The king is naked, but don’t say a word

When do you find non-partisan behaviour among legislators?
When their images are at stake.
No wonder the parliamentarians were up in arms taking umbrage to Team Anna member Arwind Kejriwal’s comments on ‘criminal MPs.’ Some are planning to send privilege notice to Kejriwal for contempt of the dignity of the House.
"In this Parliament, rapists are sitting. In this Parliament murderers and looters are sitting," Kejriwal said at a rally in Ghaziabad criticising politicians for refusing to pass the Jan Lokpal bill.
Now the question is whether the legislature, State or Central, is above criticism and scrutiny.
Based on the mandatory affidavits filed by the candidates before the Election Commis­sion, several NGOs and civil society organisations have come out with disturbing statistics of our elected representatives. Almost one third of the parliamentarians (150) have criminal cases pending against them, 72 of them face serious charges.
Though the BJP could not beat the Congress in the 2009 elections, it overtook its rival in another department by getting 42 people with criminal cases elected, compared to the grand old party’s tally of 41.
There is no reason why people would not look down on the legislators considering their ‘illustrious’ conduct. An analysis of the whole bunch would require an encyclopedia-sized edition, so let us glance through conduct of a few luminaries in the recent past.

• Three Karnataka BJP ministers were forced to resign after they were caught on camera watching porn on their smartphones during Assembly proceedings.
• Twenty-six ministers have been sacked by Mayawati on charges ranging from abuse of power to corruption, from goondaism to rape and murder.
• A Trinamool minister in Mamata Banerjee’s ministry asked what a rape victim, a single mother of two children, was doing in a night club and that the rape charge was probably an extortion attempt. The CM who called the case ‘cooked up’ and her junior colleague had to eat their words within 24 hours when the police arrested the accused and found solid evidence.
• It was not long ago that khap panchayats, which are infamous for their role in ‘honour’ killings and gang rapes, found open support from the US-educated business magnate MP Naveen Jindal, who praised the kangaroo courts for their services in upholding the moral fabric of the society. 

The exalted members find time to pass doubling of their paychecks but can’t agree over key legislations that would power socio-economic change and governance — Women’s Bill and Lokpal Bill are the best examples.
A check on their finances would show that someone who entered politics with a monthly income of a few thousand rupees has become a billionaire (rupee) in less than a decade while devoting all his time to ‘serving the people’. Financial geniuses such as Warren Buffet are reduced to amateurs before the growth model of our representatives.
The legislators are human and err like humans. So what is the point in living under the self-conferred unassailable status of parliamentary ‘privilege’?

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on February 29, 2012)

Blast from the past may blow us away

Russian scientists have set a world record by raising a plant from genetic material extracted from a 30,000-year-old frozen fossil recovered from Siberia.
While I marvel at the prowess of the advanced technology, I can’t help but wonder if it is wise to recreate a living being of another time. When you read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and watch the movie years later, the possibility of bringing back an extinct species, you realise is nothing more than the imagination of a fiction writer.
No, I am not paranoid about corporate conspiracies of hatching deadly species in their secret labs nor an evangelic apocalypse-monger who cries hoarse with a don’t-try-to-play-God propaganda.
The plant, Silene stenophylla, is not an extinct species and is still found in Siberia. However, according to a BBC report on the development, when the scientist compared today’s plants against the samples that have been ‘resurrected’, they found several differences in the shape of petals and the sex of flowers and they could not explain the anomaly.
Though human intervention has been a major reason for extinction of several species, there are several natural phenomena, which bring about this process — and in turn trigger the process of evolution.
Bringing back to life something that has been dead for 30 millennia or for that matter from any point in the past brings with it the dangers of introducing into our environment an entity that we aren’t ready for or in control of.
For example, a 1,000-year-old fossil might have embedded an equally old parasite, which had natural predators or counter-mechanisms in hosts those days. When the host organism is recreated, the parasite is also resurrected and a possible contamination of today’s defenceless ecosystem could trigger an ecological catastrophe.
Nature has distributed its variety across different terrains and has raised and annihilated species according to climatic and environmental requirements. Whenever humans, the apex predators and the intelligent creatures, have attempted their hand at this, the results have had undesirable fallouts.
Almost every country suffers from infestation of some form of the other. Life forms that were artificially introduced to alien lands accidentally or deliberately have become pests that have grown to uncontrollable proportions and wiped out several local species.
One of the worst affected regions in the world is the continent of Australia, where several animals like rabbit, cat, fox and cane toad are wrecking havoc on local environment. Several species have become extinct due to these animals and more face the same fate in future if the present scenario continues. Australia is just one example. Almost every country has its share of pest problems from introduction of non-local species.
With all the advancement in science and technology, we can’t still solve problems regarding creatures of our times. So the proposition of a face-off with species from the past becomes even more complex. We may be faced with a war, which we may win only with unacceptable losses to ourselves and the supporting ecology.
The phrase ‘blast from the past’ has a ring to it, but that may be the last good thing we remember before eventually joining the mighty dinosaurs in the pantheon of the extinct greats.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on February 22, 2012)

