Decoding the Maoist menace

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On the night of 30-7-2000, between 2045 and 2110 hours, Dr Rajkumar the Kannada Superstar was kidnapped by Forest Brigand Veerappan from Gajanoor. Gajanoor is a town in Tamil Nadu close to the border with Karnataka. At the time of the kidnapping, Veerappan handed over to Rajkumar's wife an audio cassette to be delivered to the Chief Minister of the State of Karnataka. The audio cassette required that he send Nakkeeran Gopal as an emissary to Veerappan. Gopal sent an audio cassette to Chennai which, in the voices of Veerappan and an associate, set out ten demands for the release of Rajkumar. Item 6 of the demands read as follows: 6. Innocent persons languishing in Karnataka Jails should be released. The response of the Two Governments was as under: TADA charges will be dropped immediately facilitating release of the prisoners. While coming down....

No Oliver Twists in this one

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When the Union government introduced the Right to Education bill, it threw in the leaves for revolution into boiling water, a revolution that challenged the words of John F Kennedy, who said: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." A revolution doesn't come by everyday. But when it comes, it comes in leaps and bounds. The charismatic chief minister of Tamil Nadu and cine mega star MGR introduced one such revolution in the early eighties when he introduced the concept of schools providing lunch for school children in order to improve school going habits amongst children. With parents often requiring farm hands or help in their small business, the idea of a child receiving a meal alongside education was an enthralling one and brought children to school in droves. It was however scoffed at, as the most unworkable idea of the last century. Most....

Team Anna and their seditious speeches

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The Parliament has mildly reprimanded Team Anna with Speaker Meira Kumar reading out a statement saying any comment that lowered the dignity of Parliament was "unwarranted and unacceptable". If India were an authoritarian state, it would have indubitably charged Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal with sedition. The Indian Penal Code defines sedition as under: "Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, the Government established by law in India, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to three years, to which fine may be added, or with fine." There can be no mistake in that confronting Parliament and using derogatory language to describe it is, in essence, challenging all the laws made....

Of lawyer-journalist fisticuffs, mid-term polls and Arjun Singh

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Lawyer-journalist row in Bangalore Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent- Isaac Asimov I found it rather strange that professionals like lawyers and journalists, who otherwise make use of logic, intelligence and persuasion to earn their livelihood, could fight like dogs and cats, leaving broken noses and skulls behind. The lawyers of Bangalore are still boycotting courts agitating against their lop-sided portrayal as monsters. Jeff and Jamie are fighting in the hall and Jeff is twice as tall as Jamie is. So a teacher breaks up the wrestling bout. The teacher asks Jamie who started the fight. Jamie said, "Jeff did. It wasn't a fight until he hit me back." I was reminded of this joke when lawyer friends from Bangalore complained that some lawyers were beaten up by both the police and the media. I asked who had beaten whom first, the....

The mother of all elections and stray thoughts

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'I had been to other countries - in Europe,Asia and the Middle East - but none of them had provided even half as much variety, or so much to see and experience and remember, as this one state in northern India. You can travel from one end of Australia to the other,but everywhere on that vast continent you will find that people dress in the same way, eat the same kind of food, listen to the same music. This colourless uniformity is apparent in many other countries of the world,both East and West. But Uttar Pradesh is a world in itself.' - Ruskin Bond. Brazil, the fifth most populous country in the world, has a population of 19 crore - less than Uttar Pradesh. UP has the highest population amongst all the states in the Indian Union. With a population of 200 Million, it would have been the fifth....

Of 2G, Baby Falak and the joy of cycling

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The Supreme Court of India has cancelled 122 licences given to telecom Companies on or after 10.1.2008. It has also directed that "Keeping in view the decision taken by the Central Government in 2011, TRAI shall make fresh recommendations for grant of licence and allocation of spectrum in 2G band in 22 Service Areas by auction, as was done for allocation of spectrum in 3G band." It can now be taken for granted that these 122 licences will be auctioned. The Supreme Court mentions the report of the CAG while cancelling these licences. The CAG, Vinod Rai, had assessed a loss of Rs 1,76,000 crore to the public exchequer. This assessment does not state the underlying truth that the consumer will bear the cost of such 'loss', since the telephone companies are profit-oriented and not in the business for charity. Vinod Rai has publicly sought support....

An officer or a gentleman?

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An unseemly controversy has erupted over the 'real' birthdate of General VK Singh. With the Army alone confronted with thousands of such statutory complaints, and several lakhs of others pending in various courts across the country regarding other government employees, a fixed age for superannuation ought to be looked at critically. It might be better if the country had a fixed tenure for its Army chiefs and indeed for all personnel at different grades. While the General Singh age controversy has now assumed fantastic proportions, let us examine the issue closely by looking at the facts. General VK Singh averred that his UPSC form for the entrance examination to the NDA had inadvertently shown his date of birth as May 10, 1950. He further stated that the provisional school leaving certificate from his school reflected his date of birth as May 10, 1951, which was submitted to the....

The continuing saga of the Aarushi murder

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Fourteen-year-old Aarushi Talwar, daughter of dentist parents, was found dead with her throat slit at the family's Noida residence on the intervening night of May 15-16, 2008, while the body of their domestic help, Hemraj, was found on the terrace the following day. The initial investigation in the case carried out by the Uttar Pradesh Police led to the arrest of Aarushi's father Rajesh Talwar on May 23, 2008. After frenzied media reporting and public outrage, the probe was handed over to the CBI and Rajesh Talwar was granted bail by the Ghaziabad court on July 11, 2008. The CBI, after probing the murder for over two-and-a-half years, had filed its closure report in the case in the Ghaziabad Special CBI court, saying it had been unable to find out any evidence to prosecute the Talwars. The Ghaziabad trial court, however, had rejected the CBI closure report, saying there....

Bhagwad Gita and some thoughts

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"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson A Siberian court yesterday threw out a petition that sought to ban a translation of the Bhagavad Gita as "extremist" literature. Judge Galina Butenko of the Leninsky District Court in Tomsk ruled on Wednesday that there were no grounds for recognising 'Bhagavad Gita As It Is' as extremist because the book was "one of the interpretations of the sacred Hindu scripture." Not just Hinduism, of which the Bhagawad Gita is a holy book, no religion instructs intolerance or violence against worshippers of 'false gods'. ....

Expression of hatred is not sacred

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While freedom of expression is sacred, freedom of expression of hatred, ill-will or contempt is not. Such expressions of hate are often criminal acts as the Indian Penal Code lists acts such as providing provocation with intent to cause riot, promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion etc, or making imputations or assertions prejudicial to national integration or even defamation a Crime with substantial punishment. While exotic works of genius needs to be protected and indeed nurtured, it is an extremity to seek to protect criminal and often juvenile pieces of artistry in the name of freedom of expression. Those who invoke the freedom of expression argument to an amateurish image of a giant pig defecating over a holy place of a particular community, or a dog fornicating with a man bent over in prayer, wearing robes belonging to a certain community or even a....