There is more to change than mere laws

Indians  seem to have a love affair with laws. They imbue them with talismanic properties, and so they have laws for the right to information, the right to education, to prohibt dowry, pre-natal determination of a child’s sex, child labour, and a basic law on the right to work. A law to guarantee food for all is currently being debated within government. And now there is a demand for a law  to fight corruption.
No doubt the fertile National Advisory Council has some more exciting laws in mind for the future. All this is despite the   experience which shows that laws, especially those that seek to alter social behaviour,  don’t always work —  think of the continuing problem of dowry, female foeticide, caste discrimination and child labour. 


Looked at one way, there could be an argument that this faith in the letter of a law is born out of a desire to force the pace of modernisation. In today’s India, sadly, it also reflects a bureaucratisation of politics, where social reform and entitlements are dished out by a benevolent government and bureaucracy, rather than through a process of politics that shapes society and is in turn shaped by it.
In that sense, it represents an atrophying of our mainstream political parties who are content to rule through grandstanding, usually to TV cameras, rather than undertake the hard work of educating and mobilising public opinion towards desired end. In such a climate of lassitude, evil triumphs, be it in the case of sex determination which is preventing millions of girls from taking birth, or the brutal rule of the misogynist and anti-social khap panchayats of Haryana and Western UP. 

Middle-class 
In greater measure it represents a lack of understanding of the fact that the elimination of social evils, and affirmation of human rights, are products of social, political and historical processes, not merely laws. A law is just the codification  by a legislative body to a social or political demand. These thoughts come to mind as we look at the Anna Hazare phenomenon.
 Corruption has been a slow burning fuse in India. But in 2010, it flared up with the revelation of a spate of scams and scandals across the country. It began, arguably, with the IPL episode that led to the downfall of Lalit Modi and Shashi Tharoor, and was followed up in quick succession by  the long-playing CWG fiasco, accompanied by the CAG’s confirmation of the scale of the 2G spectrum scam, the UP humongous food scam and culminating in the arrest of Hasan Ali, who had allegedly stashed tens of billions of dollars abroad for corrupt politicians and officials. 
To the horror of the middle class even the revered Indian Army got embroiled in the process through the Sukhna and Adarsh society scams.
 Many have commented on the middle class nature of  Hazare’s support. Perhaps this is a fact, if so, it is probably what persuaded the government to compromise. Revolutions are  a middle class phenomenon as the English, French and even Russian revolutions reveal. The middle class  was central to the upsurge against Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s. And it was the class which gave us the independence movement and our first wave of reform in the late 19th and early 20th century.  
Sadly  the  Indian middle class of today cannot be compared to their counterparts in Europe who provided a leavening to the European advance — Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Lord Keynes, Hegel, Darwin —  to take a few random names.
 Our middle class of today produces great managers, scientists and economists, but its philosophers, social reformers and academics occupy the margins of an intellectual wasteland.  For the bulk of the Indian middle class, intellectual inspiration, if you can call it that,  comes from new age gurus like Ramdev, Jaggi Vasudev, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Sai Baba and others.
 Like all middle classes, the Indian one is  vocal, and its sense of outrage — often self-centered and hypocritical — is magnified by the 24x7 news channels and newspapers, particularly the influential publications in the English language. So our politicians — themselves Grade A rascals —  feel compelled to heed them.
Mature democracies have all gone through the stages we have, but in time that spans hundreds of years. Child labour played an important role in the industrialisation of England in the early 19th century and in the United States in the last part of that century.  Criminalised politics, mass prostitution and ill-treatment of women, the poor and the under-classes were all features of democracies whose societies are the envy of the world today.

Progressive
 In some ways India is  at the point where the United States began its Progressive movement, whose emphasis was on rationalism, pragmatism and democracy, an effort whose bottom line was to create a political apparatus which could meet the needs of a country that had undergone profound economic and social change.
 Late 19th century US had all the social evils we see around us today — the oppression (reinforced by violence) of blacks, criminalised and corrupt politics, predatory businessmen who thought nothing of manipulating governments and stock markets, child labour, gender oppression, extreme exploitation of labour, especially that of migrants.
The Progressive movement was not one coherent affair. It spanned several decades and involved many  political currents and counter-currents. It was illuminated by the writing of “muckrackers” like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and writers like Upton Sinclair and buttressed by the work of intellectuals like Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen. And it involved thousands of middle-class activists, writers, lawyers, journalists, clergymen and social workers.

