The Best of The The WEEK - 1982 To 2002

EXCLUSIVE: OQDHRA HUSSiCSE
T H E BEST OF
PENGUIN ENTERPRISE
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First published in Penguin Enterprise by Penguin Books India 2002 Copyright The Week 2002 All rights reserved
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CONTENTS
Introduction
vii
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
AU REVOIR, A N N E MARIE I N D I R A GANDHI'S ASSASSINATION T H E B H O P A L TRAGEDY FIRST I N D I A N WITH A NEW HEART ISLAMIC BOMB? FORESTS WHERE NAXALITES RULE V. A N A N D J U N I O R CHESS CHAMPION BETTER ARMED, BETTER PREPARED T H E WORLD'S YOUNGEST MD A GENIUS VANISHES MAN WHO MOVED A MOUNTAIN TRACKING T H E TIGERS
1 9 17 29 37 48 59 63 71 78 83 89
13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
CARELESS DOCTORS, GREEDY HOSPITALS ANGER I N A Y O D H Y A BOMBAY BLASTS GERM WAR SAVAGE SWAMIS THE MYSTERIOUS MR BLEACH V A L L E Y OF WHITE HUSBANDS SACHIN'S PSYCHE IN SEARCH OF ORGASM T H E MOST WANTED WOMAN LIFE IN CHAINS H O L I D A Y WIVES GODHRA CARNAGE
99 113 119 129 137 147 159 167 173 181 189 197 205
INTRODUCTION
THE Week was born twenty years ago with a candle on its cover page. It was Christmas 1982 but the melting candle had nothing to do with Martyrdom. The cover was purely political, and photographs of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her heirapparent, Rajiv Gandhi, were displayed in the lambent candle flame. No one knew at that time that the mother and son would tragically become political martyrs. Indira Gandhi was assassinated within two years and Rajiv Gandhi six and a half year's after her death. The Week has no claim to clairvoyance or prescience. But it has had an unclouded vision in its pursuit of excellence in journalism, in perceiving and interpreting news and trends in the past two decades. This book is a celebration of that vision and its dedication to publishing stories of extraordinary courage and perseverance. Yet, in 1982, Kerala was considered the most unlikely of places to launch an English newsmagazine from. Though the southern Indian state boasted high literacy and a head start in
English education, the advice from friends and professional colleagues was unanimous that a national newsmagazine had better be based in a metropolitan city, preferably New Delhi. A view we couldn't accept. New Delhi was no doubt the seat of government and national politics, but it was not the only happening place. News of the momentous kind was being made constantly in other parts of the country as well. In those days, news was chasing journalists. It was an era of social convulsion, of phenomenal upsurge of regional sentiment and extremist violence. Actor-politician N.T. Rama Rao was churning up Andhra politics with the slogan of Telugu pride. Assam was in ferment over the presence of outsiders in the state. The followers of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in Punjab were gearing up for war for a Sikh nation. Refugees from strife-torn Sri Lanka were pouring into Tamil Nadu, where they would nest, sow dragon's teeth and reap death. In Mumbai that was Bombay, textile mills were in a death rattle, and the striking workers and their children were starving. There were a thousand such social issues screaming for resolution. It did not matter where our editors and printers sat. It had been an eventful twenty years since then, and The Week was always on the ball. If it has scored frequently, it is thanks to a dedicated team of editors, reporters, photographers and artists. Some of their names you will find in these pages. Let me emphasize that the contributions of those whose names are not here are no less. What you read in these pages is only a fraction of the many outstanding stories we have done. There have been more than a thousand issues of The Week since its inception, and every fourth issue carried at least one memorable story worthy of inclusion in this volume. Among these were a large number of endearing and ennobling stories of human drama, suffering,
viii | INTRODUCTION
courage, fortitude, triumph and magnanimity, but only a couple of them could make the shortlist of fifty, which was then pared down to twenty-five. We have not attempted here a socio-political chronicle of the last twenty years. That would be a herculean task far beyond the scope of a 221 page book. The size of the book has compelled us to keep aside many excellent stories on AIDS, economic liberalization, the Kargil war, the arts, and the numerous scandals and controversies that rocked various governments. But the glaring omission of our 'Man of the Year' series, honouring selfless, inspirational people who have devoted their lives to the welfare of their fellow beings, is deliberate. The series would make a separate volume later. Every story featured here is special in some way. Some were exclusive at the time of their publication; in others our correspondents found something unusual in the ordinary, though the subject was covered by other publications too. But the final selection reflects the magazine's emphasis on current events and stories that touch the heart and stimulate the mind, and our widening definition of what constitutes news. And, of course, our focus on people. I hope you enjoy reading this selection as much as we enjoyed doing them. Those of you who have been regular readers of The Week for some years may recall several stories that should have found a place in this book. We promise to bring out more volumes featuring the stories we could not include in this. To those of you who have not yet read The Week, this is a glimpse into our past, and also the future because many of the subjects featured in this book are likely to be with us for a long time. MAMMEN MATHEW
Chief Editor
INTRODUCTION | ix
8 January 1983
AU REVOIR, A N N E MARIE
THE Vaigai river seemed to giggle at the sight. A French lass, a peach of a girl, making love to an Indian leper. They had been there all evening, whispering sweet nothings to each other, joking, laughing. And as the sun went down, two shadows melted into one. But the night had eyes. Soon they came, the guardians of morality. 'We can't let this happen in our place,' said a social worker. The public agreed. Realizing that discretion is the better part of love, the couple decided to regularize the proceedings. So, at a public meeting of sorts, the leper tied a piece of turmeric on a yellow thread worn by Anne Marie Dompieri round her neck. Thus, Radhakrishna Iyer, a Saurashtrian Brahmin weaver, settled at Paramakudi in Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu, and Anne Marie became husband and wife. Now it won't be a sin, the girl, a Roman Catholic born in Montpellier, the French city of wine and perfumes, was told. The sparse crowd cheered as the social workers spoke on the importance of the occasion. To Anne Marie all that was immaterialthe noisy group, the sermons. What mattered wis
Anne Marie, coming from a French city of wine and perfume, fell in love with a poor Indian afflicted with leprosy
Krishna, the hero of the unusual love story

the piece of turmeric. She was a wife now. For seven years she had shared her bed with Francis, her French lover. All the time she had wanted him to make her his lawfully wedded wife. He satisfied her as a woman all right. But everytime she broached the topic of marriage, the answer was: 'Why do you want a piece of paper to bind us together? We are happy now, isn't it enough?' She had no answer to that and to the many other questions she asked herself. Slowly she was getting disenchanted with France and all that it meant. Occasionally, she took Francis out for a long journey across the border. It helped, but not much. They would be returning to the same vacuum. She was twentyfour and life's scoreboard remained a rimless zero.
