circuit TV cameras at airports, train/bus stations and offices, besides identity documents with a huge amount of personal information. But these aren't used intelligently.

India has unacceptably intrusive electronic surveillance. All Internet service-providers and cellphone operators must maintain transaction records for three years. The government can tap all e-mail conversations.

This hasn't produced useful clues to terrorism. But malice, mistaken identities or incompetence has resulted in innocent people being jailed for months-like journalist Iftikhar Geelani and IT professional, Lakshmana Kailash.

Surveillance has limited use. Britain has nearly 5 million CCTV cameras. London alone has over half a million.

The average citizen is daily tracked by some 300 cameras. Yet, these yielded no warning of or clues to the July 2005 bombings. Cameras have helped solve less than 3 per cent of street robberies.

Take the "special" anti-terrorism law the BJP demands. Any law that routinely allows preventive detention violates the fundamental principle that nobody should be deprived of liberty unless held guilty by a court of law.

Detaining suspects for months should be repugnant to a civilised legal system. Such colonial laws have created huge popular discontent in Kashmir and India's Northeast. They must be repealed, not replicated.

Similarly, inverting the burden of proof violates a basic tenet of the legal system:, an accused must be considered innocent until proved guilty, however grave the crime. The demand that confessions to a police officer must become evidence is misguided. Confessions can be extracted under duress, sometimes torture.

They cannot have evidentiary value in a credible legal system. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits such obnoxious practices.

It's simply wrong to contend that India doesn't have laws to deal adequately with terrorism. It does. The police want still tougher laws because they can detain suspects indefinitely without doing their job of gathering evidence and building a strong prosecution case.

They can also harass people against whom they nurture prejudice.

The TADA story is horrifying. Some 67,000 people were arrested under it, but only 8,000 put on trial, and a mere 725 convicted. Official committees found the law's application untenable in all but 5,000 cases. Under TADA, religious minorities were selectively targeted.

For instance, in Rajasthan, of 115 TADA detainees, 112 were Muslims and 3 Sikhs. Gujarat had an even worse pattern under POTA: all but one of the 200-plus detainees were Muslims, the remaining one a Sikh.

Nor is a federal anti-terrorism agency a magic wand. Besides, many states, including NDA-ruled Bihar, oppose it.

Talk of waging war on terror is dangerous - witness the US's global war on terror. Since 2001, it has caused a sevenfold increase in terrorism globally and implanted religion-driven extremism where it didn't exist (Iraq). GWoT has entailed enormous human rights violations, with Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and harassment of thousands of US citizens too.

In the last four years, US immigration authorities have detained over a million people, including 311,312 last year alone, creating an "American Gulag".

That's not the way India should go. Terrorism can only be fought if we improve our policing, revamp intelligence agencies, and respect human rights. There's no militarist shortcut to fighting terror.

(Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian journalist and commentator.)

Humanising nature's fury

Ames Carroll

OH, unhappy mortals! Oh, deplorable Earth!" So begins Voltaire's cri de coeur over the devastation of the "great" earthquake that struck Lisbon in 1755. "One hundred thousand unfortunates that the earth devours, who, bloody, torn and still throbbing, buried under their roofs, end - unaided and in horrible torment - their lamentable days!"

The Lisbon earthquake struck in multiple tremors across 10 minutes on the morning of All Saints Day, when vulnerable churches were full of Mass-goers. The event killed many thousands and levelled the city. The psychological trauma was felt across Europe. The catastrophe was a turning point in the Enlightenment, both undercutting the rationalist optimism of the age and stimulating the new science of seismology. It brought to the fore the moral meaning of natural disaster.

"Lisbon, which is no more, did it contain more vices than London or Paris, plunged in delights? Lisbon is in ruins, and in Paris they dance."

The devastating cyclone in Burma, with deaths projected at more than 120,000, and the earthquake in China, where as many as 50,000 may have died, bring the ruins of Lisbon to mind. Anguish is part of life, but when it occurs on a mass scale, the crisis becomes one of conscience. How could this happen?

The images of suffering humans prompt a visceral protest. Corpses that dishonour memory, collapsed buildings, threatened dams, the vacant stares of children, countless lives upended in an instant - all of it undeserved. All of it an outrage. And now the aftershocks of disease and displacement loom. The survivors who felt lucky at first now feel cursed.

When confronted with evil consequences of human venality, the judging mind shudders at the pain people are capable of inflicting on one another, but the calamities caused by "natural evil" pose a different challenge, what Voltaire called "the eternal debate over useless sorrows." He mocked stoic philosophers who thought everything was for the best, and he derided the religious who preached the mysterious ways of a just and good God.

The problem of unmerited misery is as old as the Book of Job, but now more than the idea of God is called into question. The unpredicted loss of even one life is unsettling, but when tens of thousands of lives are snuffed out in a moment, the pins of meaning itself are removed. Is that all we are - twigs that can be snapped in two by the capriciousness of wind, water, and shifting tectonic plates?

In Burma and Sichuan, each broken body in a ditch was, until recently, a whole universe of thought, desire, love, ambition, laughter, and dreaming. And now it's nothing? How can that be? The cyclone and the earthquake have attacked the moral order, too.

But here is the irony. The visceral rejection that humans feel when confronted with large-scale suffering, the innate sense that such meaninglessness is wrong, is itself an affirmation of meaning. An enraged protest at the injustice of the deaths of children is itself a proclamation of justice. Or, as a post-Voltaire believer might put it, the death of the executioner God, prompted by the slaughter of innocents, is itself the encounter with God. God does not cause suffering, but suffers, too. Now authentic faith can, perhaps, begin.

Where does the primal human insistence on right and wrong come from? When we cry out with every fibre of our beings that what earthquakes and cyclones do to the treasures of human value is wrong, we are bringing forth a treasure. Resignation and stoicism in the face of suffering are the allies of suffering. When the moral order is overturned by chaotic nature, it is restored, first, by visceral human protest against disorder, and second, by moving immediately to help.

It is said that the ruler of Portugal, after Lisbon was devastated, asked what was to be done? And the answer came, "Bury the dead, and feed the living." If nature is indifferent to human suffering, humans are not. In this way, meaning is rescued, for humans, too, are part of nature.

(International Herald Tribune)