Process
 By World War I, it had helped break up business monopolies, regulated railroad competition, created vast national parks, modernised municipal governance, promoted direct elections to the US Senate and strengthened the power of the federal government. It was in this era that the steel baron Andrew Carnegie began a trend when he sold his business and gave away his entire fortune for education, research and peace. It was also the era that gave birth to  voluntarism in the US.
An anti-corruption movement requires far greater depth than the one that went into the Anna Hazare fast. Reform movements around the world have come about in clusters in the 1830s, 1860s and 1920s  in  UK,  in the 1830s, 1900s and 1930s in the US.  Reform occurs in a  certain climate and covers multiple subjects — education, health, temperance, the rights of labour and so on. The activists often straddle several interests. Jyotiba Phule was involved in movements to uplift Dalits, gender equality and reforming religion.Gandhi’s various interests, too, are well known.
The reformist impulse in the first half of the 20th century yielded laws, passed immediately after independence, leading to universal franchise, abolition of landlordism, reservations for Dalits and the codification of the Hindu personal laws. They were underpinned by the huge effort of  intellectuals and  activists too numerous to name here. And, most important, they drove the politics of the nation, not professional politicians.  
Mao once said that a revolution is not a dinner party. It need not be the charnel house he created in China, but neither can it be a flash mob that gathers for a weekend of agitation and then disperses. Political, social and intellectual change must march in a mutually reinforcing lock-step. A law is — or ought to be — merely a final legal stamp of a forward advance which is already with us.
Mail Today April 22, 2011

BREAK THE TOXIC CHINA-PAKISTAN CONNECTION

 

THE talks between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Hu Jintao at the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Sanya, in China, has led to yet another step— albeit incremental— to restore some kind of normality to Sino- Indian ties which have been buffeted by controversy in the last three years.

The problem, to be fair, was not the fault of one or the other side. Beijing’s calculated go- slow on the dialogue between the Special Representatives was to signal its unhappiness with the growing proximity of India to the US. This was sought to be countered by India through a media driven campaign to paint China as an aggressor on the Sino- Indian border. Events in Tibet on the eve of the 2008 Olympics compounded the problem.

The Chinese then escalated matters by stapling visas to Indian passport holders who were residents of Kashmir, signaling a shift in its Kashmir stance. When this, in August 2010, included the then chief of the Army’s Northern Command, Lt Gen B. S. Jaswal, India terminated military- to- military exchanges.

 

Sino- Pak

The Wen Jiabao visit in December and the meeting with Hu have clearly reversed the slide. As is its wont, China won’t announce that it has ended the stapled visa regime, but they will revert to the regular visas henceforth. India will send a military delegation to visit China, and will include a representative of the Northern Command. Just when the special representative level talks will press on from the high- point of 2005 is difficult to predict, as is the immediate future of Sino- Indian rapprochement.

The reason is that some of the underlying causes for the estrangement remain.

One instance of this is the media- driven effort to derail Sino- Indian relations. Early this month, a TV channel known for its steroid- driven approach to news, came up with what appeared, at first sight, to be a sensational report claiming that Chinese troops were deployed alongside the Pakistanis along the Line of Control in Kashmir.

The news package, complete with stock footage of massed tanks, missiles and marching soldiers, was clearly designed to scare. The hidden subtext of the programme was the growing danger to India of a two- front war.

A closer scrutiny revealed that the report was based on a speech made by Lt Gen K. T. Parnaik, the new Northern Army commander, at a media seminar that had taken place in Jammu some nine days previously.

At least two on- the- spot media reports merely have the general talking of Sino-Pak cooperation emerging as a possible future threat to the country. Referring to Chinese road and bridge building activity in Gilgit and Baltistan, the general said that the developments could “ jeopardise our geostrategical interests in the long run and pose great military challenges not only along the Sino- Indian border but also along the Line of Control for us.” All quite kosher stuff, the kind of things generals are paid to think about, and, note, that the danger was talked of in the future tense.

So alarming has been the effort by some media groups to promote bad blood between India and China that last December, at the end of his three- day visit to India Wen Jiabao complained that despite the fact that not a shot had been fired on the Sino- Indian border for a long time, “ the boundary question has been repeatedly sensationalised by the [ Indian] media…” 

China’s close military relationship with Pakistan is no secret. Neither is the fact that there are hundreds of Chinese personnel in the region participating in some 30 odd projects in the Azad Kashmir- Northern Areas region of Kashmir. But any talk of the Sino- Pak nexus must also take into account the fact that the Karakoram highway linking the two countries is virtually dysfunctional, with some 24 km of it under a lake formed by last year’s floods and landslides. Indeed, many Chinese personnel are involved in rebuilding this road.

