Totalitarian regimes come to power because good people keep silent: Admiral Ramdas

Student Protests

The former Naval chief speaks up about the crisis triggered by police action in JNU, and the question of nationalism.

L Ramdas  · Yesterday · 07:45 pm

I have been a proud member of the uniformed fraternity for nearly 45 years, retiring as the head of the Indian Navy in 1993. The present turbulence in our top academic institutions together with continuing manifestations of mob violence, totalitarian behaviour and intolerance, impel me once again, to speak up and share my concerns through this open letter. My two recent letters to the President and Prime Minister have not elicited more than a routine bureaucratic response. I am well aware that I may be one of the few from the fraternity of retired military veterans who continue to take public positions which might not always be in support of government policy. However, I see this is both a right and a duty of a former serviceman and citizen like myself. I am well aware that serving members in uniform cannot express themselves as per the service conduct rules. However, we veterans out of uniform certainly can, and must. If people like myself are quiet today, my grandchildren will ask me, “If not you then who”, “if not now, then when”, Thatha?

I refer to the train of events that began with the tragic suicide of Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University last month and continues today with the unresolved Jawaharlal Nehru University saga. The unprecedented entry of the police into the campus, the ensuing high-decibel, high-voltage “trial by media”, and subsequent student arrests under serious charges ranging from sedition, anti-nationalism and terrorism, has hit headlines across the country. This has created an avoidable polarisation of views thanks to the entire episode having been handled with a lack of sensitivity. It has been blown into a full-scale crisis where students are being demonised and conspiracy theories abound. Thousands of students, civil society groups as well as journalists have been out on the streets of Delhi taking out some of the biggest, peaceful rallies seen in recent times.

The nation-building effort

Let me briefly rewind to my personal profile to enable you to better understand where I am coming from.

I joined the fledgling Indian Navy in January 1949 – barely 16 months after we gained our Independence. It was a time of great expectations, big dreams and opportunities. The selection for entry into the armed forces of a resurgent India at the end of the sustained struggle against British colonial rule, was heady indeed for a young fifteen year old. Those 45 years in the Navy provided me with a panoramic view of events that have unfolded across the world stage. And I certainly had a ringside view of events in an India that had been traumatised by the unprecedented brutality and slaughter of Partition – the scars of which linger on in my personal, and our collective, consciousness on both sides of our borders.

Brick by brick, step by painful step, leaders and citizens together created and built a vision of a new and a free India. This vision, the product of long and tough debates within the Constituent Assembly, sought to encompass the huge and often conflicting diversities that had to be accommodated within the framework of a path-breaking Constitutional document. Incorporating the often divergent views of an impressive range of thinkers and visionaries, the Indian Constitution firmly rejected a narrow, exclusionary monoculture in favour of a revolutionary definition of nationhood that was inclusive, confident and transformative under the guiding hand of Babasaheb Ambedkar.

Armed forces and the Nation

The armed forces of this newly-independent nation were an equal part of this combined effort of nation-building in a variety of ways – trained as we were to conduct ourselves with discipline and professionalism combined with compassion and a sense of our common humanity and purpose.

The unspoken and sacred credo has been that those in the armed forces will remain apolitical. Indeed, we forgo many of the normal rights as citizens enshrined in the Constitution when we join the armed forces. The accepted practice of honouring the principle of political control over the armed forces has been followed without exception since Independence. However, the quid pro quo of this arrangement, unwritten as it is, implies that the government of the day will discharge its responsibilities towards the people [including the military] with honour and integrity.

After retirement, each of us uniformed persons reverts to being a citizen of India, with all the implications of rights, duties and responsibilities that citizenship implies. The Regulations Navy/Army/Airforce are no longer in force. Whether in or out of uniform – we veterans have valued our right to vote – the hallmark of our democratic polity. Exercising our vote does mean that each of us would also choose a particular political position or perspective. The four decades of service in a maturing yet turbulent democracy most certainly impacted my political thinking post-retirement.

Citizens must engage

After my retirement in September 1993, I moved to a village in Alibag, Maharashtra, where I practice organic farming and continue to live till today. Living in rural India has been a total re-education, and one which has given me profound insights. I have shared the ups and downs of the life of an ordinary farmer – influenced by the vagaries of weather and pollution, local politics, threats of being evicted for so-called development under the Special Economic Zone, and much more. My years in uniform and first-hand experience of two wars, together with a closer understanding of the imminent agrarian crisis which affects some 70% of our population, has directly influenced my belief that true liberation or “azadi” from poverty and hunger, will only come when and if the elites of this land demonstrate greater integrity and less greed. Recent disclosures by the Reserve Bank of India in response to an RTI question by the Indian Express revealed that between 2004 and 2015, public sector banks wrote off bad loans amounting to more than Rs 2.11 lakh crore. It has been reported that nearly half of this amount was written off between 2013 and 2015. Surprisingly, neither this information nor its impact on the economy has yet been divulged by the finance ministry. And yet we have heard strong criticism about the petty amounts granted for education of scholars from weaker sections, in JNU and other universities, as examples of taxpayers money being ill spent! We seldom question the fact that loans too come from taxpayers money.

