LETTERS

India and Pakistan

The success of Pakistan's policy on Kashmir lies in proving to the international community that the violence in the valley is perpetrated by "freedom fighters" ("The face-off", January 18). The best way to counter this propaganda is to prove the involvement of foreign nationals in terrorist activities in India. In the present circumstances, fundamentalist organisations operating in Kashmir might want to distance themselves from Pakistani groups that they might have willingly brought to India. The foreign militants could be turned against their benefactors by Indian intelligence agencies.

Samir Kumar
Delhi

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In "The dogs of war" (January 18), Praful Bidwai presents a unidimensional assessment of the crisis in the subcontinent. He seems to have absolved the Musharraf regime of any responsibility for the crisis, although he accepts that the attack on Parliament House was "an amateurish operation by a group". He blames the Vajpayee government for the state of affairs. No one has directly blamed Pakistan for the December 13 operation. The Indian government has only been saying that Pakistan has been creating and supporting groups that carry out terrorist activities in Kashmir and other parts of India.

Bidwai hails Musharraf for initiating action against terrorists. Musharraf acted under pressure from the U.S., which, in turn, acted in response to India's tough response to the attack on Parliament House. India has been criticised for ignoring diplomatic alternatives. One should not forget that successive governments were doing exactly this all these years. Nobody heard us because nobody suffered like us. September 11 instilled some sense in the U.S. and other Western countries.

Manoj K. Jha
Ranchi

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Praful Bidwai describes the attack on Parliament House as an "amateurish operation by a group acting independently of Musharraf". However, one of the articles in the Cover Story feature quotes noted Pakistani columnist Ayaz Amir as having written that organisations like the Lashkar and the Jaish "had a free run of the entire country, holding rallies and collecting funds". This would have been impossible without the connivance of the Pakistan government. Musharraf has failed to rein in these organisations.

After attracting the attention of the international community by massing troops on the border, Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee, in a statesman-like gesture, extended his "hand of alliance" to Pakistan with the caveat that the latter must "shed her anti-India mentality". Sadly, within the next few hours he spoke like an average rabble-rousing politician. He said: "We will not hesitate to use any means at our disposal in our war against terrorism." Such bravado has been the bane of South Asian politics.

The massive troop deployment along the border may have raised the spectre of a full-scale war, but it also served to underline the fact that Pakistan will act only under international pressure. India knew that a full-scale war would set the global economy on a downward spiral, something that the international community could ill-afford. India's moves have started yielding results.

Diwakar Jha
New Delhi

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One may not like the ruling party but that should not come in the way of assessing foreign policy. Bidwai questions the government's commitment in the context of the Uttar Pradesh elections. His views lack objectivity. There will be elections in one part of the country or the other every year. We cannot see foreign policy issues through the prism of elections. Indians living outside the country got the impression that the government was building a consensus and was sharing information.

Suresh Maddula
Received on e-mail

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The U.S. and its European allies have extended support to India half-heartedly and asked it to exercise restraint. But America will not come forward to restrain Pakistan. Its real intention became clear when it prevented India from crossing the Line of Control during the Kargil war. While America's enemies in Afghanistan are identified as terrorists, those perpetrating terrorism in India are recognised as freedom fighters.

It is disheartening to note that some people in India are out to appease the U.S. rather than safeguard the country's sovereignty and honour. Our leaders must realise that India will have to fight its own battle.

Buddhadev Nandi
Bishnupur, West Bengal

Indian History Congress

In "A coarsening debate" (February 1) Sukumar Muralidharan seemingly endorses a critic's view that the Indian History Congress (IHC) is a "winter-time gathering" that makes only "occasional concessions to scholarly activity" and adds that "the IHC often runs the dual risk of losing focus and diluting standards of historical scholarship".

