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[4] From: Regi P George <george_regi@yahoo.com> Date: Sun Jul 31, 2005 Subject: The police and the Theatre of Cruelty - TJS George Point of View The police and the Theatre of Cruelty Saturday July 30 2005 20:51 IST http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/sundayitems.asp?id=SEC20050730112512&eTitle=Columns&rLink=0 TJS George Not one police officer in Haryana, or anywhere in our vast and fertile country, would have read Antonin Artaud. Yet they are ardent, dedicated practitioners of the theory that made the Frenchman famous. A leading playwright, actor, director and literary theorist who became a surrealist in the 1920s, Artaud developed a cary concept of the theatre. His plays graphically portrayed on stage the extremes of human nature, such as madness and perversion, with the deliberate intention of shocking the audience. The shock, he argued, would attack the subconscious, release suppressed fears and anxieties, and force people to see themselves without the shield of civilisation. The Theatre of Cruelty, as his movement was known, became highly influential in Europe. And in Haryana. And in Maharashtra. And in Karnataka and Kerala and Bihar and wherever uniformed policemen rise to "protect" citizens. Any issue is good enough for them. In Gujarat, it may be a communal issue. In Bihar it may be caste issues, in West Bengal ideology, in Maharashtra a simple issue of a policeman's online libido. Whatever the reason, the police can be trusted to portray on stage the extremes of human nature, such as madness and perversion, without the shield of civilisation. In a horrendously graphic scene from Gurgaon, one cop beat a man to the ground. Then half a dozen gathered around and started beating the fallen man _ like you beat a mad dog. This scene was last seen in Kerala's Mutanga where tribals were beaten in precisely the same style. In Gurgaon we also saw a parallel scene where half a dozen demonstrators beat a policeman to the ground. Haryana is by no means an isolated case. What did K.P.S. Gill do in Punjab before his bottom-pinching days? In the name of suppressing terrorism, he let loose state terrorism. What did British-educated Siddhartha Shankar Ray do in West Bengal? In order to put down Naxalism, his police threw the law into the gutter. What did the greatest sadist in khaki, Jayaram Padikal, do in the Emergency years? He had done a couple of years of medical education before joining the IPS. That knowledge of anatomy was used to device new techniques of torture, like wrenching the flesh from the bones without xternal injury. The bodies of men he killed were often burned in sugar so that not a shred of evidence would be left. This has become a culture, part of the Indian way of life, an integral ingredient of our public life, our political equations, our governance. It is sustained by the reality that the IPS and the IAS are not accountable and that their political masters are even less so. The worst that can happen to the uniformed beaters in Gurgaon is a suspension. After that they would be back on duty with longer lathis. Only on the rarest of rare occasions will a cop who beats a suspect to death in a police cell, or rapes a girl in a police chowki will be brought before the law. So the beating, the torturing, the national shame will go on. Labour trouble is indeed a dampener on FDI. But policemen savaging citizens is just as much a dampener. Our police culture as a whole is a dampener. It shows us, as a nation, without the shield of civilisation. Antonin Artaud ended his final years in a lunatic asylum. The uniformed followers of Artaud who live in our midst have turned our streets into living lunatic asylums. http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/sundayitems.asp?id=SEC20050730112512&eTitle=Columns&rLink=0 ----------------------------- [5] From: Regi P George <george_regi@yahoo.com Date: Sun Jul 31, 2005 Subject: Plachimada's right - V. R. KRISHNA IYER Plachimada's right OPINION Frontline July 30, 2005 V. R. KRISHNA IYER Ground water is no private asset to be exploited limitlessly by any individual or corporation. It is cosmic wealth to be preserved in trust beyond the power of the state to barter away. EVERY Indian, including every inhabitant of Perumatti panchayat in Kerala's Palakkad district, has a constitutionally guaranteed right to life, which is the foremost fundamental right. Here is a wake-up call for judges sounded by a great United States Judge: "A judge should be compounded of the faculties that are demanded of the historian and the philosopher and the prophet. The last demand upon him - to make some forecast of the consequences of his action - is perhaps the heaviest. To pierce the curtain of the future, to give shape and visage to mysteries still in the womb of time, is the gift of the imagination. It requires poetic sensibilities with which judges are rarely endowed and which their education does not normally develop. These judges must have something of the creative artist in them; they must have