No legal, constitutional basis for creation of Telangana state

By DA Somayajulu | ENS - HYDERABAD

Published: 19th October 2013 01:00 PM 

AS per the recommendation of the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) headed by Justice Fazal Ali, Andhra Pradesh was formed as the first linguistic state in India on November 1, 1956 by merging the Telangana area of Hyderabad state with Andhra state.

The Hyderabad state comprised, in addition to Telangana, five districts of Marathwada and three of Hyderabad-Karnataka. The Marathwada region was merged with Maharashtra and the three districts of Hyderabad-Karnataka were merged with Karnataka. About 25 states have been formed in India on linguistic basis since 1956.

Thus, Telangana is not the only region that was demerged from the Hyderabad state and  merged with another province to form a new linguistic state. Several other provinces were similarly demerged or merged with other provinces for creation of linguistic states. Thus, there was nothing unusual about Telangana being merged with Andhra for formation of Andhra Pradesh.

NO POLICY: The Union cabinet, which met on October 3, 2013, took the decision to create Telangana state with Hyderabad city included therein. But it has not spelt out the basis for such a major decision. Apparently, the government does not have in place any policy for creation of new states. Article 3 empowers Parliament to create new states. But, it is to be understood that such a power has to be exercised according to a policy created for that purpose and not whimsically, selectively or on a case-to- case basis. Arbitrary exercise of authority will not stand judicial scrutiny. It is now too well settled that every state’s action, in order to survive, must not be susceptible to the vice of arbitrariness which is the crux of Article 14 of the Constitution. Arbitrariness is the very negation of the rule of law.

This is also evident from various pronouncements of the apex court. Be it denial of passport in public interest (Maneka Gandhi) or imposition of President’s rule (SR Bommai) or removal of governors (BP Singhal) or alienation of natural resources (presidential reference under Article 143), the apex court was clear that there should be a policy in place. When it comes to creation of new states, the central government has to act with greater responsibility by coming up with a policy, particularly because the Constitution has not entrusted any role for the State Assembly beyond merely expressing its view. There should be some valid basis like language or ethnicity or backwardness or need to create smaller states. None of this is present in the case of Telangana.

PREMEDITATED: The very objective of bringing in the Right to Information Act is to enable the citizens to know not just the decision of the government in a particular case but also the basis of such a decision. When the Parliament wants the citizens to know the basis for a decision taken by all layers of government, how is it that the Union cabinet took such an important decision of bifurcating one of the biggest states without any basis, that too, by bringing such an important item as a table item before it? On the one hand, the Union government says that Telangana is a long-pending issue and, on the other, it hurriedly brings such an important issue as a table item without allowing the ministers to take a considered decision on such an important issue. This confirms that the whole process is vitiated by premeditation.

It is not as if the Congress party was not aware of the need for a valid basis for creation of new states. The Congress Working Committee had, at its meeting held on October 30, 2000, considered the demands from various regions of the country for separate statehood in detail and decided to refer the matter to another States Reorganisation Commission by passing the following resolution:

“While respecting the report of the first States Reorganisation Commission, the Congress party notes that there are many valid reasons for formation of separate states of Vidarbha and Telangana. However, the reorganisation of existing states raises a large number of issues. The Congress feels that the whole matter could be best addressed by another States Reorganisation Commission to look into all the issues involved”.

DUBIOUS BASIS: Going by the CWC resolution dated July 30, 2013, it appears that it decided to recommend creation of Telangana state because it is a longstanding demand. Why were other longstanding demands such as Vidarbha not taken up? Moreover, can a longstanding demand alone constitute a rational and valid basis for creation of new States? On November 21, 2011, the UP Assembly passed a resolution to split the state into Purvanchal, Paschim Pradesh, Bundelkhand and Awadh Pradesh. In case of Andhra Pradesh, there is no such resolution. It is, therefore, clear that the UPA government has taken the decision to create Telangana in the hope of winning a few additional MP seats, taking advantage of the ongoing agitation for a Telangana state. Such caprice shall never stand judicial review.

(The writer is a member of the political affairs committee of YSR Congress Party)

Source: The New Indian Express

Eid-ul-Azha celebrated with gaiety in Andhra

By IANS - HYDERABAD | Published: 16th October 2013 12:10 PM

The day began with Muslims, attired in their best, offering Eid prayers at Eidgahs or open grounds and mosques in 

Hyderabad and 22 other districts of the state. ( R Satish Babu/E )

Eid-ul-Azha was celebrated Wednesday with religious fervour and gaiety across Andhra Pradesh.

The day began with Muslims, attired in their best, offering Eid prayers at Eidgahs or open grounds and mosques in Hyderabad and 22 other districts of the state.

After the prayers, Muslims sacrificed goats and other 'halal' animals commemorating the great sacrifice of Prophet Ibrahim and urged Muslims to follow his teachings and the Holy Quran.

Also known as Bakrid or Eid-e-Qurban, it is the second major festival of Muslims.

The meat of the sacrificed animals is distributed among neighbours, relatives and the poor.

Muslims also exchanged greetings with relatives and friends and treated the visitors to their homes with sweet dishes.

The biggest congregation in Hyderabad was held at historic Mir Alam Eidgah where over 200,000 people offered prayers. The historic Mecca Masjid witnessed the second biggest congregation. Prayers were also held in hundreds of mosques in the city.

Eid was also celebrated in Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Nalgonda, Mahabubnagar, Adilabad, Warangal, Vijayawada, Kurnool, Kadapa, Anantapur, Guntur and other towns of the state with people turning out in large numbers at Eidgahs and mosques to offer prayers.

During their speeches before the prayers, the imams also prayed for peace and prosperity in the country.

Muslims constitute about 10 percent of the state's 84.6 million population.

Source: The New Indian Express

Kiran takes on high command again

Special Correspondent
 

After a break of a week or so, Chief Minister, N. Kiran Kumar Reddy showed his anger again at the party high command, this time for issuing “conflicting statements over a sensitive subject of bifurcation” leaving the people of the State confused.

Mr. Kiran Reddy is stated to have got so upset that he telephoned AICC general secretary in charge of Andhra Pradesh, Digvijay Singh, now camping in Madhya Pradesh, and took exception to the way he ( Mr. Singh ) and the Union Home Minister, S. K. Shinde, spelt out divergent views in public at a time when he was trying to convince the Seemandhra employees to call off their strike.

Ample scope

He reportedly reminded Mr. Singh that it was at his behest that he told the agitated employees that a resolution on bifurcation would come up twice before the Assembly leaving the members ample scope to voice the concerns of the people of Seemandhra.

“You have even told me that I should be your voice while conveying this to the employees and when I gave an assurance on this score, Mr. Shinde took a contrasting stand announcing that a draft Bill will be sent to the Assembly for its opinion only and that the bifurcation process will be expedited”, Mr. Reddy said in a note sent to the media.