One wonders on what basis such an assessment is made. Certainly, the IHC offers enough material for its academic worth to be judged. It publishes a regular collection of research papers presented at its sessions. The proceedings of the Kolkata session of January 2001 have been brought out in two volumes, and anyone has the means to see whether the focus is being lost or academic standards are being diluted. In recent years the IHC has also developed the institution of panels to cover special fields. In the last three years it has published two volumes on Sikh history, two on Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, and one on the history of disease and medicine, based on the proceedings of panels held at the preceding two sessions.

Sukumar Muralidharan writes that "the plenary session of the IHC was addressed" by R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, K.N. Panikkar and R. Champakalakshmi. This is entirely incorrect. None of them addressed any "plenary" session. Almost all of them, like many other well-known historians present, read research papers in the IHC's different sections or panels; and Panikkar was one of three speakers at a symposium on the decades before freedom.

It is a pity that your readers are not even informed that the president of the IHC session was the distinguished epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan, who has solved the puzzle of the Tamil-Brahmi script and is India's leading authority on the Indus script. In his important presidential address he raised questions on the way the Indus script has been recently sought to be "deciphered". The lack of academic interest is surely on the reporter's part and not on the IHC's part.

Sukumar Muralidharan patronisingly refers to the IHC's "all-inclusive" character as if this needs to be abandoned. If so, in favour of what? The IHC is not a partisan body, but a strictly academic and professional body. It is out of this primary concern of the IHC that it has consistently raised objections to the wilful destruction of monuments, the injection of "religious values" into history, the recent deletions of factual statements from Central Board of Secondary Education textbooks, and the current official project of enforcing a view of history in schools strictly conforming to the mythology of the Sangh Parivar. I am happy that Sukumar Muralidharan applauds this; but I wish he had done so without so unfairly denigrating the IHC.

Shireen Moosvi,
Secretary, IHC

Sukumar Muralidharan responds: The academic quality of IHC proceedings was not the main focus of the article, nor was there the slightest suggestion that the body should be any less inclusive in its composition.

Suicide attack

The attack on Parliament House exposed the glaring lapses in the security system ("Terror in Parliament House", January 4). Despite intelligence inputs pointing to the possibility of such an attack, no precautionary measures had been taken by the authorities. Luckily on that day both Houses of Parliament were adjourned at 11-30 a.m. It is imperative to put in place a foolproof security system for Parliament House.

K. B. Padia
Ahmedabad

Sex selection technique

This is in response to the timely article on Gen-Select, a pre-conception sex selection technique, which was recently advertised in The Times of India ("Dubious choice", January 4).

The West Bengal State Commission for Women took note of the advertisement and sent letters to the Chief Minister and the Health Minister of West Bengal and to the Press Council of India urging them to take measures against the advertisers and the newspaper for engaging in such illegal and unethical activity. A cautionary letter has already been sent to the newspaper by the State Health Department following the communication from the Women's Commission.

The State government will have to take some measures. But in the context of the growing market for pre-natal and pre-conception sex-determination techniques, which have been promoted by unscrupulous practitioners banking on the avid son-preference that is evident in Indian families, we feel that a coordinated, countrywide campaign against such practices is essential.

In a layperson's opinion, the advertisement does come under the purview of Section 22 of the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994. The advertisement is grossly unethical and must be countered for the general tendency that it represents. When the Prenatal Diagnostic Tests Bill was being considered by a Joint Select Committee of Parliament in 1992-93, the women's movement demanded that the Bill be strengthened by plugging all loopholes. A strong lobby of medical practitioners influenced the government and prevented it from accepting the proposed amendments. Three members of the Joint Select Committee, Gita Mukherjee, Malini Bhattacharya and Sarla Maheswari, gave a note of dissent as they felt that the law was going to be ineffective without the amendments. The declining gender ratio in India makes it crucial that this law is implemented properly.

We call upon social activist groups, including women's organisations, to join in the campaign for the prevention of unethical medical practices that thrive on son-preference and allow profit to be made out of the practice of averting the birth of girl children by whatever methods.