To achieve a more just society based on sustainable development, we must build peace through better neighbourhood management. This means finding political solutions to existing problems. Then alone can we reduce our spending on armaments, regulate consumption, balance energy demands, and provide citizens with food, shelter, education, health and employment. I have led, and been part of, a sustained movement against Special Economic Zones in Raigad, Maharashtra, and continue to push initiatives for renewable energy. Concerns over safety, cost and waste disposal, have contributed to my active engagement with the movement for Nuclear Disarmament and to end nuclear power by finding carbon free and nuclear free solutions. Efforts to strengthen the peace dividend have led me to take on leadership of organisations like the Pakistan India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy and India Pakistan Soldiers Initiative for Peace. Both these organisations have promoted people-to-people contact and better relations with Pakistan. I am also totally opposed to capital punishment and the death penalty, as also the continued imposition of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act – about which I have written and spoken publicly in several fora.

In my view, each of the above, constitute areas of engagement which we as citizens not only have a right, but a duty, to address, even if it is against the policy of the government of the day. Does any of the above make me, or anyone else, anti national? Or less patriotic? Or a desh drohi?

I believe not.

My stand on this derives from the principle that political parties and governments alike are bound by the Constitution of the land. Every citizen has the right and the freedom to think and express views without fear of reprisal. The obsolete colonial law of sedition has no place in a modern democracy.

Therefore the question arises: Why are we arraigning a Rohith Vemula, a Kanhaiya Kumar and an Umar Khalid under charges of being anti-national, seditious or indulging in terrorist activities? From available material it appears that these three young men were only acting to further the objectives outlined in our Constitution and not indulging in any anti-national activity.

Who defines nationalism?

In some ways, it is a good thing that the death of Vemula, the arrest of Kumar and the witch-hunt against Umar Khalid, have actually led to a public debate about the definition of national and anti-national, as also of the deeper and more intractable issues around caste, religion and discrimination in our society. The linked question regarding who, if anyone, has the right to decide on my nationalism or lack of it, is equally vexed and needs a longer, more mature discussion. To the best of my knowledge, this has not been done since Independence. The existing laws and practice on this are largely inherited from the colonial period and were never addressed in a contemporary framework. This is critical for a mature democracy. Jingoism, waving the national flag, and shouting slogans, are not equivalent to a certification of patriotism. Upping the ante and making allegations of seditious behaviour and terrorist ties may not pass judicial scrutiny. Many have publicly disagreed with the sloganeering and forms of protest, but none of this is new or radical. Certainly it is ludicrous to think that a few students can threaten the unity of the country, as is sought to be established by some media houses and their invisible paymasters.

If anything has been a matter of deep concern to someone like me, it is the spectacle of alleged members of the legal profession being allowed to run amok in the courtroom and to both threaten and actually assault scribes, students, teachers and Kanhaiya Kumar. All this, while the large numbers of police personnel present apparently stood by and did nothing from all accounts. This is unacceptable from a uniformed, and a so-called disciplined police force.

I have been through the wide range of written reports, and audio-visual material available in the public domain on the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad Central University imbroglio. The real tragedy to me lies in the fact that this entire exercise of raising the alarm on foreign funded, possibly terrorist and seditious activities, has been orchestrated in order to demand the shutting down and “sanitising” such a prestigious institution. One is forced to conclude that this smacks of a “false flag exercise”. And this is serious. By all means investigate the matter – allow the university officials to handle the students with appropriate disciplinary action. But great discretion and caution must be exercised before calling in the police, and worse, to make serious charges of sedition.

The way ahead

Those who are leading the clamour for shutting down and/or “sanitisation” of JNU seem to have no idea of what this implies, and are exhibiting a frightening tendency to follow the mob blindly.

This might be a good moment to remind ourselves that in addition to being held in high esteem internationally, JNU is also among the few universities in India that recognise the courses run by military institutions like the National Defence Academy, the National Defence College, the Naval Academy and others. Ties between service institutions and university departments have been carefully forged in order that our military personnel continue to benefit from these interactions and remain at the cutting edge of the latest strategic thinking. There are several service personnel who have had the benefit of attending academic courses at JNU and indeed are among the alumni. Civil servants and police officers are also in a similar category. I have intentionally mentioned this so that my band of brothers and sisters amongst ex-service veterans will carefully weigh the consequences of any hasty actions such as returning degrees and awards.