Options 

We can, of course, make a fundamental objection to the presence of all Chinese personnel in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir based on our claim over the entire state.

But India has not formally taken that view.

Instead, the criticism has come via what appear to be clearly inspired efforts to heighten Sino- Indian tensions through the media. This is a dangerous game and has, alarmingly, been played once earlier in 1959- 1962 when a belligerent Indian media pushed an unprepared Indian Army into a disastrous war with China.

Those who see some sinister design in the Chinese presence in Pakistan, or parts of territory claimed by India are missing the wood for the trees. Improving Pakistan’s infrastructure or helping maintain it, is the least pernicious nature of the Pakistan- China link.

By providing nuclear weapons and missiles to Pakistan, China has already done far greater harm to Indian security than it can now do in any other way. As the record shows, the Chinese did not merely facilitate Pakistan’s nuclear programme, they actually gifted a weapon design to them, and tested that weapon at their own range in 1990. Since then it has provided Islamabad ballistic missiles, and more recently, cruise missiles to carry these weapons.

India can shout this from the rooftops and denounce China with all its might and main.

But that is unlikely to get us anywhere. We can, of course, contemplate war to redress our wrongs, but no matter what our chicken hawks may say, that would be an act of lunacy. India could alternatively ally itself to a big power like the US to settle scores with China. The US may pull Pakistan’s chestnuts out of the fire, but it is unlikely to oblige India. We could well end up pulling America’s chestnuts out of the fire.

Strategy

If you look at the current situation, it would appear that Indian policy feels compelled to move on two ruts called Pakistan and China. Those who advocate unrelenting hostility to Pakistan and China are actually trying to take us deeper into those ruts.

Any Indian grand strategy must have as its principal aim the need to weaken the links between our two inimical neighbours.

How you do it is not the issue. Because if you can’t you will lose the game. This strategy has to yield a policy that makes better ties— rather than hostility with New Delhi— the preferred option in Beijing and Islamabad.

India has managed to establish a mutually beneficial economic relationship with China. It now needs to shape the ties in such a way that Beijing is made conscious of the cost of alienating New Delhi.

Pakistan is a more complex problem. For the present, the Pakistani deep state comprising the Army and hard- line religious fundamentalists have the upper hand.

Broadly, Manmohan Singh’s policy of persisting with what seems to be a Sisyphean effort to normalise ties with Pakistan is a better option than adopting a hostile posture towards it. Carefully planned and executed engagement, at least points to a way out instead of remaining mired at a dead end.

The irony is that those who are warning about the dangers of a two- front war are doing everything to make that a reality.

Instead, they ought to be educating us about a viable strategy of delinking the China- Pakistan connection— our key strategic headache— one that will define our geostrategic footprint in our region and Asia.

India may be right to demonise China and denounce the sinister nature of the Sino- Pakistan relationship, but unrelentingly hostile rhetoric cannot substitute for a viable strategy that will ensure a peaceful neighbourhood, in which India can race against time to use its demographic dividend to eliminate poverty, and become a developed country.

Mail Today April 15, 2011

Nuclear power plans must face Fukushima fallout

On the evening of March 26       lights in Rashtrapati Bhavan and some houses in South Delhi were dimmed between 8.30 and 9.30 pm.  They were observing Earth Hour, an event organised by the World Wildlife Fund which sees millions of households and noted landmarks like the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Sydney Opera House and India Gate in New Delhi turning off their lights for an hour. Living as many do, in a privileged enclave of the national capital, they were perhaps unaware of the irony of their action.
Large parts of India, indeed many of its urban centres as well, observe endless “earth hours” every day. Their gesture would probably have been better appreciated if they had taken a pledge to turn off their lights for an hour or two every day, so that they could share the misery of the hundreds of millions in this country who do not know what 24x7 electricity supply means.




Our worries could well increase a great deal more now in the wake of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Nuclear power constitutes just about 3 per cent of all the electricity produced in the country today. But it has an important place in the plans for the coming decades. India’s hopes of meeting the huge demand of electricity from 2030 and beyond, with the least possible carbon emissions, rest on its civil nuclear programme.
 