antennae registering feeling and judgment beyond logical, let alone quantitative, proof" (Felix Frankfurter). "Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps" (Thomas Jefferson). "We need judges who are trained for the job, whose conduct can be freely criticised and is subject to investigation by a Judicial Performance Commission; judges who abandon wigs, gowns, and unnecessary linguistic legalisms; judges who welcome rather than shun publicity for their activities" (David Pannick QC). Humanism and compassion are fundamental duties that are non-negotiable since Part IV-A of the Constitution articulates it with authority. Obviously, judges, executive functionaries and social activists are expected to use their power, imagination and influence to enable people, rich and poor, to enjoy their right to air and water and other biosphere- stratosphere-linked amenities and privileges, which are components of life and liberty under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution, read together with Articles 39, 49A and 51 A as an integral human rights project operated in holistic harmony. What is often missed, but is constitutionally crucial, is that this ownership and control of the material resources of the community are, as a top priority, so distributed as to subserve the common good (Article 39-b). Equally fundamental in the governance of the country is that the state shall never allow the economic system to operate to aggravate the concentration of wealth and the means of production to the common detriment (Article 39-c). Ground water is a great resource of people's good, beyond private ownership, and so indubitably belongs to the community that, sans its preservation as a quintessentially social asset, the water of wells, streams, rivers and the drinking water right of common humanity will suffer grave prejudice. This is obvious to anyone with sense and sensibility, aqua-patriotism and thirst-sensitive humanism. The state is guilty of irrational, arbitrary and inhumanity if this compassionate proposition is violated by corporate avidity. The court, as the perennial sentinel of the republic and oath-bound to command compliance with the mandates of the Constitution, shall use its writ jurisdiction and breathe reality into this hallowed cosmic jurisprudence. The might and majesty of the great judicial institution shall guard even the lowliest citizen in the discharge of his fundamental duty to protect and improve ecology and environment, which include all universal blessings of a nation such as rivers, streams, tanks and wells whose very life diminishes or perishes if the basic level of ground water sinks below safety margin or pollutes its sweet innocence. By whom? By lucre-lustful "colas", carbides and toxic "affluenza" discharged by avaricious industries with malignant technology. If corporate robbery drains our ground water the basic structure of people's right to life is breached and constitutional values buried. "To wipe every tear from every eye is our tryst with destiny" (Jawaharlal Nehru, August 15, 1947). The state and its instrumentalities, as broadly, creatively and catalytically understood in their humanist semantic dimensions, are obligated to fulfil the essential needs of the common folk who are victims of deprivation by global gargantuan corporations, especially foreign, who use their clout and operate with toxic technology and corrupt methodology. Joseph Stiglitiz, once a leading adviser inside the World Bank, exposed what he eloquently underscored as "briberisation" of the governing classes of satellite countries, which are prone to policies often described by nationalists who cherish swaraj and self-reliance as "dependencia" syndrome. Patriotic architect Jawaharlal Nehru, authentic nation-builder Mahatma Gandhi and the socialistic republic's proud constitutional Preamble notwithstanding, America and other nations of the North have adroitly manipulated and dubiously managed to rob our resources under the guise of "development" and the illusion of advance. Union Carbide and Coca Cola et al are illustrative of this Indian vulnerability. Patriotism, in this exploitative global context, if there are patriotic politicians left, must resist this menace, which may insidiously infiltrate into the limpet media and manufacture subject minds. This exotic invasion by multinational corporations (MNCs) will spell craven cultural prostration unless we launch aggressively a Quit India movement against the stratagems of mega-corporate recolonisers. In the absence of such a militant self-defence battle, we may quail and fail as a nation, free and egalitarian. Ecology and environment, mandatory for human survival, deserve preservation and promotion without which economic self-reliance, people's well-being and the very right to life will suffer gravely. IT is but right to dwell upon the controversy about Coca Cola driving down to the bottom base of Plachimada, using hi-tech processes which, the local people complain, deprives them of well storage and ground water resources and other aqua