Bush takes away citizen's rights

The following is a comment on the Military Commissions Act signed recently by Bush and foisted upon the people declaring almost 12 million Americans (and non-Americans) as citizen's without rights. Not only does the Act suspend the right to appeal against forced confessions, illegal confinement, and torture, it also revokes the basic structure of the American consitution. Anyone now could be arrested are incarcerated without providing any reason for doing so.

More such comments and critiques could raise a worldwide alarm against the Great Satan. This is one such attempt.

Now then, it is easy to decide who is winning the lofty War on Terror, Bush or Osama! Read on...

Year One of the Empire
Bush: Resistance is Illogical
by Juan Cole, http://www.juancole.com/

Bush and a supine, cowardly Congress shredded the US Constitution on Tuesday, abolishing the right of a court review (habeas corpus) for some classes of suspect. Suspect, mind you, not proven criminal.

In other words, we have to be confident that George W. Bush is so competent, all-knowing, and inherently just that we can just trust him. If he says someone is an enemy combatant, then he or she is. No need to check with a judge about why he or she is being held. And then Bush can have the suspect tortured to make him confess, and can convict him on the basis of the coerced confession, all in secret.

This law creates two classes of persons inside the United States, citizens with rights and non-citizens (12 million persons? Equivalent to the entire state of Michigan!) without rights.
Basically, Bush can issue them what the French kings used to call lettres de cachet.:

' In French history, lettres de cachet were letters signed by the king of France, countersigned by one of his ministers, and closed with the royal seal, or cachet. They contained orders directly from the king, often to enforce arbitrary actions and judgements that could not be appealed. . .'

We Americans made a revolution against such arbitrary practices of the French and other Empires.

Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution says, "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

I look out my window. I don't see a general Rebellion or an invasion by a foreign power. The conditions, under which the right of the imprisoned to demand that a court establish whether
there are genuine grounds to hold him is suspended, are absent.

The law is unconstitutional.

Moreover, our founding documents did not admit of a distinction among human beings with regard to rights. The Declaration of Independence says:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

All men here means all human beings. It says they are all created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. All of them. Not some of them.

Of course we have had these periods of neo-Monarchy and temporary insanity before in our history. There was the Alien and Sedition Act, and the Red Scare after World War I, etc.

King George came on O'Reilly and said that it is "illogical" to disagree with his policies in Iraq and branded arguments that he is drifting along without a plan "propaganda."

Bush sounds more and more like the Borg every day. I swear to God, next we are going to get up in the morning and hear him proclaim, "Resistance is futile!"

So of course eventually Bush-think will lead to attempts to cure those of us who are critical of him of our illogicality, and to suppress our "propaganda." We'll all be right-thinking non-propagandists after a little water-boarding. You say we don't have to worry about that because we are citizens? But what is to stop Bush from declaring you an enemy combatant and stripping you of your citizenship? And then keeping you away from any civil court where those letters of cachet can be challenged?

The Republic is Dead, Long Live the Republic.

Bad boys

I have been a fan of the Pakistan cricket team for a while now. Ever since I started following the game closely and avidly, on television, in newspapers and magazines, on the Internet. Life now is incomplete without cricket. So controversies surrounding the team are not new to me. The Pakistanis have always had a reputation of being the bad boys of world cricket. From bowling spearheads Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, and Aquib Javed binging on ganja on a Caribbean beach to Shoaib Akhtar and other quickies being called for throwing, chucking, and ball-tempering, Pakistan has been through it all.

The speed at which the cricket board replaces coaches, both overall and bowling, is almost a joke now. The to-be or not-to-be captaincy saga also did not come as a surprise. What did was the manner in which the cricket board reacted. Not that the Indian board fares any better. But the Pakistanis take the cake as far as bad management is concerned. Now Bob Woolmer, the man who has been with the team through the ball-tampering mess and the captaincy imbroglio, at the same time lifting the side out of the doldrums in terms of sheer grit and high quality performance was also seen to be under a cloud. A recent report however quashed those rumours, thankfully for the team, and for the board.