It was not proper on the part of the party leadership to make such contradictory statements on a subject involving future generations of the two regions, Mr. Reddy said and wanted Mr. Singh to clarify in one voice the procedure being followed in dividing the State and how justice would be done to people of all regions.

‘Fresh controversy’

Supporters of the Chief Minister said he was annoyed that the high command has triggered a fresh “Telangana resolution versus draft bill” controversy as if the deep division among the people was not enough and when the need was for adopting a conciliatory tone to calm the ruffled feelings.

The latest detailed statement of Mr. Shinde of how the Centre plans to circumvent the problem it would encounter if the AP Assembly rejected the bill on Telangana, too had vertically divided people with those favouring the separate State rejoicing and those opposing it feeling let down.

Source: The Hindu

Centre to woo Seemandhra with financial package, new capital

PTI | 11th Oct 2013

Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde with other Union ministers during the GoM meeting on separate state of Telangana in New Delhi on Friday. PTI

New Delhi: The Group of Ministers (GoM), set up to look into the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, will focus its deliberations on the recommendations of Justice B N Srikrishna Committee that gave an extensive report on Telangana in 2010.

"Srikrishna Committee's report will be the basis of the whole exercise," Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, who heads the seven-member ministerial panel, told reporters here. However, the option of bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh into Telangana and Seemandhra with Hyderabad as the capital of Telangana and Seemandhra having a new capital- given by the central government was not the most preferred one of the committee.

"After taking into account all the pros and cons, the committee did not think it to be the most preferred, but the second best option. Separation is recommended only in case it is unavoidable and if this decision can be reached amicably amongst all the three regions," the five-member Srikrishna Committee, headed by Justice (retd) B N Srikrishna, had said.

The committee said if this option is exercised, the apprehensions of the coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema people and others who have settled in Hyderabad and other districts of Telangana with regard to their investments, properties, livelihood and employment, would need to be adequately addressed and confidence instilled that their safety and security would get highest priority from the new dispensation.

"Considering all aspects, the committee felt that while creation of a separate Telangana would satisfy a large majority of people from the region, it would also throw up several other serious problems. The implications for the other two regions also cannot be ignored," it had said.

The Srikrishna Committee said this option implies accepting the full demands of a large majority of Telangana people for a separate state that will assuage their emotional feelings and sentiments as well as the perceived sense of discrimination and neglect.

The committee's impression, gained during its extensive tours of Telangana region, indicated that a very large number of people from Telangana were highly supportive of the demand for a separate state.

The panel had said the implications of this option are that if earlier agitations are anything to go by, this decision will give rise to serious and violent agitations in the coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions, where the backlash will be immediate; the key issues being Hyderabad and sharing of water and irrigation resources.

The Srikrishna Committee also said that There will be every likelihood of pressure being put by the general public on the leaders of the political parties of Seemandhra region (MLAs/MLCs/MPs) to resign and fight for united Andhra Pradesh.

The agitation for separation of Rayalaseema from coastal Andhra may also start taking shape sooner than expected.

Even though water and irrigation issues can be handled by creating autonomous/semi-autonomous structures, the apprehensions of the people of coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema will continue to be voiced.

The impact on internal security situation with the anticipated growth of Naxalism and religious fundamentalism.

The committee said the division of the state will also have serious implications outside Andhra Pradesh.

It would not only give fillip to other similar demands but it will be for the first time, after the re-organisation of states, that a political demand for dividing a linguistically constituted state would have been conceded by the Union government with the creation of two Telugu-speaking states.

The issue requires a most calm and dispassionate consideration of the consequences.

The matter should also be seen in the larger context of whether a region can be allowed to decide for itself what its political status should be, as that would only create a demand for a great number of small states resulting in problems of coordination and management.

The option of keeping the state united by simultaneously providing certain definite Constitutional/Statutory measures for socio-economic development and political empowerment of Telangana region– creation of a statutorily empowered Telangana Regional Council had been termed by the committee as the best way forward.

The other four options are (a) Maintain status quo, (b) Bifurcation of the state into Seemandhra and Telangana; with Hyderabad as a Union Territory and the two states developing their own capitals in due course, (c) bifurcation of state into Rayala-Telangana and coastal Andhra regions with Hyderabad being an integral part of Rayala-Telangana and (d) Bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh into Seemandhra and Telangana with enlarged Hyderabad Metropolis as a separate Union Territory.

This Union Territory will have geographical linkage and contiguity via Nalgonda district in the south-east to district Guntur in coastal Andhra and via Mahboobnagar district in the south to Kurnool district in Rayalaseema.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

Personal Comment: Given the treatment of "CWC and CONGRESS CABINET" towards Seemandhra people I will doubt that Congress will ever win a seat in this Region in the near future. Existing parties YSR, TDP, BJP are no better either. It is high time to float a new party to protect and safeguard the rights of Seemandhra People !!!

 

Bill, resolution in Telangana soup

DC | Ch V.M. Krishna Rao | 2 hours 1 min ago

Friday, Oct 11, 2013 

 

Hyderabad: There is still confusion even among the top leadership of the Congress about whether the  Centre will direct the AP Assembly to pass a resolution in favour of Telangana, or will only require the Assembly to express its opinion on the Telangana Bill, or both.

Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy had informed the striking employees’ associations on Wednesday that AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh had assured him that the Telangana issue will be referred to the AP Assembly twice (for its opinion and for voting). Singh himself issued a statement in Delhi on these lines.
 

But Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, during his monthly briefing to the media on Thursday, said that after the Group of Ministers (GoM) clears the Bill, it will be referred to the President who in turn will send it to the AP Assembly only for its opinion. Asked what the Centre will do if the AP Assembly rejects the Bill, Shinde said, “There is a remedy provided in the Constitution. Please read it or wait for the outcome.”
 

Seemandhra leaders tend to rely on Singh’s statement that the resolution will come before the Assembly, where it could be easily voted down, forcing the Central government to reverse its decision to carve out Telangana state.
 

Telangana Congress leaders prefer to believe the Union home minister’s statement that the Bill will come before the Assembly only for the latter to express its opinion. They say that even if the AP Assembly rejects the Bill, Parliament is vested with the power to bifurcate the state.
 

Sources close to the CM are still hopeful that the Cabinet note that was approved on October 3 will be sent to the President with the advice that it should be referred to the AP Assembly.
 

Shinde, during his briefing, said that the GoM, which is slated to hold its first meeting on Friday, will listen to various stakeholders and submit its report to the Cabinet. The Bill will then be placed in Parliament after getting the opinion of the state Assembly.
 