Iran-Israel imbroglio in Indraprastha

With Iran being blamed for the simultaneous magnetic bomb attacks on Israel embassy personnel across different parts of the globe, India finds itself in a particularly difficult diplomatic fix where it has to make some hard choices.
India imports 12 per cent of its crude from Iran and has continued to do so despite immense pressure from the EU and US to stop it and choke Iran’s finances, which they say, is funding its covert nuclear weapon programme.
Iran has been a friend of India and has honoured its commitments on supply of oil and bilateral trade despite India voting against it in International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meetings, siding with the US and its allies.
However, with more evidence emerging about the similarity in the modus operandi of the attackers in using ditto style that was used to assassinate key Iranian nuclear scientists and the coincidence with the anniversary of killing of Hezbollah leaders, India would find it difficult to believe the Persian republic’s story.
Since the end of the cold war, India has been slowly but steadily strengthening its ties with Israel. Counter-terrorism and defence are areas of shared interest for both countries, bordered by hostile neighbours and constant targets of terrorist attacks.
Co-operation in these fields has grown multi-fold in the last two decades. Today India is the largest customer of Israeli military hardware and sources a substantial chunk of its high-end weapon platforms from the Jewish state.
Israel has also emerged as India’s second largest military supplier after the Russian federation. Israel has gone out of its way to persuade the US to allow it to sell sophisticated weapons systems it developed with American collaboration.
The attack on Israeli diplomatic personnel on Indian soil has been a first and comes close to the two countries celebrating establishment of diplomatic ties in January 1992. The ease with which the attack was carried out in broad daylight very close to the prime minister’s official residence has also exposed an embarrassing hole in the radar of the dozen-odd security agencies tasked with keeping the Capital secure.
Tensions are high in West Asia. Israel is preparing for a unilateral pre-emptive air/missile strike on Iran, with or without the US support. A cornered Iran, feeling the economic crunch of harsher EU-US sanctions, is threatening to cut off oil supplies to Europe and close the Straits of Hormuz — a vital route for international oil trade.
The US has responded by sending its carrier group to international waters close to Iran and has vowed to defeat any attempt to block oil routes. Iran responded by testing additional land-to-sea and sea-to-sea missiles and unveiling two indigenously built submarines.
The current dicey situation is also a wake-up call for Indian planners and the need to diversify from the country’s over dependence on import of oil and military hardware.
Another key area that needs addressing is intelligence gathering. Despite all the gung ho about overhaul of security apparatus after 26/11, several terrorist attacks have taken place in the country — the Delhi incident being the latest feather in the cap of intelligence failures. A conflict is looming and the ripples of the tensions have reached Indian shores.
It is time for India to man up and tell its squabbling West Asian friends to stop dirtying its backyard.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on February 15, 2012)