Projections
That India is short of electricity today is hardly a secret, though many living in privileged city areas are often unaware of the extent to which their fellow citizens are deprived. In 2005, India’s electricity consumption per capita was a mere 480.5 kWh as compared to 1780 of China and 2013 of Brazil and 13,635 of the US.
India’s future growth depends on its ability to overcome this problem. Admittedly, we are not doing too well. The latest central electricity authority figures show that in the year 2010-11, we set a target of around 21,441MW, but achieved a little less than half that figure. Not surprisingly, of the three sectors—hydro, thermal and nuclear— the last named was the most disappointing, achieving only 18 per cent of the target set.
The government has undertaken several  reforms to promote higher electricity generation and better distribution. Plans are afoot to give a boost to the moribund coal mining sector and even grander policy measures are in place to enable nuclear energy to be produced. But the recent Fukushima accident has put a crimp on some of the more ambitious aspects of these plans.
A 2006 Planning Commission Report of the Expert Committee on Integrated Energy Policy chaired by Kirit Parikh said that to maintain an 8 per cent rate of growth— as well as a regime of the least possible carbon emissions and a maximisation of all the renewable sources of energy— we would still require a mix where coal and oil are the mainstays in 2031-32. But the other sources like nuclear and hydro would be vital to prevent shortfalls and the requirements of meeting our commitments to the low carbon emission regime.
It is possible to forgo the nuclear component in this mix, but the balance would have to be made up with more oil, natural gas or coal. The Parikh committee’s “coal-dependent” scenario projects the requirement increasing from 406 million tonnes in 2004-5 to 2,555 million tonnes in 2031-2. India has abundant coal, but it is of poor quality and as it is, more than 50 per cent of the traffic on the Indian Railways today is in ferrying coal. Of this one third is nothing but dirt, since Indian coal is not of good quality and most of it is not washed in the collieries. Carrying five times more coal would probably mean handing over our entire railway system for the exclusive carriage of coal.
Actually what it would more likely mean is that we sharply increase our import of coal, thus making us dependent on imports for yet another element of our energy matrix. Then, of course, is the issue of enhancing port capacity as well as transportation links. And, this is for an 8 per cent growth scenario. If we want double digit growth, you would have to rework the math.
It would be difficult, therefore, for India to say goodbye to nuclear power. Beggars, they say, cannot quite be choosers. Even so, given our relatively small nuclear power programme and great ambitions, this is the best time to confront the issues that have been raised by the Fukushima disaster.
 
Transparency
Sadly, the debate on the dangers of nuclear energy has been limited. One protagonist, a former member of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, has taken the occasion to ride his hobby horse—the criticism of the proposal to import light water reactors. Instead of using his supposed expertise—the safety of Indian nuclear plants—to tell us whether or not the Indian nuclear power reactor operation is safe— and will be so even when the fast breeder reactor comes into stream—he has been inveighing against foreign nuclear technology and giving a clean chit to the existing reactors being run by the Department of Atomic Energy.
He is missing the wood for the trees. Each reactor type imported will have to meet the type certification which will be done by the AERB. So, he should tell us whether or not  the AERB is up to the job, and if not, how the government could strengthen the regulatory system so that it can be so.
The Prime Minister has ordered a review of the systems, but the Department of Atomic Energy has, unfortunately, a poor record on the subject. It has used its “holy cow” status to deny information on nuclear “events” that ought to have been available for the asking. Post-Fukushima, there is need for the government to come up with a far more credible regulatory regime than the one that exists.
 
Alternatives
There is need here for systems and structures which are transparent and rigorous.  There should be nothing secret about the working of a power reactor. Everything about its operation, the status of spent fuel, the levels of radiation in key areas around the plant etc. should be in the public domain, preferably on a real time basis.
In addition to the review of the regulatory mechanism, there is need to revisit the “holy” three-stage nuclear programme of the DAE as well. The country has been told how much the DAE has achieved and how great its fast-breeder technology is, but no one has told us about its potential hazards, which are possibly greater than those of the existing power reactors, to go by the experience of Japan and France. Danger by itself need not deter us, provided we have a clear idea as to what they are, and what the nuclear establishment plans to do about them.
This is a good time, too, to look at the alternatives to fast breeder reactors. As the Parikh report has suggested, the import of light water reactors was seen as a hedge against the failure or delays in the fast breeder and thorium reactor programmes. There is, for example, the pebble bed reactor, a programme which the Germans and South Africans developed, and which the Chinese have adopted in a big way, which can utilise our abundant thorium resources without the dangers associated with fast-breeder reactors.
Fukushima has made it clear that we do need to have far better reassurance on the safety of Indian power plants—firstly of those functioning right now, as well as those that will come in the future.  This is not something we should take at one or the other person’s words. What is needed is a strong institutional response, not the high decibel opinion of one individual. 
Mail Today April 7, 2011