I have outlined at some length the many reasons for why I write this note today. It is imperative that senior public figures like myself and others speak out, to raise an alarm, before it is too late. Recent history has shown us that totalitarian regimes have come to power because good people chose to keep silent. Above all else it is imperative that we must preserve our democratic spaces and the freedom, indeed the right, to question, to dissent and to debate – especially in our institutions of higher learning. JNU has been a frontrunner in producing thinkers and professionals who are not scared to speak out. Frankly, after listening carefully to the speech of the young union leader – Kanhaiya – I was left feeling reassured that if a young man in his twenties can speak with such compassion, intellect and passion about the real challenges and dangers we face in this land, all must be well in this complex and disparity-riddled country.

Far more than saluting a flag (which, of course, I continue to do with honour and respect), it is the thoughts articulated by young idealists like a Rohit Vemula, a Kanhaiya Kumar, a Shehla Rashid and yes an Umar Khalid all of whom together with the many unnamed and unsung women and men across this country, embody the true spirit of nationalism and patriotism. We must collectively ensure that we not only protect those who have not yet been pushed to take the extreme step like Rohith Vemula, but ensure that justice is promised and done to those presently in custody, or forced into hiding, for fear of their lives.

In the ultimate analysis, human security is the best guarantee for national security.

This article was first published in The Citizen.

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Source: scrollin

Note: The highlights on this article are by this blogger.

'How can one opinion represent a diverse university?' JNU professor attacked in Gwalior speaks out Vivek Kumar on the idea of Brahmanical merit and the notion of being anti-national.

Dalit issues

Scroll Staff · Yesterday · 12:19 pm

On Sunday, Vivek Kumar, professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Social Sciences, was attacked by activists of the Bharatiya Junta Yuva Morcha as he spoke at Gwalior’s Bal Bhavan. Kumar has done extensive research on Dalit assertions and political mobilisations. The BJYM, which is the youth wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, called his speech “provocative and anti-national”. Kumar now recounts what he talked about and asks some questions.

     “I started with arguing that there are cultural and civilisational aspects of people that I respect, but that they should also respect my culture. I mentioned the Buddha, Birsa Munda, Kanshiram, Savitribhai Phule and others. Over the years, this history has been decimated. It is as if it had never happened. You have suppressed it because you did not debate and discuss it.

    I went on to talk about Ambedkar, who said that India was not a nation but a nation in the making. Because it was divided into 6,000 castes. These divides have created animosities.

    The idea of the nation is also tied up with self-representation of people in various institutions ‒ the institutions of governance, production and education. They need to be represented in the judiciary, in legislatures, in industries. I’m talking about women, Dalit, tribes, minorities. Where is that self-representation? All institutions have been monopolised by one group. Some people talk of nation building through the trickle-down effect. I say the other way to build the nation is to give people representation.

    Some people say that caste has refused to disappear because you have reservation. But I ask which came first, caste or reservation? Some say if you have representation then merit goes down. But tell me, is there a constitutional definition of merit? By merit you usually mean scoring high marks in an examination. You are fifth-generation, seventh-generation, tenth-generation learners. You convert your cultural capital into what you call merit. My parents probably never learnt how to read.

    Now they called that 'provocative'. What is provocative here? If there is logical dialogue, you can talk it out. But there is nothing you can say to violence. And that is very dangerous.

    Secondly, this was a programme organised by a Dalit group, the Ambedkar Vichar Manch, it was called Babasaheb Ke Sapno Ka Bhartiya Samaj (Indian society as envisioned by Babasaheb), its speakers were Dalit and its audiences were Dalit. How can you deny them that agency? Is that democratic? There seems to be a larger design in Gwalior and in Madhya Pradesh to wipe out Ambedkarism. This government celebrated Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary this year. But is that based on any deep understanding of Ambedkar or is it just politics?

    As a person of a particular identity, I have a certain duty to my community, to spread knowledge among them. Is that not nation-building?

    You construct your own idea of nationalism and use it to selectively target those who don’t conform to it. You brand people anti-national as it suits you. Sometimes you kill in the name of the cow, sometimes it is because of love jihad, sometimes it is because you have decided to call JNU-ites anti-national. These are dangerous constructions of nationalism.

    How can you brand a university which has so much diversity as any one thing? There are students from so many different places and communities and so many different groups. Is the ABVP [Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad] also anti-national? It has given several student councillors to JNU.