Conflicting statements will upset dialogue process: CM
 

Conflicting statements will upset dialogue process with striking staff: CM
 

The conflicting statements by Congress leadership at the Centre and Union ministers on the highly sensitive issue of state division is adding to the existing chaos.

Within a day of AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh's assurance to Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy that the Assembly will deal with the T issue twice, in the form of a resolution and Bill, Union home minister Mr Sushilkumar Shinde said the Bill would be sent to Assembly only once for its views.

The Chief Minister who has been trying to convince employees that the division process could be scuttled by ensuring defeat of T resolution in the Assembly, he believes the statement is likely to upset the dialogue process with the striking employees.

The visibly irritated Chief Minister said in a television interview that it is high time that the Central leaders and ministers coordinate with each other before making statements on highly sensitive issues.

“We have lost complete faith in what they are saying. We also fear that they want to keep us in confusion with their statements and push the Bill in the winter session of Parliament,“ APNGOs leader A. Vidyasagar told this newspaper.

It all began with Mr Shinde announcing in December 2012 that a decision on carving out state will be taken within a week. Then came the infamous statement of former AICC incharge Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad that one week cannot be taken in literal sense.

Digvijay Singh, while announcing the CWC resolution, made it clear that the entire process of carving out the Telangana state would begin with the state Assembly sending a resolution to the Centre to decide on the contentious issue.

“Now we understand that it was a ploy to preempt resignations by MLAs and ministers who have been hiding under the excuse of defeating resolution in the Assembly whenever agitators counter them with the resignation demand,“ said Mr Vidyasagar.

There have been conflicting statements on the duration of the division process.

While the ministry of home affairs' note on the T-state gave six weeks time for the Group of Ministers (GoM) to submit its report, Mr Shinde said that the Bill would be introduced in the Winter Session of Parliament. Within days the Centre removed the six-week deadline and Mr Shinde on Thursday said there has been no deadline for the GoM to complete its process.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

Should President's rule be imposed to create Telangana?

By B Vinod Kumar - HYDERABAD
(The writer is a former MP and TRS politburo member.)

Published: 08th October 2013 07:50 AM

Contrary to the prevailing opinion, in this country, new state formation has never been smooth. Nor were the procedures exactly similar. Each state formation was unique and had followed a different sequence of steps.

The only thing common to all the state formations so far in Independent India has been the rigid applicability of Article 3 in its truest sense, where Parliament is given the supreme authority to carve out states irrespective of the opinion of the involved State Assemblies.

While the NDA followed a convenient procedure in the creation of Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in 2000, where the state assemblies initiated the demand for separation, such a procedure is neither legally mandated nor is constitutionally prescribed and deviates from most other prior state formations.

Even the original reason for carving out states is different for each state. While some states in India were formed on the basis of recommendations by the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC), most others have not been dealt with by the SRC. And in certain cases, states were formed though SRC made explicit negative recommendations, like in case of Maharashtra and Gujarat. Even the formation of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 did not follow the recommendations of SRC.

And contrary to what Seemandhras believe, Indira Gandhi was not an apostle of preservation of existing states. In fact, history attests that she was a big supporter of creation of new states.

No other Prime Minister of this country has carved as many states as Indira Gandhi. She single-handedly led to the creation of many new states--Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura. Back then, there was a strong case for creation of Telangana when the Telangana Praja Samiti (TPS) won 10 Lok Sabha seats in 1971 elections in spite of the popularity wave that Indira Gandhi was riding on at that time.

Leaders of those times confide that Indira Gandhi was almost ready to divide Andhra Pradesh as well in 1972, which actually resonates with her proclivity towards creating new states with utmost ease.

Why she opposed the division of Andhra Pradesh, as a special case, seems to have completely different reasons. The then principal secretary of Indira Gandhi PN Haskar made her aware of a pending petition with the United Nations filed by last Nizam Osman Ali Khan against forceful annexation of Hyderabad State by the Indian armed forces.

Haskar advised Indira Gandhi not to broach the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh while the case was still pending. It is to be noted that Indira Gandhi went about creating many states following different sets of steps for each state. When Chief Minister Ram Kishan of Punjab openly opposed and criticised the CWC resolution of March 9, 1966, to bifurcate the state, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended proviso of Article 3 of referring the bill to the State Assembly by imposing President’s rule on July 5, 1966, keeping the State Assembly in suspended animation to go ahead with the formation of Punjab Suba and Haryana Prant, using Parliament’s prerogative in carving internal boundaries of the country.

The President of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, stated that there would be no reference of the Reorganisation Bill to the State Legislature. The bill was debated at length and passed by the Lok Sabha on August 31, 1966, and by the Rajya Sabha on September 3, 1966. The President’s Rule was revoked on November 1, 1966, when Punjab was bifurcated. This decision to divide the state while under President’s Rule was later upheld in 1970 by the Delhi High Court, thereby establishing the supreme power of Parliament in the creation of new states.

Punjab, like Andhra Pradesh, was covered by Article 371. The passage of bill for reorganisation of Punjab automatically removed Punjab from this special provision of Article 371, which will be now applicable during formation of Telangana.

The current insubordination and overt defiance of Andhra Pradesh CM N Kiran Kumar Reddy is uncannily similar to the belligerent stance taken by the Chief Minister of Punjab Ram Kishan in 1966. It would be wise if the current Seemandhra leadership stops its undemocratic and coercive activities aimed at stalling the formation of Telangana.

They should realise that bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh is inevitable, and therefore, there is a need to cooperate with people of Telangana in separation. Seemandhra leaders should instead focus their energies towards safeguarding the interests of Seemandhra at this critical hour.

If the current belligerence and willfull disobedience of Kiran Kumar Reddy is continued, wherein he uses cricket symbolism that “it is not over till the last ball is bowled”, expressing his desire to fight till the end, there is a very strong case for imposing President’s Rule to bifurcate Andhra Pradesh by keeping the State Assembly in suspended animation, thereby obviating the need to refer the bill to State Assembly.

Sonia Gandhi may now have to do what Indira Gandhi did in 1966. We sincerely hope we don’t have to do it that way. Seemandhras can debate their perceived problems and issues in the State Assembly while discussing the draft bill. We need to remember that we can choose our friends but not our neighbours. We hope that we will be friendly neighbours who are going to solve all the issues that may arise in future with maturity and responsibility.

Source: The New Indian Express

శ్రీ కౌముది అక్టోబర్ 2013

‘The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide’ by Gary J. Bass

To Nixon, the Indians were “a slippery, treacherous people.” To Kissinger — who comes across as a cold-blooded practitioner of realpolitik given to rages when he doesn’t get his way — the Indians were “insufferably arrogant,” with “convoluted minds.” At one point on the tapes, Nixon remarks, “The Indians need — what they really need is a” — Kissinger interjects, “They’re such bastards.” And then the president finishes his thought: “a mass famine.”