India's dodgy stand on the Libyan crisis

The Indian response to the  events in Libya has been craven and cynical. Just how craven is evident from the manner in which External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna rushed to condemn the coalition air strikes on Libya, even though by choosing to abstain on a crucial UN Security Council vote, New Delhi ensured that the action would take place. And just how cynical our polity’s response has been is manifested by the discussion in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday where all parties condemned the bombing. The fact that Mulayam Singh Yadav kicked off the discussion points to its true nature— the search for the Muslim vote.
After standing on the sidelines at the UN Security Council discussions and then shedding crocodile tears over the developments in Libya, India is displaying its tendency to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, a trait so painfully apparent in the triangular dealings between India, US and Iran, as revealed by Wikileaks.
 
Resolution
But why blame India? The Arab League called for the action and two of the key African nations—South Africa and Nigeria—along with Gabon, voted for the resolution along with the principal western countries, minus Germany. Had India and, say, Brazil, actually opposed the resolution, it would have failed, as it would have if either Russia or China had voted against it.
The language of the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSC 1973) mandating “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians and the establishment of a no fly zone (NFZ) over the country, is as clear as it could be. The resolution was not passed in a hurry, but after extensive consultations and discussions.
All the diplomats there would have  known what a “no fly zone” meant. The one over southern Iraq in 1991-2003  involved attacks on any active air defence sites. Had Colonel Gadhafi immediately acknowledged UNSC 1973 on March 17 and indicated his compliance by grounding his air force and switching off his air defence radars, it would have been difficult to justify the attack that was launched three days later on March 20th. But the Colonel denounced the resolution and this meant that to implement the NFZ, it would be necessary to take out his air defence network.




Libya operates—to be precise operated—an extensive air defence network based on Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles (SAM) and fighter aircraft to protect its cities and oil installations along the Mediterranean coast. The coalition cruise missile attacks were clearly aimed at eliminating these. Of these, the SA-5 with a range of 250 kms and the Mig-25 fighters were particularly dangerous.
Two contrary pulls have marked the debate on Libya. One relates to the sanctity of the state, as underwritten by the Westphalian state system. The other is the right, sanctified in practice, if not international law, to revolt against tyranny. What is happening in Libya is not some western conspiracy. It arose out of the way in which Colonel Gadhafi sought to crush the rebellion in the state he had ruled with an iron hand for 40 years. Indeed as Gadhafi’s tank column neared Benghazi, the Colonel appeared on TV to declare that he would punish the “traitors” and “show no mercy” to them. Just what that would have implied was apparent from the use of tanks and aircraft in the process.
Clearly—as the discussions and the eventual vote in the UN Security Council reveal— there was consensus that something needed to be done to stop Colonel Gadhafi. No one opposed the NFZ, though India and China wanted the situation to be studied a bit more. But with Benghazi already under artillery bombardment, there was need for action, rather than discussion.
The world does have important and legitimate concerns over the action, though it seems strange that they did not figure in the discussions. First, for example, UNSC 1973 has not set any time-frame for the measures that it has mandated; second, we do not have a clear idea of what end state the world community seeks to achieve.
 
Intervention
The NFZ in Iraq did not solve the problem there; indeed, it set the stage for the subsequent war whose consequences we still witness. The attacks on Libyan missile sites and airfields was necessary to create the conditions for a no fly zone, but of what category were the attacks on Libyan tanks on the outskirts of Benghazi? And what are we to make of  Obama’s press conference statement in Santiago, Chile that “It is U.S. policy that Qaddafi needs to go”?
We can speculate that the western intervention arose out of its belief that the uprising represented democratic impulses, as in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, and therefore there was a need to support it. But there are some who argue that the rebellion was born out of the  long-standing tribal divisions in the country and that the eventual outcome of the present policy could be the division of the country along those lines.
In the last fifty or so years the world has witnessed many armed interventions. Most have been motivated by national interests and many minus the sanction of the United Nations. In this way, the US intervened in Vietnam in the 1960s and Iraq in 2003, India in East Pakistan in 1971 and Maldives in 1988, the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.
The list of interventions that did not take place is even more graphic. Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge was allowed to carry on a genocide of the Cambodians and the Vietnamese invasion which overthrew the regime was opposed by China and the western nations. No one intervened in the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, or the systematic killing of Bosnian Muslims in the mid-1990s.
More recently, people have pointed out that while the UNSC has authorised action in Libya, it remains silent on Bahrain and Yemen, both well-known American allies.