potential, thereby jeopardising the necessitous right of the community to water. This fatal intimidation by an MNC has to be read imaginatively in the context of the doctrine of public trust emphatically expressed by a bench of the Supreme Court. I quote from the head-note: "The notion that the public has a right to expect certain lands and natural areas to retain their natural characteristic is finding its way into the law of the land. The ancient Roman Empire developed a legal theory known as the `Doctrine of the Public Trust'. The Public Trust doctrine primarily rests on the principle that certain resources like air, sea, waters and the forests have such a great importance to the people as a whole that it would be wholly unjustified to make them a subject of private ownership. The said resources being a gift of nature, they should be made freely available to everyone irrespective of the status in life. The doctrine enjoins upon the government to protect the resources for the enjoyment of the general public rather than to permit their use for private ownership or commercial purposes. The courts in [the] United States are finally beginning to adopt this reasoning and are expanding the public trust to encompass new types of lands and waters. There is no reason why the public trust doctrine should not be expanded to include all ecosystems operating in our natural resources. "Our legal system - based on English common law - includes the public trust doctrine as part of its jurisprudence. The state is the trustee of all natural resources which are by nature meant for public use and enjoyment. Public at large is the beneficiary of the sea-shore, running waters, airs, forests and ecologically fragile lands. The state as a trustee is under a legal duty to protect the natural resources. These resources meant for public use cannot be converted into private ownership. Thus the Public Trust doctrine is a part of the law of the land" (1997 Supreme Court Cases 388). Ground water is no private asset to be exploited limitlessly by any individual or corporation. It is cosmic wealth to be preserved in trust beyond the power of the state to barter away. The paramountcy of public rights in universal property is a basic feature of public law too deeply entrenched in the divine dimensions of progressive jurisprudence that jejune judicialese cannot whittle it down. Nor shall judges blink at these timeless principles of vintage jurisprudence or allow it to wither away. The apex court, in a case of broadcasting claims of a cricket tournament, ruled that air waves have a cosmic dimension beyond private purchase by giant oligopolies at the expense of smaller claimants who have equal rights. Being a perennial reservoir of a socially indispensable source of human survival, none - not even the State - shall sap ground water since vintage human rights will then be mere mirage. Public rights and public law with infinite potential are a rare class of jurisprudence with a vision too sublime for manky legalists and moron jurists to interpret myopically, ignoring "earth democracy". Carbide, Cola and mega-magnates cannot and shall not buy or bend our holistic and hallowed rule of law. "Small is beautiful", and when billion strong and boundless in resources, India shall not buckle under pressure from Big Business. That is India, that is Bharat and that is the meaning of meanings which the little Indian understands as democracy, not oligarchy in power through the incompetent many. The rule of law must run in aid of the rule of life and the judicature shall hold the human rights barricade to protect the least and the last no less than the billionaire barbarians who possess the money power to buy the biosphere. THE conquest of Bharat through recolonisation using the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) is a dark plot of the West developed after the Second World War. Raeganomics is the American strategy of disguised robbery by the disingenuous operations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They operate through the fraudulent philanthropy of loans, aids and investments et al and the facilitatory mantras of globalisation, liberalisation, privatisation and marketisation. Money matters, man does not. Briberisation buys, self-reliance surrenders. America Inc., with its hidden agendas, corrupts, Indian tycoons collaborates. Stiglitz explained this global plot and won a Nobel Prize. I quote at length from a 1970 piece, which has burning relevance now: The law locks up both man and women Who steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose. - Anonymous ------------------------------ [6] From: Shahmeer Sariyo <ssariyo@yahoo.com> Date: Sun Jul 31, 2005 Subject: Uzbekistan Tells US: "Get Out You Criminals!!!" Dear Friends, Will Pakistan do the same - get US Troops Out of Jacobabad, Sindh? Will India do the same, tell US: "Get out of Diego Garcia and let the natives come backto their homeland from Mauritius??? Uzbekistan Evicts U.S. From Air Base By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer 11 minutes ago