Read full article below: The Washington Post

 

By Neil Sheehan, Published: October 4 E-mail the writer

Neil Sheehan, who spent three years in Vietnam as a war correspondent, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam” and “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon.”

We seem to live in an era of massacres. More than 500,000 Tutsis were hacked to death by their Hutu ethnic rivals in Rwanda in 1994. The following year, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were shot to death by the Bosnian Serb army at Srbrenica. In Syria, more than 100,000 are dead, and more keep dying in massacres large and small by bullet, shell, bomb and poison gas.

Now Gary J. Bass, a journalist and professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, has come forth with “The Blood Telegram,” a profoundly disturbing account of the hitherto hidden role of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of East Bengal (subsequently the nation of Bangladesh) and the making of 10 million refugees during Pakistan’s civil war in 1971. Apparently no precise figure is available for the deaths, but Bass cites a CIA and State Department estimate of about 200,000 midway through the killing.

(Knopf) - “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide” by Gary J. Bass.

The partition of British India in 1947 into mainly Hindu and mainly Muslim areas created a bifurcated Pakistan in a bizarre configuration that was a recipe for political instability and military dictatorship. West Pakistan was forged from the Muslim-dominated provinces on the western side of the subcontinent, while East Pakistan was created on the other side from the chiefly Muslim province of East Bengal. Roughly 1,000 miles of India lay between. East and west shared virtually nothing except religion.

Serious trouble began in 1970 when the president of Pakistan, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, permitted a national election. The winner was a charismatic Bengali leader named Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman and his Awami League. Mujib enraged the army leadership, whose troops were drawn almost entirely from the Punjab and other western provinces and had no affection for the Bengalis, by publicly advocating autonomy for both wings under a federal system, while privately promoting secession and independence for East Bengal.

On the night of March 25, 1971, Yahya Khan launched a ferocious crackdown. The orgy of murder, rape and mayhem went on for months, focusing in genocidal fashion on the minority of Bengali Hindus regarded as most friendly to Pakistan’s enemy, India.

Nixon and Kissinger, his national security adviser, have sought to draw a curtain of silence over their role by omitting or glossing over the atrocities in their memoirs. Bass has defeated the attempted coverup through laborious culling of relevant sections of the Nixon White House tapes, declassified State Department documents and interviews with former officials, American and Indian, who were involved.

Archer Blood, the U.S. consul general in 1971 in Dhaka, the principal city of East Bengal, and his staff were horrified by the violence. Their reports to the State Department in Washington described the killings in gruesome detail and urged the strongest possible intervention to try to bring the carnage to an end. Pakistan’s generals were highly susceptible to pressure from Washington. Virtually their entire military, from the F-86 Sabre jet fighters in the air force to the armored, artillery and infantry contingents, was equipped with American weaponry and depended on the United States for the ammunition and spare parts required to keep it operating.

But the consulate’s cables met with what Blood later called a “deafening” silence from Washington. With the Bengalis being killed by American weapons wielded by an American-sponsored army, and Washington doing nothing to try to stop it, the United States had become complicit in the massacre. In desperation, Blood’s younger staffers drew up a “dissent cable,” a Vietnam War-initiated reform in the Foreign Service meant to allow diplomats to speak out, confidentially but frankly, against official policy. Bass calls it “the Blood telegram” after its most important signatory — and as a double-entendre title for the events the book recounts. The cable accused the Nixon administration of “moral bankruptcy” and demanded action to stop the murders “in order to salvage our nation’s position as a moral leader of the free world.” Twenty members of the consulate staff signed the cable, a “roll call of honor,” as Blood put it. As the senior man, he had the most to lose by signing, and lose he did in the years to come.

What Blood and his young associates did not know was that Nixon and Kissinger were using Yahya Khan as a secret communications channel to Mao Zedong’s China. It was Yahya Khan who would arrange Kissinger’s clandestine trip to China in July 1971 to prepare the way for Nixon’s epochal visit there in February 1972. Nixon and Kissinger were determined to let nothing interfere with their enterprise to checkmate the Soviet Union in the Cold War by turning China into a friend of the United States. The cables from Blood’s consulate about this inconvenient massacre in East Bengal infuriated both men.

And there was more stroking their anger. They loathed India because the Indians had adopted a neutral position in the Cold War and then turned to the Soviet Union to obtain weapons, which they could not get from the United States, to fight Pakistan. To Nixon, the Indians were “a slippery, treacherous people.” To Kissinger — who comes across as a cold-blooded practitioner of realpolitik given to rages when he doesn’t get his way — the Indians were “insufferably arrogant,” with “convoluted minds.” At one point on the tapes, Nixon remarks, “The Indians need — what they really need is a” — Kissinger interjects, “They’re such bastards.” And then the president finishes his thought: “a mass famine.”

Nixon had a particular animus, a dislike that was mutual, toward Indira Gandhi, the prime minister and daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, a founder of India and its first prime minister and greatest statesman.
 

Rather than seeking to restrain the Pakistani military, Nixon and Kissinger did all they could to strengthen it for the open clash with India that loomed because of the bloodshed in East Bengal. Once the fighting started, Bass recounts that, in a precursor to Watergate, the two men knowingly broke U.S. law by approving the transfer to Pakistan of American-supplied F-104 Starfighter jet interceptors from Jordan and Iran, then still under the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general and subsequently one of the major figures convicted in the Watergate scandal, was in the room at the time of the decision and made no objection. In the end, the Indian army decisively defeated the Pakistani forces, liberating East Bengal and fostering the birth of Bangladesh.

After reading Bass’s account of this shameful episode, one has to ask if preservation of the secret conduit to China via Pakistan was worth the lives of more than 200,000 Bengalis. Mao clearly wanted to do business with the United States, and some other channel presumably could have been found. One has to conclude that where the Bengalis were concerned, Kissinger and Nixon simply did not give a damn. And one has to wonder too, what had happened to the America that once stood for liberty, justice and decency.

Experts stress need for dictionary on Telangana dialect

Ch Sushil Rao, TNN | Oct 5, 2013, 06.16 AM IST

HYDERABAD: A separate state of Telangana could mean that you may have to learn the nuances of the dialect, even if you hail from the region. A complete, etymological dictionary is therefore the need of the hour, believe academicians.

"There is a need to compile words from the different districts of Telangana. One has to get to the origin of the words per se," said Prof Ghanta Chakrapani, sociologist and professor at the Dr B R Ambedkar Open University. It is not as if a dictionary comprising words used in the Telangana region has not been attempted so far. "I myself compiled hundreds of words," Chakrapani said.