Responsibility
Like it or not, we cannot avoid intervening in the affairs of others. Should the world stand by when rulers decide to punish their own populace, or, as in Rwanda, Cambodia and erstwhile Yugoslavia, wipe out entire groups of people because of their ethnicity or religion?
Obviously we need rules to undertake such ventures. Despite the flaws in UNSC 1973, it is based on international law which  is admittedly imperfect. Even so, countries who are now wailing, that they did not realise what an NFZ would imply are lying.
President Obama’s behaviour has not been particularly courageous on Libya; his travails in Iraq and Afghanistan probably explain this. But he did have a point when he told our Parliament last year that it was “unacceptable to gun down peaceful protestors and incarcerate political prisoners decade after decade” and that national sovereignty could not be used as a shield for this.
In the same speech he had also bluntly pointed out that “in international fora, India has often avoided these issues.” In abstaining on the UN vote on Libya and fudging its stand the way it is doing, New Delhi’s response has, sadly, been par for the course.
Mail Today March 24, 2011

India must heed the lesson of Japan's nuclear disaster

The great Tohoku earthquake and the consequent 
tsunami has not just shifted the earth off its axis, it has also given a hard knock to the prevailing paradigm about nuclear power being the energy source of the future. Whether or not it is a fatal knock remains to be seen, as the disaster that has hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan plays itself out. As of the writing, Japanese workers continue to battle heroically to avert a wider nuclear catastrophe which could result in a large number of casualties.
An event of this magnitude has had predictable global consequences. The powerful and vocal anti-nuclear power community has pounced on the developments to revive a movement that had flagged in the face of the demands for clean energy in the era of global warming. Nuclear power votaries and personnel involved in the industry rose equally quickly to the defence of “their” technology. Both sides have valid arguments, and it would be hubristic to believe that the event was a one of kind and has  limited lessons. What it has done is to question our prevailing assumptions about the nature of natural disasters. 



The great Tohoku earthquake was  the fifth largest since 1900, and it has been 1200 years since an earthquake of this magnitude has hit that plate boundary, unleashing a tsunami which sent waves higher than ten metres crashing onto north-eastern Honshu, Japan’s main island.
It upended the contemporary knowledge about the scale of earthquakes and tsunamis that Japan had been used to in modern history.  Japan, of course, implements a strict building code for construction in the country which faces many major and minor earthquakes every year.  
 
Guidelines
Nuclear power has had its critics since its very inception. They have pointed to the inherent dangers of nuclear power technology. For strategic reasons, primarily the fact that it lacked any oil, Japan decided that nuclear energy would form an important part of its energy mix.  Japan has 52 operational power plants and three under construction, as many as fourteen of these are in the region facing the earthquake and tsunami. The Fukushima Daiichi plant has six reactors of which four are in serious trouble. The Fukushima Daini plant and the Onagawa plant with three reactors which face the region of the earthquake, did shut down and, in the case of the Daini plant, the cooling was temporarily halted, but soon resumed.
Everywhere in the world,  the design, construction and operation of nuclear power plants takes place in a tough regulatory environment. In Japan, because of the high seismicity of many parts of the country and its environs, the regulations have been that much more stringent.
Most nuclear power plants, including the Japanese, are designed to handle major earthquakes and shut down safely automatically. While nuclear plants near Kobe were not affected by the 1995 earthquake, in subsequent years earthquakes did result in several power plants shutting down. The reactors were originally designed to withstand earthquakes of the intensity of 6.7 on the Richter scale, assuming that the earthquake took place directly underneath the reactor. The event would result in an automatic shutdown of the reactor, maintenance of its cooling and its subsequent startup. After the 7.2 magnitude Kobe earthquake, the safety figure was revised upward to  7.75.
In the past decade, the Japanese nuclear safety agencies have revised even these guidelines and put in place newer parameters based on ground motion, rather than the earthquake intensity, and power companies upgraded their safety features  to meet the requirements.
The problem, however, was not an earthquake or a tsunami, but a combination of the two. While the earthquake did result in the planned shutdown of the four operational Fukushima reactors, the resulting tsunami really created the problem. It swamped the plant’s electrical machinery and the pumps used to keep the reactor cool failed. The backup generators, too, packed up and the limited battery backup was insufficient to meet the enormous requirements for cooling the fuel rods.
 