The doping accusations, I must admit were a shock. Really. Shoaib Akhtar, thanks to his starry airs and his bohemian lifestyle, as well as the fact that he is the fastest bowler of the cricket ball on the planet, has been for long been under the scanner. His rockstar ways have never gone down well with the Pakistan Cricket Board. Mohammad Asif was more of a surprise. That a young man of 23 who has received such stupendous success in a short time and was seen as all set to claim the place the Waqar Younis’ and the Wasim Akrams’ left in the team would do something as foolish as dope is unpardonable. Why throw everything away in this fashion? He may have been ignorant about the contents of the medication he was consuming to get over injuries. Perfectly possible. I don’t know what reasons the two dope-tainted players will present before the three-member inquiry commission they are supposed to face in a day or two. But the scars shall remain…there’s no question about it.

Lage raho Gandhi

Just yesterday, I came across this very ill-informed critique of the cult movie, Lage Raho Munnabhai and its equally successful prequel, Munnabhai MBBS on a blog. If you ask me, the movie is probably the best thing to happen to the year 2006 after of course the trail-blazing Rang de Basanti. The fiery piece painstakingly argued that the reason why India has lagged behind all these years, politically, economically, and well, socially was precisely because of the very ideals that Gandhi propagated in his lifetime inspiring a whole generation. Gandhigiri, for the writer is a strict no-no in today's day and age of global progress, liberalization, cut-throat competition, and ritual communalization of the society. After all, India was surging ahead and there should not be place for complacency, slackness, and humility when the world was gazing at us with expectant eyes. A neo-liberal critique of a post-modern montage on screen? Perhaps!

Why would anyone want to jeopardise India's bull run by making a retrogade film like Lage Raho...? Let me give you some answers. The film posits truth as a virtue. In a world where a behemoth goes to war with a rather tiny piece of territory on the basis of a heap of sheer lies, truth becomes a rare commodity. The only WMDs in Iraq were the ones dropped with impunity by the Great Devil and his associates. That Bush lied to the world to bomb Iraq is not a secret, nor is the fact that more deaths have occured in that battered country from malnutrition, disease, insurgent and enemy gunfire, and of course torture than all American military casualities ever. So ah, the Americans lied, went to war and killed thousands! So Lage Raho... says 'truth is God'. Gandhi also said the same. What is wrong with that? Could lives in Iraq have been saved if Bush had not lied? Maybe. Trust Bollywood to teach the Amrikans some lessons. Even though we never realise the potential of our own cinema, it could actually give good old Hollywood a run for its money. And in turn drill some sense into the brainless morons who run, or ruin, America.

Back home, hundreds of murder cases pile up in courts. Even as the Jessica Lall and the Priyadarshini Mattoo cases capture eyeballs, the fact that eye-witnesses were bought over to lie in court stares everyone in the face. A recent Tehelka expose relates how Shayan Munshi, Karan Rajput and Shiv Das, all key witnesses to the gruesome murder, were paid hefty sums of money to either shut up or retract statements. In short, they were told to lie...or else! So there! Some semblance of truth could give justice to a dead young woman. But a bag full of untruth is all she has got. Even in death, truth has evaded Jessica. So is Gandhigiri relevant? I guess so.

The importance of being Musharraf

President Musharraf's memoirs have created quite a flutter worldwide. Understandable, considering his stature and the volatile situation of the country he heads. The lukewarm response that the book has recieved in India was also not way off the mark from what seers, literary pundits, foreign policy experts, leading lights of the publishing world, and others inclined to comment on everything from food to the overtly flimsy grounds of X's divorce had predicted. After all this man is the supreme commander of a country seen as everything from devil incarnate to enemy state to the harbinger of all evil in the world. The neighbour is seldom loved, in this case often reviled except when the overwhlming force of the game of cricket blankets everything down and raises a toast to subcontinental unity.