We are not a nation of human guinea pigs

In a country of 120 crore people, where lakhs are born and almost the same number die every day, life comes pretty cheap — as shown by the unabashed continual of human drug trials sans conformation to ethical norms.
The recent expose by Lancet on unethical human trials that took place in a Madhya Pradesh government hospital shows the extent to which pharma companies have been able to sabotage the very system that should ensure good practices.
For pharma companies who want to conduct human trials, India offers several advantages such as low operational costs, large number of high-end private hospitals, English-speaking doctors and technicians and most importantly — a massive supply of diverse, impoverished people who can be used as human guinea pigs.
Getting information on medical records itself is difficult and involves a maze of rules, procedures and not the least, miles of red tape.
Well… there is more bad news. Only a small segment of the human trials take place in government hospitals, the rest take place in private clinics — which are not obliged to provide any information under the Right to Information Act.
Figures provided by the Lancet speak for themselves — up from about 50 human trials cleared in 2003, there have been 1,852 projects registered with the Clinical Trial Registry India (CTRI) in mid-2011. Ironically, this registry was set up only in 2007.
An even more shocking aspect is that the Madhya Pradesh government had banned all human drug trials in the State as recently as 2010 and the ban is still in force. The aberration that has been exposed in Madhya Pradesh is just the tip of the iceberg.
Drug companies of repute, both national and international, use clinical research organisations (CROs) to do the dirty work for them. The CROs, in turn, use services of dubious characters as agents to recruit the subjects (read victims).
Informed consent, which is mandatory, remains a farce as the subjects are usually illiterate or barely-literate and cannot read the elaborate forms (usually in English) that they sign. They are also equally unaware of the nature of the drug that is going to be tested on them and the possible side effects.
And even when the side effects surface at a later point of time, these people rarely have the means to get treatment or a collective mechanism to seek compensation. The most preferred human guinea pigs are tribals, most of whom are neither organised nor literate.
“The CRO industry generated $485 million in revenue in 2010—11 and has been growing about 12 per each year. The number of CROs grew from a handful before 2005 to more than 150 today. However, there is no government registry for CROs in India,” points out another reference in the Lancet report.
The worst part about the whole human drug trial episode is that the doctors, who have sworn to protect life and uphold medical ethics, are the facilitators for these unethical practices.
It has been only been seven decades since the notorious human experiments of Nazi doctors on inmates of concentration camps. We might be a democracy, but with laxity on regulations, we swing dangerously close.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on February 8, 2012)

French connection to serve multiple goals

Finalisation of French fighter jet Rafale as the choice for Medium Multi-role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) will give the Indian Air Force the much needed boost and plug the gap that will be left by the fast approaching retirement of Soviet-era MiG-21s.
The four-year tender process that began in August 2007 had six contenders — two from the US, one each from France, Russia, Sweden and a UK-Europe consortium. In April 2011, Dassault Rafale of France and Eurofighter Typhoon were shortlisted as the finalists and almost a year later the Frenchman walked away with the contract.
The $10-billion deal for 126 jets, which defence analysts point out may go up to $15 billion with ancillary contracts, will also take bilateral ties between India and France a few notches up. The deal came through at a time when the French industry is battling the fallout of the Eurozone crisis.
This is the second major Indo-French defence deal in the last six months after the $1.4-billion upgrade contract for IAF’s Mirage-2000 fleet. The contract will also boost India’s defence industry and science sectors with the mandatory clause that 50 per cent of the deal amount be invested in domestic partnerships.
The biggest beneficiary will be the PSU Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), which will manufacture 108 of the jets under a transfer-of-technology agreement; the rest will be supplied by Dassault in fly-away condition before 2015. The HAL team can also use the expertise thus gained from the process to enhance the quality of the indigenously developed Light Combat Aircraft and to develop technologies for future projects.
The MMRCA deal was on the verge of being scrapped a year back when offset proposals of contenders went missing from the IAF headquarters and later resurfaced on a South Delhi roadside. The defence ministry decided to go ahead with the shortlisting process after an internal probe concluded that the documents were part of an appendix and their disclosure would not put any of the contenders at advantage or disadvantage.
More than a defence purchase agreement, the MMRCA deal marks strategic shift in the defence policy. By refusing to heed the US pitch that bilateral ties will be hyphenated with business, India has sent out a clear message to the rest of the world that it doesn’t need a superpower to prop it up and that it will take unpopular decisions to protect its national interests.
By choosing the French fighter, India has told Uncle Sam that the American policy of sanctions and supply disruptions based on its whims and fancies — like it did after the 1998 nuclear tests — will put it at a disadvantage with the French and the Russians, who honour agreements regardless of calm or storm.
India’s decision to diversify its shopping destinations will also ensure that it will no longer be dependent on a single vender or power block for crucial defence supplies. It is also a message to Russia that it can no longer take India’s evergreen friendship for granted, nor allow disruptions in supply chain or maintenance contracts with other international suppliers vying for the massive Indian market.
The transparent and focused MMRCA deal has shown that with the right approach multiple targets can be achieved. With more potent additions to its arsenal, India has asserted that it is not going to bury its head in the sand in a troubled neighbourhood.

(This article was published as the editorial column in Postnoon on February 1, 2012)