Hubris
The Indian nuclear establishment has reacted to the dismal news from Japan with alacrity, but the past record of obfuscations and secrecy makes the Department of Atomic Energy’s statements on the subject suspect.
As for the critics, they have used the event to buttress their case against nuclear power. There are a number of ongoing agitations against nuclear power  plants in India. Anti-nuclear power votaries, some of who make a living from their activism, are in the forefront, but in most cases the real momentum for the agitations come from farmers upset over the loss of livelihood from land that the government has taken over, or plans to take over. Some of the critics seem more eager to refight their battles against the Indo-US nuclear deal, rather than deal with the specific issue confronting us.
And that issue is: Can India do without nuclear power ? Given the overall shortage of power in the country, it cannot. It may not want to rely on nuclear power for all its energy, but it certainly needs nuclear power sources to meet the enormous demands that it confronts in the coming decades. DAE officials have been arguing that India does not have the same kind of seismicity that Japan has, and is unlikely to face an earthquake of the intensity that it has last Saturday.
True, but neither had the country heard about a tsunami till the 2004 event. Though that tsunami was not at the scale of the one that hit Japan last week, it was powerful enough to take tens of thousands of lives in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand. It also led to a shut-down of the Kalpakkam nuclear power plant. What would a ten-meter tsunami have done?
In all fairness, nuclear power alone is not threatened by earthquakes. Big dams, too, can be destroyed by a temblor.  We have several large dams such as the ones in Bhakra and Tehri whose destruction could result in a massive loss of life and property comparable to a nuclear disaster. But unlike a nuclear event which can contaminate a region for hundreds of years, the ecology will easily recover from a burst dam.
 
Response
What the country needs is to look at the Japanese experience with a cool head and a sharp eye. An event like the great Tohoku earthquake and the ensuing nuclear accidents demand a thorough review of the safety features of existing and planned power plants in the country. The prime minister has promised as much.
But he should also insist on establishing a truly independent regulatory body that would look into matters of siting nuclear power plants and  validating their designs. Such a body should be structured for credibility with the people, rather than comfort with the government.
We should also explore other advanced nuclear technologies where accidents  will not lead to long-term catastrophes. The Generation IV reactor initiative has several projects with safer and more proliferation resistant reactors. While many of these are still in the future,  the so-called pebble-bed reactor is a technology which has been around us for a while and which deserves serious consideration. A 300 MW reactor based on the technology was constructed in Germany, but later dismantled because of political opposition.
Governments and regulatory bodies cannot cater for every possible eventuality. After all a significant asteroid strike can bring a disaster of enormous magnitude and there is little that can be done to prevent it. Human beings have not achieved what they have by taking a neurotic approach to life, the Japan event has confronted us with a situation, and we must react to it in a prudent and mature fashion.
Mail Today March 17, 2011

Disarm the criminals, or arm the people to fight them

The proliferation of guns--licensed or otherwise-- poses risks for all

The death, on Tuesday, of Radhika Tanwar at the hands of a stalker is heart-rending. A young life has been snuffed out for no fault of her own. A cowardly killer used the easiest method to kill her —shot the unsuspecting victim at close range with a country-made pistol and walked away. On Wednesday, a gun was used to shoot a couple and injure them grievously. Almost every other day  a murder is committed with the use of a gun. It takes something to bludgeon or knife a person to death, pressing the trigger of pistol is much easier. The state has done little or nothing to make it difficult to get one and so,  for the homicidally inclined, the gun has become the weapon of choice.
 