But that's beside the point. The assertions he makes in the book about the misadventure in Kargil too are not the most earth-shattering thing to happen to international politics in the past few months. One must agree and endorse that the Indian armed forces were done in by a massive intelligence failure. However, the deeds of the General cannot be condoned since he parlayed the hills with army colleagues disguised as mujahideen, all under the hawk eyes of erstwhile Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief, who has misled the world, and particularly India in claiming that he was unaware of the goings on at Kargil.

One must also agree that the man has taken an irrevocable risk in laying bare his soul on Pakistan-US relations. The fact that Richard Armitage, the former Under Secretary of State and senior Republican politico obviously threatened the Pakistan establishment with dire consequences bordering on death and pillage unless they hopped on to the War on Terror-Infinite Justice bandwagon has been highlighted by the President of Pakistan in the book. There are chances that he has brought upon himself the wrath of Bush and his cronies by naming them in a public document.

President Musharraf nevertheless has mitigated most of the danger by shaking hands with Bush, appearing on late night TV in the US, and embarking on a massive publicity drive which included the release of the book in New York. Or perhaps one would think so. What direction the storm in the teapot created by the revelations in the book will take, only time will tell.

Was the book mistimed in terms of the meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the joint statement? Experts feel so. And why not? Here is a man who is admitting his involvement and that of his army in a war ostensibly won by India where the Indian side is seen as a victim of terrorism and conspiracy. The strategic implications of what the General has said in his book are immense. But the Indian establishment has been strangely quiet on the issue and not raised a hue and cry about the contents of the book so as to hamper the ongoing peace process. Intelligent!

There are, therefore, obvious merits of reading In the Line of Fire even if one does not agree with what the President has to say. After all, no other book seems to be as relevant to the contemporary politics of South Asia. The Indo-Pak relationship, punctuated by two full and one half war, documented in the words of President Musharraf has enough historical significance for people to engage with. For a book of this nature is as much part of the composite dialogue as the secretary level meetings and other discussions.

Calcutta!

Kolkata is a strange city. I for one am quite fond of using the old Victorian intonation for the part-dilapidated, part-growing metropolis, if you could call it that. The growth, measured solely in terms of grand multiplexes and swanky shopping plazas, seems to be, in places, suspended in time. Not that someone like me should complain. I am quite satisfied with snaking through narrow Calcutta lanes, with monolithic, soot-blackened walls lining the sides, green and brown windows behaving themselves to allow cycle-rickshaws, auto-rickshaws and even taxis to maneuver through them.The wall faces are rather steep, sometimes children peep through them, at other times men of various ages look around for friends to sit down with a cup of sweet tea and spend the next few hours engrossed in the favourite Bengali pastime, adda while their wives are ensconced neatly in kitchens preparing for the evening meal. Food for one is one of the lifelines of Calcutta along with the Metro and of course, the Howrah Bridge. The old neighbourhoods bear the undisputed mark of past masters like Tagore and Satyajit Ray. I am reminded of the ubiquitous city detective Feluda and the manner in which Ray (the writer) described Calcutta in the stories.The rumbling houses bear the telltale signs of a bygone era, a time of precocious wealth and grandeur that has now given way to grime, filth and dust. The old city is crumbling. True, it is crumbling. But the crumble is worth its while even when erstwhile towns like Bangalore and Hyderabad have transformed into tech-savvy dream destinations.Calcutta is beyond compare. Beyond compare even with the New Town area that is witnessing the first pangs of unmitigated commercial growth. In its oldness and lazy languidity lies the promise of a new tomorrow. The youth is brimming with confidence. There is urgency in their stride. But somewhere they lack the passion of a Mumbaikar or Delhiite to compete with the rest of the country. There are areas of improvement and they, one is sure are working towards making sense of the world…as they do day after day while in the midst of an adda.The Wipro SEZ is a good beginning. One is however fearful of this uniquely beautiful city losing its old-world charm, swamped by skyscrapers and glass cascades. But again, the indomitable spirit of the Calcuttan – that comes to the fore each year as the Goddess Durga makes her way into the city, spends five days and walks into the sunset – is at work to preserve and secure an inviolate space. A space that takes me back to an age that I can never be part of but can glimpse…only in this city called Calcutta.