A Telugu writer Dr Nalimela Bhaskar, published a dictionary of Telangana words after extensive research, a couple of years ago. Bhaskar who hails from Karimnagar district compiled as many as 9,000 words spoken in the Telangana dialect which were published in 2003 and 2010. "It was a herculean task. I spent several years of research on it," Bhaskar told TOI. With the Union cabinet clearing the proposal for a separate Telangana, Bhaskar stresses the need for a more comprehensive dictionary.

The Telangana dialect shows marked differences in different districts of the region. Although the Telangana dialect is spoken in Hyderabad, the influence of Urdu, in the city is evident.

Noted linguist and former vice-chancellor of University of Hyderabad Bhadriraju Krishnamurti had classified Telugu into four different categories in the state. The categorisation was done based on the way the language is spoken. The eminent linguist was also instrumental in compiling "A Telugu Dialect Dictionary of Occupational Vocabularies in Andhra Pradesh".

According to Krishnamurti, Srikakulam and Visakhapatnam districts were included in the Purvamandalam category based on the way Telugu was spoken in the region. The districts of Rayalaseema, Nellore and Prakasam districts were listed in the second category called Dakshina Mandalam. In the third category called Uttaramandalam, the districts of Telangana were included. As Mahbubnagar and Khammam districts are geographically close to Rayalaseema and coastal Andhra regions respectively, the influence of Telugu spoken in those regions would be evident on the dialect in the two districts. East and West Godavari districts, Krishna and Guntur districts were included in the fourth mandalam.

Source: The Times of India

PIL filed against bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh

TNN | Oct 5, 2013, 06.27 AM IST

HYDERABAD: Stating that Article 371(D) was inserted in the Constitution to do justice to the people living in various zones of the state when AP was formed in 1956, a public interest litigation was filed in the AP high court on Friday urging it to direct the central government not to initiate any further action in pursuance of Article 3 of the Constitution for bifurcation of the state. The Centre has no power to invoke Article 3 when it was made clear that regional injustices could be set right through Article 371(D), contended petitioner PV Krishnaiah, an advocate practicing in the high court. In his petition, Krishnaiah urged the court to direct the authorities concerned against forming the new state of Telangana in pursuance of the decision taken by the Union cabinet on October 3

. He submitted that AP was formed in 1956 by having the 32nd Constitutional amendment wherein Article 371(D) was inserted, giving the impression that the issue was settled permanently. Therefore, the government does not have any power under Article 3 of the Constitution to bifurcate the state again until and unless the special Constitutional provision is deleted, the petitioner contended. He also wanted the court to direct the non-official respondents not to undertake any agitation, bandhs etc. for bifurcation of the state or opposing the same, including the ongoing strike of the APNGOs

. tnnUnion cabinet secretary, secretary to ministry of home affairs, state chief secretary, presidents of the CWC, UPA, TRS, TDP, BJP, YSR Congress, CPI, Telangana political JAC, TNGOs and APNGOs were named as the respondents.

He urged the division bench comprising Chief Justice Kalyan Jyoti Sengupta and Justice KC Bhanu to take up the matter. The bench said it would hear the petition on Monday.

Order on Vijay Sai's bail plea reserved to Oct 8

Hyderabad: Principal special judge U Durga Prasad Rao of the CBI court on Friday reserved to October 8 his orders on the bail plea of V Vijay Sai Reddy, the accused auditor in the Jagan assets case. CBI counsel K Surender argued that Vijay Sai Reddy was the brain behind the illegal flow of bribes into Jagan's firms in the guise of investments from various beneficiaries of YSR regime and opposed his bail plea. Sushil Kumar, counsel for the auditor, contended that his client never tried to influence the witnesses in the last two years.                                                                                                                                                                  

Source:  The Times of India  

  

States of Health

by Atul Gawande  

October 7, 2013 

Ours can be an unforgiving country. Paul Sullivan was in his fifties, college-educated, and ran a successful small business in the Houston area. He owned a house and three cars. Then the local economy fell apart. Business dried up. He had savings, but, like more than a million people today in Harris County, Texas, he didn’t have health insurance. “I should have known better,” he says. When an illness put him in the hospital and his doctor found a precancerous lesion that required treatment, the unaffordable medical bills arrived. He had to sell his cars and, eventually, his house. To his shock, he had to move into a homeless shelter, carrying his belongings in a suitcase wherever he went.

This week, the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, which provides health-insurance coverage to millions of people like Sullivan, is slated to go into effect. Republican leaders have described the event in apocalyptic terms, as Republican leaders have described proposals to expand health coverage for three-quarters of a century. In 1946, Senator Robert Taft denounced President Harry Truman’s plan for national health insurance as “the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it.” Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan argued that, if Medicare were to be enacted, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” And now comes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell describing the Affordable Care Act as a “monstrosity,” “a disaster,” and the “single worst piece of legislation passed in the last fifty years.” Lacking the votes to repeal the law, Republican hard-liners want to shut down the federal government unless Democrats agree to halt its implementation.

The law’s actual manifestation, however, is rather anodyne: as of October 1st, healthcare.gov is scheduled to open for business. A Web site where people who don’t have health coverage through an employer or the government can find a range of health plans available to them, it resembles nothing more sinister than an eBay for insurance. Because it’s a marketplace, prices keep falling lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted, by more than sixteen per cent on average. Federal subsidies trim costs even further, and more people living near the poverty level will qualify for free Medicaid coverage.

How this will unfold, though, depends on where you live. Governors and legislatures in about half the states—from California to New York, Minnesota to Maryland—are working faithfully to implement the law with as few glitches as possible. In the other half—Indiana to Texas, Utah to South Carolina—they are working equally faithfully to obstruct its implementation. Still fundamentally in dispute is whether we as a society have a duty to protect people like Paul Sullivan. Not only do conservatives not think so; they seem to see providing that protection as a threat to America itself.

Obstructionism has taken three forms. The first is a refusal by some states to accept federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs. Under the law, the funds cover a hundred per cent of state costs for three years and no less than ninety per cent thereafter. Every calculation shows substantial savings for state budgets and millions more people covered. Nonetheless, twenty-five states are turning down the assistance. The second is a refusal to operate a state health exchange that would provide individuals with insurance options. In effect, conservatives are choosing to make Washington set up the insurance market, and then complaining about a government takeover. The third form of obstructionism is outright sabotage. Conservative groups are campaigning to persuade young people, in particular, that going without insurance is “better for you”—advice that no responsible parent would ever give to a child. Congress has also tied up funding for the Web site, making delays and snags that much more inevitable.