WASHINGTON - The Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan has ended its agreement allowing U.S. military aircraft and personnel to use an air base that has been an important hub for American military operations in Afghanistan, administration officials said Saturday. No reason Uzbekistan was evicting U.S. forces from Karshi-Khanabad air base, commonly referred to as K2, was offered by either the State Department or the Defense Department. The Washington Post, which first reported the eviction notice, said no reason was given by Uzbekistan and that U.S. forces would have six months to leave. The New York Times reported Saturday on its Web site that a State Department official cited the abrupt action as a response to a secret United Nations operation to take hundreds of Uzbek refugees from the region. The official said most of the 450 refugees who had fled to Kyrgyzstan after an Uzbek uprising in May had been airlifted to Romania and other countries on Friday despite the Uzbek government's desire that they be returned. The U.S. Embassy in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent received the diplomatic note terminating the agreement late last week, State Department spokeswoman Nancy Beck said. A Pentagon spokesman, Glenn Flood, said the notice was received Friday. "This is a bilateral agreement between two sovereign nations, and under that agreement either side has the option to terminate that agreement," Beck said. The State Department had no further comment, she said. The Uzbek government in recent months had tightened restriction on use of the base, including banning night flights. "We have to step back and look at our options now and see where we go from here," Flood said. "That airfield has been very important for our operations in Afghanistan" ??” humanitarian as well as military. K2 has been a critical staging point for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan since the earliest days of the war, which began in October 2001. More recently, the base has been used to move supplies, including humanitarian aid, into northern Afghanistan. It also is a refueling point for transport planes. The eviction notice came just days after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld returned from a Central Asia visit to two Uzbek neighboring states, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Officials in Kyrgyzstan affirmed to Rumsfeld that U.S. forces can continue to use Manas air base for as long as the Afghan war requires. U.S. forces do not use any bases in Tajikistan, which shares a long border with northern Afghanistan. The Pentagon has an arrangement that permits U.S. planes to refuel there under certain circumstances. During his trip, Rumsfeld said he did not believe U.S. operations in Afghanistan would be hurt if the Uzbek government denied continued use of K2 because there are other air base options in the region. "We're always thinking ahead. We'll be fine," Rumsfeld said on Monday. In early July, a regional organization led by Russia and China issued a statement calling for the U.S. to set a timetable for withdrawing its forces from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Uzbekistan's ties with Washington have deteriorated after the Bush administration joined other Western nations in urging an international investigation into the suppression of a May uprising in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan. Uzbek government troops fired on protesters in the city after militants seized a prison and a government building. Authorities denied that troops fired on unarmed civilians and said that 187 people died in the unrest; human rights groups put the figure as high as 750. Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, who has ruled for 16 years and tolerates no dissent, has blamed the violence on Islamic militants. He has rejected the demands for an outside inquiry, and, facing Western criticism, has found a strong support in Russia and China. Both of them are wary about the U.S. military presence in the strategic and resource-rich region. Full Coverage: Uzbekistan News Stories Uzbekistan evicts United States from air base Reuters via Yahoo! News, Jul 30 Uzbek refugees flown to Romania at BBC, Jul 29 Uzbek Refugees Will Be Resettled at The Washington Post (reg. req'd), Jul 28 Uzbek Refugees to Be Airlifted to New Havens at The New York Times (reg. req'd), Jul 28 Feature Articles US confronts a dilemma in its ties with Uzbekistan at Boston Globe, Jul 14 Fragile stability in Central Asia at Christian Science Monitor, Jul 07 Opinion & Editorials Decision on Uzbekistan at The Washington Post (reg. req'd), Jun 08 The dangers of being Uzbekistan's best friend at Christian Science Monitor, May 31 |
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| << July31, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net]Flood,millipnaire & joy of kanji |
August01, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net]Marathi,Gurgaon,Gujarat flood,Coke and Parvez' posts >> |
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