History
Guns were not always so easily available. In the 1960s when the Maoists decided to take on the Indian state in Naxalbari, in West Bengal, the  only firearms they could muster were some  12 bore guns and hunting rifles looted from tea estates. In fact many of the Naxalites used pipe-guns made of ordinary water pipes.
Chambal had its dacoits and Mumbai  its gangsters, but the easy availability of guns in northern India is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its epicenter lies in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar where the breakdown of administration in the 1960s and 1970s led to the proliferation of workshops churning out country-made weapons. Today’s Naxalites, of course, are armed with a variety of weapons — .303 rifles, SLR and INSAS carbines — many of which have come from government armouries by means that are not easy to determine.
Parallel to this has been the exponential growth in the availability of licensed arms. Till the 1960s, getting a gun license was quite difficult in India because of the hang-over of British colonial laws where the issue of licenses was closely linked to loyalty to the empire. But the rise of democratic politics saw a proliferation of gun licenses as newly rising castes saw gun ownership as much an issue of prestige, as to offset the perceived advantage of their upper caste rivals. 
In India strict gun-control laws were an outcome of the imperial necessity. The eighteenth century, in which the British fought their way to dominance in the Indian subcontinent, was a very violent one. Given the Mughal mansabdari system, armed men owing allegiance to their feudatories were scattered across India. With the breakdown of Mughal authority, India, particularly in the north, saw a long period of anarchy where petty rajas and landlords vied with each other for control, and the British by virtue of their superior military organisation and world view managed to prevail. Once they came to power, and especially after the 1857 uprising, they undertook a policy of systematically disarming the people through tough legislation and laws that made the ownership of weapons without license a major crime.
This was not very different from the system they had back home. In the seventeenth century, the British aristocracy created laws restricting hunting and gun ownership to the upper classes and denying them to the poor.  The legacy of this continues to this day and UK has some of the toughest laws against owning guns. Civilians, regardless of the circumstances, cannot own handguns. Other guns, mainly for hunting and sport are strictly licensed.  
But by  themselves guns don’t kill. As the slogan goes, “guns don’t kill, people do.” It is true that the easy availability of guns promotes its use in crime in the US. The American  right to bear arms is written into their constitution and has as its basis the history of the country which was liberated from the colonial yoke because the people had the firearms to turn against their British overlords. But, Switzerland with a similar history, i.e. where people fought for their freedom and were able to defend their country against their bigger European neighbours because they remained armed and ready for war, does not have the kind of crime statistics you see in the US.
It is a certain kind of a social and political milieu that provides the backdrop of their usage for violent ends.
In the US it is obvious in its stratified social system and ghettoisation of the minorities.
Unfortunately, the ambiance in India with its burgeoning urbanisation, poverty and social tensions make for an incendiary situation. Layer upon this a ruthlessly  predatory attitude towards women and the weak, compounded by the breakdown in effective policing in most parts of India.
 
Proliferation
The big threat lies from unlicensed weapons. And these have proliferated widely. Making the weapon itself is not the problem, even the technology available to a village craftsman can do the needful. Ammunition is an issue, but leakages from the licensed system as well as from the police and the armed forces have created the problem. Last year, this paper reported how ammunition from CRPF armouries in UP managed to find its way to Maoists in the jungles of Chhattisgarh.
Given the rapid urbanisation of the country and the emergence of large unpoliced or poorly policed areas can result in the rise of criminal gangs who are not afraid of taking on the police. We already see some aspects of this phenomenon in the Ghaziabad-Meerut area of the national capital region. If something is not done to check the proliferation of country-made weapons, things could go from bad to worse.
The police need to first understand that there is a problem. The issue of misuse of licensed weapons is straightforward enough. Here the police need to not only strengthen the processes relating to the issue of licenses, but to also institute a process whereby which licenses can be withdrawn from people who  could become a threat to society because of their possession of a licensed weapon. In other words, the licensing process should involve much more continuous  monitoring.
As far as the country-made gun phenomenon is concerned, the challenge is vaster. One aspect of it is the location and destruction of workshops that produce them. The second is to break the supply chains of ammunition for such weapons.
 
Leaching
The third, and most doable, is to leach away the weapons from those who possess them. Countries have tried different ways of doing this — Brazil, Zambia, South Africa have experimented with amnesty and cash bounties to encourage people to turn in illegal weapons.  
What the Delhi police can easily do is to offer an amnesty, to start with, and then undertake a sustained drive to locate and seize these weapons. One way to do this is surprise search and seize drives where the police can seal off a mall, a market or a bus stand and search every person for hidden weapons. This will deter people from carrying the weapons around. For its part, the union government needs to pass laws that will enhance punishment for the manufacture, transportation and possession of illegal weapons.
If the police and the government throw up their hands and claim they cannot do anything, it may be a better idea to make licensing easier and encourage the ordinary citizen to become a gun-owner and train them in the use of guns.
 At least this will be able to equalise the advantage that the criminals have vis-à-vis the common folk as of now.
Mail Today March 11, 2011