    General [GD] Bakshi keeps saying [during his frequent appearances on the Times Now channel] that we don’t commemorate the deaths of soldiers. But have the jawans themselves ever spoken on television? Who has given General Bakshi the right to speak for them? Is his nationalism representative of them? It is the same for the students. Can any one opinion represent a diverse university?

    We have produced civil servants and academics who are contributing to the production of knowledge, good actors and NGO workers. The former security advisor, Shiv Shankar Menon was our student. We have contributed directly to every sphere of society. What are you gaining internationally by calling us anti-national?”

As told to Ipsita Chakravarty.

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An economist’s radical idea for lowering petty corruption

BOOK EXCERPT

Former Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu’s suggestion led to instant outrage followed by serious debate.

Kaushik Basu  · Today · 08:30 am

How contentious the law can be, I learned by fire, when I was chief economic adviser in India. Corruption has been a long-standing problem in India that successive regimes and governments have battled or given the impression of battling and mostly failed. One can sense the despair in the classical master of statecraft, Kautilya, when in his magnum opus, Arthashastra, written nearly three centuries before the Christian era, he observed: “Just as it is impossible to know when a fish moving in water is drinking it, so it is impossible to find out when government servants in charge of undertakings misappropriate money.”

Some two thousand three hundred years after those lines were penned the nation was being traumatised by one corruption scandal breaking after another… Anna Hazare’s call to eradicate corruption struck a chord and brought thousands out to protest.

As some well-intentioned individuals in government looked at the vastness of the problem in despair, I spent a lot of time thinking about what we, sitting in the North Block, could do to curb this dreadful menace that inflicts harm on people and, in my view, damages economic development.

A simple idea struck me about one particular kind of corruption, which I went on to call “harassment bribery,” and how it could be reduced. I felt convinced that the idea was morally and theoretically well founded enough to at least merit debate and discussion. Let me present the gist of this idea. In India ordinary citizens and, at times, even large corporations are asked to pay a bribe for something to which they have legal entitlement. I had called these “harassment bribes.”

Say a woman has filed her tax return properly and it turns out that the Income Tax Department owes her some money. It is not uncommon for a critical employee of the department to ask for some money before he releases the reimbursement.

To give another example: a person has imported some cargo, done all the required paper work, and paid the requisite taxes; he is nevertheless asked to pay some money in cash before he can get all the papers that he needs to take the cargo out. These are examples of harassment bribes.

One advantage of getting a senior government job is that one is never asked to pay a harassment bribe.

So it is genuinely easy for those high up in government to forget that the crime of bribery is ubiquitous. Plaintive calls for help from relatives and friends being harassed for bribes act as a reminder that all is well in the underworld and not all is well for the common citizen. This also raises a question: are these ordinary folks who pay bribes culpable given they are virtually compelled to do so?

According to India’s main anti-bribery law, the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, bribe-taking and bribe-giving are equally wrong. In the event of conviction, both the taker (usually a public servant) and the giver are equally punishable. As section 12 of the law states, “Whoever abets any offence [pertaining to bribery], whether or not that offence is committed in consequence of the abetment, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall be not less than six months but which may extend up to five years and shall also be liable to fine.”

It may be added here that the giving of a bribe is treated under the Indian law as abetment to the crime of bribery, and so bribe-giving is covered under this section. I want to point out that there is, allegedly, an exception to the law on bribe giving in the form of section 24 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, which says: “Notwithstanding anything contained in any law for the time being in force, a statement made by a person in any proceeding against a public servant for an offence under sections 7 to 11 or under section 13 or section 15, that he offered or agreed to offer any gratification (other than legal remuneration) or any valuable thing to the public servant, shall not subject such person to a prosecution under section 12.” However, section 24 has a lot of ambiguity. In a 2008 case, Bhupinder Singh Patel v. CBI, 2008 (3) CCR 247 at p. 261 (Del): 2008 Cri LJ 4396, it was ruled that this exemption would apply only if the bribe giver could establish that the bribe was given unwillingly and in order to trap the public servant. The word “unwillingly” is so ambiguous that the use of this judgment as precedence is not easy.

As a consequence, section 24 has effectively become a clause meant exclusively for those wanting to carry out a sting operation to trap a public servant in the act of bribe taking, and seeking protection from the law. Consequently, section 12, which suggests that bribe-giving and -taking should both be treated as equally punishable, has come to dominate the Indian anti-bribery legal system. This, in the case of harassment bribes, seemed to me to be wrong. In situations where a civil servant asks for a bribe from a person who is legally entitled to a particular service, it is important to distinguish between the perpetrator of a crime and the victim.

But over and above this moral position, there is an interesting strategic argument that one can put forward to distinguish between the bribe-giver and -taker.