Prof. Jasodhara Bagchi
Chairperson,
West Bengal State
Commission for Women
Kolkata

Health campaign

The death of children following the administration of Vitamin A indicates the absence of sincerity and seriousness on the part of the Assam government's Health Department in handling the campaign sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund ("A programme gone awry", December 21). Had the health workers been properly trained, the tragedy could have perhaps been avoided.

People's faith in Assam's primary health care machinery has eroded considerably. What has annoyed them most is the fact that neither the Assam government nor UNICEF has owned up responsibility for the mishap - they blamed each other. However, under pressure from the media and eminent citizens, the State government has ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry.

A.S.M. Khairuzzaman,
Lanka, Assam

Frontline

As a regular reader of Frontline I feel that there is no other magazine in India that can be put on a par with it.

The only thing that the magazine lacks is regular coverage of literature, art and culture. Occasionally you allot space for literature.

I am keen on reading English translations of stories by South Indian writers such as M.T. Vasudevan Nair.

R.K. Garhwalia
Agra

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I wish to congratulate your magazine on providing up-to-date information on India and giving good coverage to world affairs. The articles are useful to me in preparing for my master's programme. If you could add a search field in your online version, it would be of great help to students.

Anbalagan Marappan
Received on e-mail

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I have been reading your magazine since my high school days. I miss the photo features on nature. Please include such features once again, if possible.

S.K. Rastogi
Delhi

A question of usage I refer to Sukumar Muralidharan's initial remarks in his article "General's manoeuvre" (February 1) where he writes that the General (Musharraf) "... lacks the democratic forums...". In Latin, words ending with um, such as forum, memorandum and referendum, take a at the end in their plural forms. For instance, the plural of forum is fora; the plural of memorandum is memoranda, and so on. I have seen this mistake in the Indian media (plural of medium). So I thought, coming from a Spanish-speaking country and being more familiar with Latin, this mistake has to be corrected by Indian newspapers. May I also add that I am a keen reader of Frontline, which I consider as the best analytical magazine in India. Gerardo M. Biritos Argentine Ambassador to India New Delhi Editor's Response: We thank Ambassador Gerardo Biritos for this instructive letter and his commendation of Frontline. As for his comment on the mistaken use of unLatin plurals such as forums in Frontline and generally the Indian media, I wish to cite the following shrewd note on "Latin Plurals" in The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, Third Edition, ed. R.W. Burchfield, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996: "Separate entries have been made for Latin words that are in regular use in English and these are to be found at their alphabetical place together with their (often competing) plural forms... No simple rule can be given for the distribution of the rival forms. Some common words regularly retain the Latin pl., e.g. bases, crises, oases, theses (not basises, crisises, oasises, thesises). Some others exhibit both the original Latin form and the Anglicised one in a fairly random way, e.g. atria/atriums, cacti/cactuses, lacunae/lacunas. The context or individual taste governs the choice on most occasions. In an age when formal knowledge of Latin rules is fading fast, it is not surprising that there should be a general movement towards the use of English plurals like crematoriums (rather than -oria), cruxes (rather than cruces), encomiums (rather than -mia), gymnasiums (rather than -sia), referendums (rather than -da), but in such words a degree of self-satisfaction is certainly in order if a knowledgeable person chooses to retain the Latin plural form. There is a further group for which the Latin plurals are more or less obligatory... the plurals of alga, corrigendum, desideratum, nucleus, stratum, are regularly algae, corrigenda, desiderata, nuclei, strata." And so on. Burchfield is in agreement with Ambassador Biritos on the point that it is clearly wrong to use media as though they were a singular noun: "A good many originally plural nouns of classical origin have tended over the years to be wrongly treated as sing. nouns in English." Two cases in point cited by Burchfield are data and media. The media must always be used as a plural. I agree that even in modern English usage, which is notoriously cavalier in its treatment of words borrowed from other languages, including French, it is a good rule to be grammatically loyal to the borrowing. The rule must be to use plurals of nouns of Latin origin in the correct Latin plural forms. My own preference is for the elimination of variable use - in an ad hoc, wilful or random way - of Latin and unLatin plurals (of words of Latin origin) by writers and speakers in English. I join Ambassador Biritos in calling for an end to the permissiveness towards unLatin plurals in English usage. Even so, this comes to mind: Tom Lehrer, in his lead-in to a song, is able to get a laugh out his American audience by using, only semi-mockingly, the correct Latin plural of stadium.