Some states are going further, passing measures to make it difficult for people to enroll. The health-care-reform act enables local health centers and other organizations to provide “navigators” to help those who have difficulties enrolling, because they are ill, or disabled, or simply overwhelmed by the choices. Medicare has a virtually identical program to help senior citizens sort through their coverage options. No one has had a problem with Medicare navigators. But more than a dozen states have passed measures subjecting health-exchange navigators to strict requirements: licensing exams, heavy licensing fees, insurance bonds. Florida has attempted to ban them from county health departments, where large numbers of uninsured people go for care. Tennessee recently adopted an emergency rule declaring that anyone who could be described as an “enrollment assister” must undergo a criminal background check, fingerprinting, and twelve hours of course work. The hurdles would hamper hospital financial counsellors in the state—and, by some interpretations, ordinary good Samaritans—from simply helping someone get insurance.

This kind of obstructionism has been seen before. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, Virginia shut down schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County rather than accept black children in white schools. When the courts forced the schools to open, the governor followed a number of other Southern states in instituting hurdles such as “pupil placement” reviews, “freedom of choice” plans that provided nothing of the sort, and incessant legal delays. While in some states meaningful progress occurred rapidly, in others it took many years. We face a similar situation with health-care reform. In some states, Paul Sullivan’s fate will become rare. In others, it will remain a reality for an unconscionable number of people. Of some three thousand counties in the nation, a hundred and fourteen account for half of the uninsured. Sixty-two of those counties are in states that have accepted the key elements of Obamacare, including funding to expand Medicaid. Fifty-two are not.

So far, the health-care-reform law has allowed more than three million people under the age of twenty-six to stay on their parents’ insurance policy. The seventeen million children with preëxisting medical conditions cannot be excluded from insurance eligibility or forced to pay inflated rates. And more than twenty million uninsured will gain protection they didn’t have. It won’t be the thirty-two million hoped for, and it’s becoming clear that the meaning of the plan’s legacy will be fought over not for a few months but for years. Still, state by state, a new norm is coming into being: if you’re a freelancer, or between jobs, or want to start your own business but have a family member with a serious health issue, or if you become injured or ill, you are entitled to basic protection.

Conservatives keep hoping that they can drive the system to collapse. That won’t happen. Enough people, states, and health-care interests are committed to making it work, just as the Massachusetts version has for the past seven years. And people now have a straightforward way to resist the forces of obstruction: sign up for coverage, if they don’t have it, and help others do so as well. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: Tom Bachtell

Source: The New Yorker

What we carry over to our next life

By Anil Sharma - HYDERABAD

Published: 30th September 2013 09:28 AM

When the soul is in the causal body it has within itself an imprint of the impressions of the experiences it underwent during its life on the lower planes i.e., the mental, astral and the physical planes. When the life on the higher mental sub-plane comes to an end, trishna reasserts itself, and the ego once again turns its attention outwards.

Desire with its army of tendencies consisting of material qualities, sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies of mind, awaits the ego as it re-emerges to assume a new incarnation. The seeds of past tendencies commence to germinate as soon as the new personality begins to form itself for the new incarnation.

The process is brought about by the ego turning its attention first to the stored mental impressions, which immediately resume activity and then to the stored astral impressions. The tendencies, which had been in a condition of suspended animation, are thrown outwards by the ego as it returns to re-birth.   First, it draws around itself matter from the physical world, and its elemental essence.  The ego thus begins in this respect exactly where it had left off.   Next, it draws round itself matter from the astral world and its elemental essence thus obtaining the materials out of which its new astral body will be built, causing re-appearance of appetites, emotions, and passions brought over from past lives.

The astral matter is gathered by the ego descending to re-birth automatically. This material is an exact reproduction of the matter in the astral body at the end of its last astral life. The soul thus resumes its life in each world just where it had left it last time.  Each incarnation is inevitably and automatically linked with the preceding lives, so that the whole series forms a continuous, unbroken chain.

This ego in its descent to incarnation does not receive ready-made mental and astral bodies, instead it receives material out of which these bodies will be built, in the course of the life that is to follow. Moreover the matter it receives is capable of providing it with mental and astral bodies, exactly of the same type it had at the end of its last astral and mental lives, respectively.

The qualities are simply the germs of qualities, which have secured for themselves a possible field of manifestation in the matter of the new bodies. Whether they develop in this life into the same tendencies as in the last one will depend largely upon the encouragement, given to them by the surroundings of the child during its early years. Any one of them, good or bad may be readily stimulated into activity by encouragement, or, on the other hand may be starved out for lack of that encouragement. If stimulated, it becomes a more powerful factor in one’s life this time than it was in one’s previous existence, if starved out, it remains merely as an unfructified germ. The child cannot thus be said to have as yet a definite astral body, but the matter out of which to build it.

For example, suppose one was a drunkard in one’s past life, in kamaloka or astral plane one would have burnt out the desire for drink and be definitely freed from it. But although the desire itself is dead, there still remains the same weakness of character which made it possible for one to be subjected by it. In one’s next life the astral body will contain matter capable of giving expression to the same desire, but one is in no way bound to employ such matter in the same way as before.

In the hands of careful and capable parents, who regard such desires as evil, one would gain control over them, repress them as they appear, and hence the astral matter will remain unvivified and become atrophied from want of use. The matter of the astral body is slowly but constantly wearing away and being replaced, precisely as is that of the physical body.

As atrophied matter disappears it will be replaced by matter of a more refined order. Thus are vices finally conquered and made virtually impossible for the future.

The article has been taken from the book ‘Life Beyond Death’ by Anil Sharma

Source: The New Indian Express

CM explains the perils of bifurcation

By Express News Service - HYDERABAD

Published: 28th September 2013 07:58 AM

 

Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy pointing out at Andhra Pradesh map during the media conference at  CM's camp office in Hyderabad on Friday. (Express photo)

Chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy has sought to build a very strong case for Samaikyandhra by narrating the problems state’s division will throw up.

Speaking to mediapersons at his camp office here on Friday, he said, “The problems are insurmountable. There might be some benefits but the problems will outnumber them. In such a case, which one is a wise decision, bifurcation or unity?

He spoke on irrigation and government and private sector employees’ problems. He recalled that the Fazal Ali Commission had recommended in 1956 that the state remain united for proper utilisation of water resources and said its suggestion held water even today. Explaining his point with the help of a map, he said that had the united state not been formed, there was no way Nagarjuna Sagar and Srisailam dams could have been built on Krishna river.

RESERVOIRS: The Nagarjuna Sagar dam (1967) led to submergence of 70,000 acres, the Srsaialm dam (1982) to 88,000 acres and Pulichintala 28,000 acres. “Had the state not remained united, could we have built these reservoirs with so much submergence? See the kind of problems we are facing on Polavaram now?” the chief minister said.

“If the state is divided, it will cause untold suffering to farmers. Several projects have been taken up under Srisilam for impounding 325 tmcft of water though assured water is only 99.7 tmcft. If the state is divided, there will only be assured water and not surplus water to feed the additional projects under Srisailam.