Note that under the current law, once a bribe has been paid, the interests of the bribe giver and the taker become fully aligned. If this criminal act gets exposed, both will be in trouble. Hence, they tend to collude to keep the act of bribery hidden. And even if they do not actively collude, each has a level of comfort in the knowledge that it is not in the interest of the other to reveal any information.

It is not surprising that while all Indians know of the widespread prevalence of bribery and, behind closed doors, people will tell you how they had to pay a bribe, this is seldom revealed in the courts and a vast majority of bribery incidents go unpunished. It seemed to me that this could be changed by making the following simple amendment to the Prevention of Corruption Act.

In all cases of this kind of bribery, declare the act of giving a bribe legal while continuing to hold the act of taking a bribe illegal. If needs be, we could double up the punishment for taking a bribe, so that the total magnitude of punishment remains the same. Further, once the bribery has been proven, the bribe taker will be required to return the bribe to the giver.

Now think of a civil servant trying to take a bribe. He will know that, once he has taken the bribe, he can no longer rely on help from the giver in keeping this fact a secret. Unlike under the existing law, after the bribery, the interests of the giver and the taker are diametrically opposed to each other. Knowing that this will happen, the bribe taker will be much more hesitant to take the bribe in the first place. Hence, if the law were amended, as is being suggested here, the incidence of bribery would drop sharply...

The idea seemed sufficiently compelling and of practical value that I quickly wrote and put it up on the website of the Ministry of Finance as a working paper.

There was a rancorous debate going on in India on corruption at that time. Much of the debate, while founded in genuine passion and concern, generated few practical ideas of what could be done.

Most of the popular talk was of creating a layer of special bureaucracy to catch and punish corruption. Little thought was given to what David Hume recognised some 250 years ago – that with each such layer of bureaucracy, there would be a tendency for a new layer of corruption to arise. This was the fundamental question of who would police the policeman. Indeed, one factor behind the high incidence of corruption in India was the complex layers of laws and inspectorates that we had built up over time in order to curb corruption.

I felt pleased with the idea. I knew I was addressing only a segment of the problem – namely, corruption that took the form of harassment bribery – but this segment was not negligible by any means. If we could bring this down drastically through a small change in the law without adding to the size of the bureaucracy, that seemed to be worthwhile. What I did not anticipate was the level of anger (and misreporting) that my note would generate. It began with small mentions of my paper in the newspapers, followed by lacerating editorials and op-eds. Some of them stemmed from the mistaken view that I was somehow condoning corruption and saying that bribery should be made legal. I may add that I myself would be upset if someone made such an argument (even though I must admit I could never quite follow what making bribery legal means).

Soon there were some Members of Parliament (MPs) writing to various leaders in government protesting against the floating of this idea. Two MPs, members of the Communist Party of India, wrote letters to the prime minister and the finance minister, asking that action be taken against such an immoral idea on a government website and insisting that it be taken down. Then the television channels picked this up and there were some screaming matches debating the idea.

Some individuals, including some prominent industrialists, called me up to support this kind of an amendment to the law. Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys and one of the pivotal figures in India’s takeoff in the information technology sector, publicly stated that it deserved serious consideration and was roundly subjected to criticism himself. I knew that, at least for the next two or three years, my idea was dead. No politician would want to be associated with it. Not openly.

Yet, curiously, it revealed a side of Indian politics which gave me hope. At the peak of this debate, when protest letters were sent to the finance minister and others and the political leaders had to write back and explain the government’s position on this, I thought I would be asked to take the working paper down from the Ministry of Finance website. That did not happen.

Moreover, no politician in the ruling party, not one, asked me either to relent or told me off for causing embarrassment to the government.

On April 23, 2011, a Saturday evening, the prominent TV journalist Barkha Dutt phoned me requesting me to appear on her show We the People the following evening. Having an instinctive taste for such discussions but not knowing whether this would churn up the debate more or dampen it, I decided to do something which I rarely did – ask the finance minister or the prime minister whether I should risk stoking the fires by participating in the debate.

The finance minister was away in Vietnam so I phoned the prime minister at his residence. When he called me back, I told him I enjoyed these debates and, left to myself, I would love to explain my idea to the public, but since I had caused grief enough to the government, I was wondering whether or not I should go on the Barkha Dutt show. This was the first time I was speaking to Prime Minister Singh on this subject. There was a moment’s pause, and then the prime minister said that he had heard about my idea on how to control corruption, but he had to say he did not agree with me on this. Fearing that he had heard one of the many misstatements that were floating around, I explained briefly what my argument was. I doubt I would have succeeded in persuading him so quickly. But anyway, what he went on to say was very heartening to me.