RESPONSE The crisis of the IPS K.S.SUBRAMANIAN ONE read with interest R. K. Raghavan' s rapid appraisal of the Indian Police Service (IPS) in Frontline (December 21, 2001). Following the management approach of his mentor Professor David Bayley, Raghavan makes a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis. He does not question the structure, relevance and utility of the Service in the overall politico-administrative context. Rather, he identifies a few threats within the existing arrangements and would like some improvements. Given his management approach, Raghavan, in his earlier columns published in Frontline, also perceives no connection between terrorism and politics. He supports the U.S. line in the fight against global terrorism and the 'legislative terrorism' of the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO) in India. He even goes to the extent of advising the Government of India to learn from Israel, which has 'won universal praise for its decisive thrusts against terrorism unleashed by religious fundamentalism'. While a SWOT analysis is often useful, it is not sufficient to explain the crisis of the IPS today. The IPS is not an isolated management structure. It functions within the larger historical context of a crisis-ridden politico-administrative structure, in which the 'violence of politics' has led to an increasingly aggravating 'politics of violence'. A historical approach, relating the experience of the IPS to the experience of its key sister service, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), is required to understand the issues involved. The experience of the historically evolved police organisational structure over which the IPS presides also needs to be related. Thus, a brief historical exploration may be in order. The IPS of today is the top rung of an organisational model that was originally devised by the British for the Indian police in the 19th century. This model was "unashamedly foreign in inspiration and design". The British selected the model of the colonial Irish Constabulary rather than that of the London Metropolitan Police for their Indian colony. The Irish Constabulary was a centralised paramilitary force. Its chief officer was called an Inspector-General, an apt designation for the chief of a colonial paramilitary force. The Inspector-General was directly subordinate to the Chief Secretary. Answerable solely to the government, the Irish constabulary was untrammelled by local authorities. Although the colonial Indian police was organised along provincial lines, the central government played a role of supervision and regulation. The Police Commissions of 1860 and 1902 made significant attempts to standardise and reform the police structure on a national basis. The trend towards centralisation of departments such as intelligence and paramilitary police became evident towards the end of the Raj and laid the basis for the further strengthening of these departments after Independence. The uprising of 1857 fundamentally affected the administrative development of India. The earlier period of experimentation with police reforms was brought to an end. The Government of India Act of 1858 was enacted. The recommendations of the Police Commission of 1902 were intended to strengthen the police so that they could take over the army's responsibilities and thus maintain internal control and counter the nationalist opposition. At the time of Independence, the Indian police displayed several multiple and interdependent features: strict subordination to the civilian administration despite the increase in relative importance of the armed police and the Special Branch; unaccountability to the public and their elected representatives together with an express role as state servants rather than public servants; coercive strength and disposition and frequent use of state violence; institutionalisation of a paramilitary wing; an 'eyes and ears' function on behalf of the government directed against the people; and close identification with the propertied interests. The Indian rulers in 1947 retained this colonial repressive structure. After Independence, one national-level and several State-level Police Commissions were set up but they attempted only cosmetic changes in the colonial organisation model. No fresh conceptual exercises such as parliamentary democracy, federalism and development administration were taken up in the light of the special features of the Indian Constitution. After the Emergency and the Shah Commission Report, a National Police Commission (1977-81) submitted eight reports. These reports envisaged no basic structural or legal changes. The recommendations remained unimplemented and the crisis of the Indian police system remained unresolved. David Bayley of the State University of New York, Albany, an interested authority on comparative policing, visiting India during the 1980s, was pessimistic about the situation. There was an atmosphere of desperation in relation to public safety and security and a loss of faith in