“There will be several other problems. Even if the Centre set ups a mechanism, it is unlikely that it will address the problems because such mechanisms set up in the past failed. If there is enough water, it is fine. If not, the problems will arise and cause water wars between the two states.”

Referring to power, he said Telangana state would suffer because the lift irrigation schemes in the region would require 175 million units. For power porjects to generate that much electricity, an investment of Rs 45,000 crore would be needed. “Where will Telangana state get that much money from?” he asked.

GOVT JOBS: On the apprehensions of employees, he said it was on account of the appointments made in accordance with rules in force in a combined state. Under the Six-Point Formula, 70 per cent of government vacancies in a district were filled by people hailing from that district. In the remaining 30 per cent vacancies, people from other districts were appointed. When the state is divided, these people will have a serious problem.

Under zonal system, there are six zones in the state. Seventy per cent of jobs in a zone are filled by people from that zone and the rest  from other zones. Ten to 11 per cent of jobs in common cadre posts are filled by people from all districts.

Then there is the question of pensions. Those who retired from service have settled down in Hyderabad or in some other districts. “After division, how will pensions be paid to them?”

NO ASSURANCE: These problems surfaced when states were divided elsewhere in the country. These problems are difficult to solve. That is why the Centre should address them first. But though it is about 58 days now since the CWC announced its decision on Telangana, no assurance has come from the Centre. The decision to divide was political. It should be backed by government’s action programme as to how it would address these myriad problem. That is lacking.”

The chief minister made an appeal to the Seemandhra government employees to call off their strike since political leadership was seized of the issue. “They have forgone Rs 1,000 crore in the form salaries. They should call off the strike now since they have made their point known to the Centre,” he  said.

Source: The New Indian Express

Year Zero: A History of 1945

• HISTORY

September 25, 2013

By IAN BURUMA

Reviewed by Brooke Allen

Not many people can remember the year 1945. For those of us who were born well after World War II, into a world governed, however imperfectly, by entities like the United Nations, the European Union, the International Criminal Court, and the World Bank, the scale of pure chaos during that fateful year is unimaginable. Many millions lay dead. Beyond the murder of 6 million Jews, 8 million Soviet soldiers and 16 million Soviet civilians had been killed; in China, 10 million civilians. At war's end, 8 million "displaced persons" were stuck in Germany, 3.5 million in other parts of Europe. Six and a half million Japanese were stranded in Asia and the Pacific, a million enslaved Korean workers in Japan. As Ian Buruma comments in his hair-raising account Year Zero: A History of 1945, "The scale of displacement because of World War II was especially horrendous because so much of it was deliberate, for ruthlessly political as well as ideological reasons: slave labor programs, national borders, emigration in search of Lebensraum for the German and Japanese master races, the civil wars ignited, entire populations deported to be killed or languish in exile."

And though the war had ended, the violence went on almost unabated. All over Europe and Asia vengeance was being bloodily and summarily executed: on Germans, on collaborators, on women who had fraternized with the enemy, on "class enemies," on unpopular ethnic and religious minorities. In Czechoslovakia, 10,000 German civilians were packed into a football stadium and machine-gunned. In Poland, the feared Polish Militia "killed at random, and put people in pillories, sometimes for no reason at all," in an orgy of violence Buruma likens to that of the Khmer Rouge. In Vietnam, Algeria, Syria, and Indonesia, subjugated and often starved peoples rose in fury against the colonial powers, only to be brutally suppressed. In Yugoslavia, there were "several civil wars going on at the same time fought along ethnic, political, and religious lines. Croatian Catholics versus Orthodox Serbs versus Muslim Bosnians versus Serbian royalists versus communist Partisans versus Slovenian Home Guardsmen versus Slovenian communists."

One of the most gruesome hallmarks of 1945 was the systematic use of rape as an act of terror by the victors. The Soviet army was particularly fearsome in this respect, especially in China, where Buruma likens their behavior to that of the sixteenth-century conquistadores. "The surest way to repay humiliation with humiliation is to rape the women, in public, in front of the men, who are helpless to do anything about it. It is the oldest form of terror in human conflict…. Raping German women, especially those who appeared in front of the emasculated ex-warriors of the 'master-race,' made the despised Untermenschen feel like men again." Male sexual humiliation also underlay the épuration sauvage in France, during which Frenchwomen who had slept with the enemy were particular targets: a new law was even passed, against "national unworthiness," to deal with this source of shame. Of all the victims of this six-year global bloodletting, it seems that only the greatest victims, the Jews, were unwilling to seek revenge, a restraint Buruma attributes to the fact that Jewish leaders were well aware of their dependence on international goodwill in the founding of the State of Israel, which would duly be declared three years later.

Displaced persons were often forcibly returned to homelands where they faced certain death. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, for example, promised that all Soviet citizens would be returned "whether they were willing to return or not." Hence the heartbreaking plight of the Russian Cossacks: those who did not drown or hang themselves in despair were packed by the British into sealed cattle wagons and taken over the Soviet border. Back in the homeland, those who were not executed immediately were sent to the gulag, where they soon perished. "We cannot afford to be sentimental about this," Eden wrote to Prime Minister Churchill.

How did civilization emerge from the wreckage and start to rebuild itself? It's as epic a story as that of the war itself, and Buruma, whose own father, a Dutchman, was one of the legions of displaced persons at war's end, finds an emotional thread in the tale: the search for a new internationalism that might ensure that this kind of madness would never be allowed to happen again. In May 1945 Europe and much of Asia were in ruins, but murmurs of vitality were audible, to those who could hear. One eyewitness, the playwright Carl Zuckmeyer, likened Germany to a gigantic anthill, with "a constant sensation of crawling, scratching, groping…a ceaseless coming and going, wandering, walking, crossing; the scuffing and grating of millions of shoes. This is the 'Black Market'… The world and the march of the homeless, the refugees, the scattered masses, the marauding bands of youths."

The countries that had undergone national humiliation -- nearly all the belligerents, that is, except for the victorious British, Soviets, and Americans -- had to construct an alternative narrative for themselves, a way that they could salvage enough national self-respect to build a future. Resistance movements, even the storied French maquis, had played at best a minor role in the military defeat of Germany and Japan. But they were purposely romanticized after the war. "Restoration of democracy," Buruma insists, "rests on such stories, for they help to rebuild not just a sense of civic morale but also of political legitimacy for postwar governments. They are the foundation myths of national revival in postwar Europe."