He said he was leaving the decision on whether or not to appear on this particular programme to me, but since it was my job as chief economic adviser to bring ideas to the table, I should feel free to articulate my ideas in public and discuss them. Eventually, I, on my own, decided not to appear on We the People, but I participated in many subsequent debates and felt strangely good about India.

There are not too many developing countries, and not that many industrialised nations either, that would give this kind of space not just to the nation’s writers, intellectuals, and journalists, but also to its professional and technical advisers to air new ideas that may be unpopular and perhaps not even in keeping with the government’s own position, but are potentially useful in the long run.

This strategy creates short-term turbulence, but by enriching the quality of a nation’s public discourse it contributes to a more robust development.

Excerpted with permission from An Economist In The Real World: The Art Of Policymaking In India, Kaushik Basu, Penguin Viking.

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Why is menstruation a religious taboo, students ask SC

National

NEW DELHI, February 15, 2016    Updated: February 15, 2016 08:16 IST

Krishnadas Rajagopal

Students who are a part of the ‘Happy to Bleed’ campaign has asked the Supreme Court why the healthy biological process of menstruation is used in the name of religion to discriminate against women.

A Special Bench led by Justice Dipak Misra, which is hearing the Sabarimala temple entry issue, will consider the intervention application. The students want the apex court to address and decide on whether modern society should continue to bear with “menstrual discrimination” when the Indian Constitution mandates right to equality and health of women to achieve gender justice.

The students, represented by senior advocate Indira Jaising, have asked how a religious “taboo” that prohibits the entry of women aged between 10 and 50 years to the Sabarimala temple continues to be widely accepted and even justified by the authorities in violation of the rights of women under Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution.

At a preliminary hearing on Friday, Justice Misra had asked whether the Vedas, Upanishads and scriptures discriminate between men and women. “Is spirituality solely within the domain of men? Are you saying that women are incapable of attaining spirituality within the domain of religion? Can you deprive a mother?” Justice Misra had asked.

Source: thehindu

Gravitational wave discovery: India may play big role in future experiments

Across time and space

The envisaged LIGO-India project aims to make the country part of the global detector network.

Nayantara Narayanan · Today · 11:18 pm

 Photo Credit: LIGO

“This is the first time the universe has spoken to us – through gravitational waves,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory project.

On September 14, 2015 a team of scientists at Livingstone, Louisiana picked up a signal from the far reaches of space. Seven milliseconds later they saw the same signal at Hanford, Washington. After months of checking their data, the team announced on Thursday, February 11, that the two signals came from gravitational waves – a holy grail of astrophysics.The detection of gravitational waves is a direct verification of Albert Einstein’s last prediction from his theory of general relativity. It is also proof that binary black holes exist, LIGO scientists said.

Here’s a short version of how the LIGO team explained the phenomenon they recorded. The wave that LIGO detected was generated 1.3 billion years ago when two massive black holes collided and merged. Each black hole was about 150 kilometers in diameter but packed with 30 times the mass of the sun. As they spun around each other, they accelerated to half the speed of light and then crashed into each other till they finally became one giant black hole. As the two black holes merged there was a burst of gravitational waves that passes through all matter in the universe to finally reach the earth and the interferometer set up to detect it.

The scientists at LIGO also converted the gravitational wave signal they saw into sound waves that allows us to hear what a pair of colliding black holes sounds like.

A hundred years ago, Einstein proposed that the universe is in the form of four-dimensional space-time. Imagine space-time to be a flexible but taut rubber sheet and stars and planets and other celestial bodies are balls dropped onto the rubber sheet. A planet curves the fabric of space-time in the same way that a ball on a rubber sheet would. When a planet moves, it causes a ripple in space-time in the same way that a ball moving in a rubber sheet would cause ripples. These ripples are gravitational waves that expand and contract all matter in the universe as they pass through it.

The LIGO experiment involves splitting a laser beam, projecting the twin beams perpendicular to each other over 4 km, bouncing them off mirrors, merging them and then looking for a signal of a G-wave in the merged beam. The binary balck hole signal was detected before the science run of the upgraded Advanced LIGO system began last year.

The LIGO discovery opens another window to explore the universe apart from using electromagnetic waves, said Anirban Kundu, a particle physicist from the University of Calcutta. “It may also tell us something about the very, very early universe when it expanded exponentially, which we call inflation,” he said. “This will open up a new observational tool of the universe, suited for drastic phenomena. This will also affect the theoretical studies on topics like black hole.”

A lot more expected from where the September 14 signal emerged. “The paper that has just been published contains a very careful statistical analysis of what this means about how often these things may occur. That analysis says we may see more over the coming year,” said Kip Thorne of Caltech, co-founder of LIGO. “Advanced LIGO is at one-third of its ultimate design sensitivity. Over the next few years the noise level will be brought down, LIGO will be three times better and we can see three times farther into the universe.”