the ability of the police and the courts to contain disorder. Mounting group violence rather than individual criminality had become the main concern. IPS cadre Superintendents of Police were devoting 80 per cent of their time to deal with riots and demonstrations. Substantial increases in the numbers of armed police personnel, distortion of deployment patterns and a decline in professionalism, efficiency and the morale of the police were the other features of the situation. Developments during the 1990s made matters worse. Some 60 per cent of all the arrests made by the police have been found to be unnecessary and unjustifiable. The power to arrest has become a major source of corruption. Extra-judicial killings, summary executions and false encounters have become an established pattern. Atrocities on Dalits, the minorities and women have increased. In a major state in the country, a Dalit woman is raped every 60 hours; an offence under the Indian Penal Code (other than murder, rape, arson and grievous hurt) takes place every four hours; a Dalit is murdered every nine days; a Dalit house or property suffers an arson attack every five days; and yet the chances of the perpetrators being punished are low given the massive bias the police have against the rural poor. Conviction rates are as low as 3 per cent. The upper-caste police structure says that these cases are grossly exaggerated or false; the idea that ordinary people, the poor, the weak and women are liars is deep-rooted in the police hierarchy. Today everywhere in India poor people have to fight pitched battles in order to secure their minimum human, social and legal rights under the Constitution and the general and specific laws of the land. Development-related struggles by the poor for land, wages, social justice and fair implementation of the limited rural development projects and schemes, often bring them into conflict with the inherited regulatory administrative and police structure, which has links with the power structure - both rural and urban. Serious human rights violations are the result. A command structure rather than a demand structure and poor institutionalisation of the service concept vitiates the functioning of the police. Further, the rapid change and extreme complexity of social movements has eroded the limited organisational capacity of the police. The training of IPS officers, which is basically management-oriented with a strong regulatory element, prevents IPS officers from having a clear understanding of the overall historical background of this structure, which has become seriously malformed, dysfunctional and over-centralised. While public order is a State subject according to the Constitution, there has been a massive growth of centralised police forces which are increasingly being deployed in localised conflict management. The situation is unviable. THE public order scene has been complicated by an increase in communal violence against the minorities throughout the 1990s. Those who profited by the communal mobilisation are in public office and are not in a mood to relent. The IPS hierarchy, eulogised by Raghavan for its alleged educational attainments, has become increasingly corrupt and inefficient and presides over a situation that can only be described as anarchy, plus a policeman. The IAS and the IPS, intended to be complementary services at the district, State and Central levels, have drifted apart. The need of the hour is to carry out far-reaching administrative reforms to bring about flexibility, transparency, accountability, responsiveness and decentralisation. The IAS and the IPS need to be downsized. The achievements of the two services are considerable. However, a realistic assessment of their record is called for. One should not counterpose one service with the other in a partisan manner as Raghavan seeks to do when he states that the IPS has stood up better to political pressure than its perceived rival, the IAS, which is far from the case. Briefly, a thesis which may explain the administrative crisis today in India is that of a fundamental contradiction in the Indian polity between the historically evolved, regulatory structure of the two main All India Services, the IAS and the IPS, and the basic features of our republican Constitution involving parliamentary democracy, federalism and development administration. In this light, the study of the bureaucratic system is as important as the study of the party system on which much energy has been invested. Scholars have sometimes used the concept of a 'passive revolution' to understand the nature of the politico-administrative transition that took place in India around 1947. An adequate discussion of these issues is needed to facilitate far-reaching administrative reforms in the country. Raghavan's approach to the IPS appears too managerial and superficial to make this possible. K.S. Subramanian was a member of the IPS and was Director-General of the State Institute of Public Administration and Rural Development, Government of Tripura.