A canny politician like Charles de Gaulle knew how to nurture and exploit such a myth. He did so by publicly celebrating what he called, the day after Paris's liberation, "the France that fought, the only France, the real France, the eternal France" -- thereby implying that his people should suppress the memory the countless collaborationists and those who simply tried to muddle through and stay out of trouble (in fact, the vast majority of the population). De Gaulle presided over a "purging" of French collaborationists that was more symbolic than real, for if every collaborationist had been removed from the industrial, political, economic, and civil service sectors the country would have ground to a halt. The policy, in France as elsewhere, was to publicize a few symbolic cases -- the Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval, for instance, who was executed after a show trial -- and to let most members of the Establishment quietly return to their posts. "De Gaulle mended France in the same way Japan was 'mended,' or Italy, or Belgium, or even Germany," Buruma writes: "by keeping damage to the prewar elites to a minimum."

Laval's execution was symbolic, allowing him to stand in for others at least as culpable -- notably the former president, Marshal Pétain. To execute the aged Pétain, still venerated by many as a great hero of World War I, would have been bad P.R.; the unpopular Laval had to take the rap. The same was true of General Yamashita Tomoyaki in Japan, made the scapegoat for the so-called Massacre of Manila, during which up to 100,000 Filipinos were murdered by Japanese forces early in 1945. Like Laval, the sinister-looking Tomoyaki made a thug right out of Central Casting, but in fact, as Buruma shows, there was little indication that he had actually been responsible for the atrocities: "he was charged with a crime that had not existed before, namely, of not being able to stop atrocities committed by troops over whom he had no control and who deliberately went against his orders."

The Nuremberg war crimes trials were designed to avoid such symbolic and legally dubious shenanigans and to deliberately establish the due process of the law as a moral necessity. "This idea, very much espoused by Eisenhower, that knowledge of the human capacity for evil would make the rest of us behave better, that to learn about the worst would be a civilizing process, was one of the chief motives for the ensuing war crimes trials." Nuremberg eschewed the sensationalism and legal dubiety of the trials of Laval and Tomoyaki; the law was to grind on implacably, and the tedium of the trials (Rebecca West called the Nuremberg Palace of Justice "a citadel of boredom") was, paradoxically, an emblem of their probity. The example worked; the International Criminal Court in The Hague, still active today, is modeled on Nuremberg.

How to ensure that none of this could happen again?   Radical programs of "reeducation" were imposed on the vanquished Axis powers. The Japanese proved enthusiastic pupils in this endeavor, ultimately embracing their new identity as an anti-militarist country, spelled out in Article 9 of their American-imposed 1945 constitution. (Indeed, the Japanese became so attached to their identity as pacifists that twenty years later, deep in the Cold War, the Americans were unsuccessful in their efforts to persuade the country to rearm as a bulwark against Communist China.) The Germans were understandably less amenable to the process, for what "was being systematically destroyed in 1945," Buruma tells us, "was German culture, along with many of the people who lived it. Old parts of the German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, some of whose great cities -- Breslau, Danzig, Königsberg, Lemberg, Brünn, Czernowitz, Prague -- were centers of German high culture, often carried by German-speaking Jews, now had to be 'de-Germanized.' "

And what was to be put in place of the old militaristic and nationalistic structures? Some sort of internationalism, more effective than the old League of Nations, was clearly called for. A letter to The New York Times signed by numerous luminaries including Albert Einstein and J. W. Fulbright, claimed that the concept of national sovereignty was no longer viable: "We must aim," they concluded, "at a Federal Constitution of the world, a working world-wide legal order, if we hope to prevent another atomic war." This was not to be; as various countries were liberated during the course of 1944 and 1945, they were already being allotted to either the Soviet or the Western spheres of influence, or in some cases -- such as Korea and Germany -- being divided between them. But the necessity for some sort of supranational organization was clear, and preparations were already being laid before war's end for what was to become the United Nations.

For those of us born, like Buruma, in the postwar baby boom, our fathers' tales of "the war" haunted our childhoods even while society was changing and reformulating itself so quickly that such scenes seemed impossible to credit. "My generation," Buruma writes, was nourished by the dreams of our fathers: the European welfare state, the United Nations, American democracy, Japanese pacifism, the European Union. Then there is the dark side of the world made in 1945: Communist dictatorship in Russia and eastern Europe, Mao's rise in the Chinese civil war, the Cold War." In some places the leveling experience of the war ended forever the immemorial acceptance of vast and rigid discrepancies in income and social class; the shocking 1945 election in Britain, in which the revered war leader Churchill was unceremoniously thrown out in favor of a Labour government and a welfare state, remains the most famous example of this. Though Communist resistance movements were disarmed and excluded from power all over Western Europe, the ideals of the Left were perpetuated there by the social democrats who came to power throughout the region. The European Union, which Buruma deems the most positive outcome of the war, has for all its imperfections been effective in its most important mission: to keep its member states from going to war against one another.

Will it last? This might depend on the lessons learned from World Wars I and II. "Germans and Japanese were disenchanted with the heroic ideal," Buruma claims, with some justice. "They wanted nothing more to do with war. British and Americans, on the other hand, could never quite rid themselves of nostalgia for their finest hours, leading to a fatal propensity to embark on ill-advised military adventures so they and their nations could live like heroes once more." As the Second World War passes out of living memory, in the next twenty years or so, more and more lessons will surely be forgotten. There are already quite a few people who claim that the Holocaust never occurred, though there are still living survivors of the camps. And militaristic nationalism has clearly not left the world stage. Buruma's eloquent reminder of the global savagery that was unleashed only a couple of generations ago is timely -- perhaps more than ever so, now that fewer and fewer can actually recall it.

Source: review

House debate on Sri Krishna report sought

By Express News Service - HYDERABAD

Published: 26th September 2013 10:34 AM

Chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy should intervene to call a special Assembly session to discuss the Sri Krishna Committee report and adopt a resolution in favour of united Andhra Pradesh to be sent to the Centre, Andhra Pradesh Rastra Parirakshna Vedika (APRPV), a non-political organisation, has said.

The APRPV will conduct seminars in Tirupati and Guntur on October 3 and 5 respectively to tell the people about the difficulties involved in dividing the state.

Addressing a press conference, it demanded that the MPs and Union ministers should resign immediately to mount pressure on the Centre to reconsider its decision on the bifurcation of the state. However, it was of the view that MLAs should refrain from resignations to express their opposition to state division in the Assembly.

“The announcement of the CWC decision to carve out Telangana state is not in accordance with the law, because the Centre did not think about State Reorganisation Commission to divide the state,” said former High Court judge justice Lakshman Reddy, president of APRPV.

On the city police rejecting permission for seminars on the bifurcation issue in Hyderabad, he said, “It is really saddening that people do not have the right to express their views in Hyderabad. The chief minister and the government should take note of this.”

Further, he appealed to all political leaders across the state not to make provocative speeches and urged them to bring back the lost glory to the state.

Source: The New Indian Express