India will have a big role to play in future detection of gravitational waves. The envisaged LIGO-India project proposal includes shifting one Advanced LIGO detector from Hanford to India. Studies have shown that adding a detector in India or Australia could increase the sensitivity of a network of detectors to gravitational waves. LIGO-India will be a collaboration between LIGO and three Indian institutions – the Institute of Plasma Research in Gandhinagar, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune and the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology in Indore, which together form the IndIGO consortium. LIGO scientists are also looking to partner with the Virgo project in Italy to expand the g-wave network.

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శ్రీ కౌముది ఫిబ్రవరి 2016

Source: శ్రీ కౌముది ఫిబ్రవరి 2016

'Students today are a misinformed lot and Modi is banking on their short attention spans'

Letters to the editor

A selection of readers' opinions over the past week.

Scroll · Today · 04:30 pm

 Photo Credit: Sajjad Hussain/AFP

Caste politics

While I agree with the piece in general (and mourn the past), might I add that these are not the 1990s (“Could the Dalit students’ agitation be Modi’s Mandal moment?”). With all the sources of information at their disposal, students today are a misinformed lot and Narendra Modi is banking on their short attention spans.

Like everything else, the suicide and the agitation shall be forgotten in a month or two. This is not a Mandal moment, just a fashionable intermezzo before the next new atrocity erupts. Life goes on, sadly. – Kishore Tejaswi

***

Narendra Modi was never the leader of the backward classes and Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes. Although he got a fair share of their vote that swung the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in his favour, he knows that these groups will not stick with him and will return to their parent parties.

That’s why he is not acting in this case because it will be futile for him to act and displease his core base supporters – upper-caste Hindus. He knows that they are behind him and if he does something wrong, then they will ditch him as well. – Vishal Jindal

Patriarchal perspective

This was the danger which I discussed with my friends when this government came to power in 2014 (“First Chennai, now Hyderabad: Has the government decided that all dissent is anti-national?”). Those who have read RSS and BJP ideology know that they believe in a patriarchal system of society in which elders and most importantly upper castes are always right, and those who are on the receiving end – namely youngsters and lower castes should obey their masters dutifully.

It is their firm belief that no student or children (for them a person is child as long as his/her elders are alive) can question elders in a family and in society. We should see all these student-government clashes from this perspective.

They also believe that any criticism, debate or discussion will raise doubts on their governing ability and so they crush any such attempts.

The BJP’s problem is that it sees everything through the prism of “us vs them”. But this will lead to their downfall. – Vishal Jindal

Caste considerations

It’s true that reservations have nothing to do with the development of common Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but only creates a slavery system for SCs, STs, MLAs and MPs (“Despite having 40 Dalit MPs, why has the BJP ignored Dalit complaints? Dr Ambedkar has the answer”).

This is the reason why with the support of slaves, the ruling parties are removing reservation in various places of government through privatisation, and rejecting reservation in higher education and rejecting reservation in promotions through government orders.

Now it’s time to demand that the government scrap reservations in politics. – Sivaji A

Credibility in doubt

I’m writing in to let you know that I’m deeply saddened by this article and that it is well written (“Love, justice and stardust: A requiem for Rohith Vemula”). However, the author makes a claim that reserved students are discriminated against in IITs. As a student of IIT Madras I can say this isn’t true, at least over here. Nobody knows or even asks each other’s JEE rank, let alone category. They most certainly aren’t segregated in hostels. They don’t even get unique roll numbers in class and the teachers here never discriminate between students based on caste. Everyone is treated the same.

This one sentence in the article makes me doubt the knowledge of the author and I wonder how many of the other claims made in the article are false or poorly researched. Please do provide the sources of your information in your articles. It will help readers decide what and what not to believe. – Vaibhav Nayel

Minister's mess

I feel the onus lies with Smriti Irani, our HRD minister (“So who exactly is politicising Rohith Vemula’s suicide?”). I don’t understand why on earth she is getting embroiled in such controversies. On many previous occasions, she has made a fool of herself by speaking prematurely. Her presser just after Rohith Vemula’s suicide says a lot about her ignorance. Now she has to eat humble pie because the prime minister has spoken belatedly to clear the air, indirectly putting the blame on the HRD minister. – Ravindra Arakeri

Evident bias

Good try, Akash Banerjee (“As Modi completes 20 months in office, 20 numbers he should keep in mind going ahead”). We wish you had removed your blinkers while writing the piece. You can become prime minister for six months and try to rectify the shortcomings. You forget the role of the Opposition in creating all possible hurdles after losing power. Writers need to be rational and unbiased while writing about our country. – Ravindra Krishna

Hidden atrocities

I take the report as true, without any investigation. The story has entered the public domain – this in itself is proof of it being true (“Déjà vu: Chhattisgarh’s security forces accused of large-scale sexual violence yet again”). The Indian psyche and politics never allows such atrocities inflicted on tribals and destitute to surface in the mainstream media. Shouldn’t we take pride in having defeated ISIS in their odious game? After all, we run with handicaps like democracy, free media, welfare state, among others. – Farooque Shahab

Skewed perspective

The use of Shivaji as a symbol of a Hindu king waging war against Muslim Mughals is a complete parody of history (“Why BR Ambedkar’s three warnings in his last speech to the Constituent Assembly resonate even today”). Shivaji did not fight for Hindus and Mughals did not fight against Hindus – both fought for their respective empires. The writer’s judgement is biased and religiously motivated. – Dhruv Badolia

Meaningless freedom

This really was a very shocking story of rape victims. It looks like we are still far away from independence (“In Muzaffarnagar, rape videos herald death, judgement and communal incitement”).

Your article only mentions victims from one community. But there have been reports of rape in the Muslim community as well, forcing them to flee their homes and leave behind their landholdings. I think the writer is ill-informed or she has only described the pain of one community.

These were the worst communal riots in the history of Muzaffarnagar for which the political parties were responsible. I feel our respected freedom fighters devoted themselves to the country but our leaders have sucked the peace and harmony from India today. – Mohd Zuhaib

Claiming a legacy

I am not supporting any of the so-called special efforts by the rightist brigade to claim credit or ownership of any lineage (“Photoshopping history: Fake Nehru letter aside, here’s why BJP wants to lay claim to Netaji’s legacy”). However, I am very curious to know how come almost all of your articles are bereft of even an iota of criticism of the much lauded “Nehru Gandhi family”.

If a legitimately elected government is proposing some other point of view, can’t it be given a bit of space? Do only Nehrus and Gandhis hold all the intellectual capacity of the country? Much nepotism and corruption has taken place in their presence and indirectly or directly been promoted by them. At least now your eyes should open a bit to newer realities. – Vilas Kulkarni

Question time

This article made for a very interesting read (“A question for Indian quizzers: Where are the women?”). Quiz is perceived as a “battle of the mind sport” and an “intellectual activity” among the general public. The lack of women participants in corporate events stems from the lack of diversity in Indian companies.

Schools these days have a healthy mix of male and female students. The same cannot be said for Indian corporates.

Globally, the notion of women quizzers is much more accepted. Where there is a strong culture of pub quizzes in places such as UK, US and Australia, the same gets translated to the corporate world.

While gender auditing and stereotypical questions continue to attract the mainstream, it is important to strike the right balance between “entertainment” and “information”. While quizzes can have Sunny Leone dancing to bring the entertainment factor in place, there is also the informative angle to it by highlighting her achievements as an animal rights campaigner. Such questions are both entertaining and educative – important hallmarks of a great quiz.

A Women’s Day quiz at companies, where we celebrate the achievements and spirits of famous women across all boundaries, may be the starting point to bring about this cultural shift. – Daksha Ballal

Alarmist notion

I think the writer is overreacting (“Another Republic Day, another compromise on nuclear safety?”). India needs more energy, and solar power can’t supply all of it. Providing compensation to project affected people is the government’s responsibility and some cost to the environment is inevitable in generating more energy and improving the country’s Gross Domestic Product. – Nishant Kale

EPW's identity

I enjoyed reading this write-up (“The legend of EPW: How a weekly magazine became an institution”). While EPW will certainly survive, its corporatisation, and by implication commodification, of the precious EPW knowledge system began after C Rammanohar Reddy became its editor.

The EPW archives are accessible only to subscribers, which means even past contributors have no access to EPW back issues. EPW was conceived and developed as an everyman’s weekly. Alas, it is no more so.

There are any number of EPW readers who may not have institutional affiliation or subscription to EPW. Reddy deprived many of these readers their free access to EPW. I wonder whether Krishna Raj would have gone for such wholesale commercialisation of EPW, and also wonder whether the new editor, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, will undo the damage. – P Radhakrishnan

Remembering Ramanujan

A simple fact that is often deliberately understated and not mentioned at all is that GH Hardy was a Marxist (“What English mathematicians thought of the ‘Hindoo calculator’”). 

The man who knew infinity offers an interesting insight into the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. Though colonialism has ended, we still have to take a glimpse at one of the world’s greatest mathematicians through the lens of the colonial power relationship.

Of course, one should qualify this statement with the caveat that British and US academia always had an open door for talent, though often regarding such talent as mildly exotic social species. – Prof Subho Basu

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