AU REVOIR, A N N E MARIE | 5
In 1979, the couple came to India. To Anne Marie it was like a pilgrimage. She was in love with India from her teenage days. The search for shanti had led her to the libraries of southern France and she read the Gita, Upanishads, the Ramayana. She did believe in Jesus. She prayed to Him: 'Jesus, find me a guru in India, a Jesus in saffron.' She found one, on a Saturday night, in March 1979. He was not saffron-clad. There were white patches of leprosy'on his dark skin. And sores on his withered fingers. Anne Marie was with Francis and two others, sipping tea and smoking pot in one of those tiny stalls in Rameswaram when the man went up to them and rattled off in his pidgin English: 'Me Krishna, know English. Guide here. Know the Gita, Upanishad. Teach you yoga. Want meditate, foreigners? Want smoke?' While Francis and others looked.'askance at him, Anne's eyes caressed him. A well-built fellow. Through the veil of ganja, the leprous sores did not look repulsive. What did he say? Meditation, yoga, the Gita?. Yes, that was what she had come for, all the way. She could not resist the offer. As if under a hypnotic spell, she dragged others along: 'Let's go.' And in one of those dark corners of the Rameswaram temple, the weaver from Paramakudi initiated the foreigners into a mystic world of 'medicine god' and meditation. As ganja smoke filled the air and their lungs, Anne had visions. It wasn't the leper but Krishna who stood before herLord Krishna uttering words of wisdom. She felt like a child trying to catch the meaning of every word. Leper Krishna, as he is locally called, rechristened her as Radha. He taught her to meditate, answered the questions that were nagging her all these years. Francis was dead so far as she was concerned. She had ditched him; buried him fathoms deep in her memory. Even after she had fallen under the spell of this bizarre romance,
15 | T H E BEST OF THE WEEK
Francis had stayed on in India for a few more days and tried to get back his lost love. No, it was all over. She had given him seven years of her life. That was enough. Vedic discourses and yoga classes went on. One thing led to the other. In the yoga lessons, the guru had to teach her the right posture, the correct placement of legs. Sometimes she needed his help. The magic touch dissolved all barriers. It was total surrender. Francis had won her body; Krishna conquered her body and soul. She wrote about him in her diary: 'You are my god. You speak like Lord Krishna.' They set up a love nest at Rameswaram. Just a room, a part of someone's house. The rent was Rs 20 a month. It was a dark and dingy place. Still, she loved it. She cooked food for him, washed his clothes, fanned the flies away from his sores, shared his bed, ate the leftover from his plate like a devout Hindu wife of old. All the money she had brought from home, over Rs 4,000, she spent on him. When it was over, she wrote to her parents and sister and got more. Though he did not believe in modern medicine, she got drugs from France to treat him. She did the domestic chores when he was out, preaching and guiding tourists. She went to the common tap on the roadside to fetch water. Once a week her fair hands would get dirtied with cowdung. The room had to be purified with cowdung water. There was also the binding factor of ganja between them. Life went on like a song till the bank balance touched the bottom. Then it struck a sour note. There were tiffs over money and the kind of medicine she wanted for herself. He believed in nature cure. Though she did not like to trouble her people in France too often, she wrote again asking for money. She also did something which she had never done beforepushing pot. But she soon got fed up with the business and gave it up.
In 1979, the couple came to India. To Anne Marie it was like a pilgrimage. She was in love with India from her teenage days. The search for shanti had led her to the libraries of southern France and she read the Gita, Upanishads, the Ramayana. She did believe in Jesus. She prayed to Him: 'Jesus, find me a guru in India, a Jesus in saffron.' She found one, on a Saturday night, in March 1979. He was not saffron-clad. There were white patches of leprosy on his dark skin. And sores on his withered fingers. Anne Marie was with Francis and two others, sipping tea and smoking pot in one of those tiny stalls in Rameswaram when the man went up to them and rattled off in his pidgin English: 'Me Krishna, know English. Guide here. Know the Gita, Upanishad. Teach you yoga. Want meditate, foreigners? Want smoke?' While Francis and others looked, 'askance at him, Anne's eyes caressed him. A well-built fellow. Through the veil of ganja, the leprous sores did not look repulsive. What did he say? Meditation, yoga, the Gita?. Yes, that was what she had come for, all the way. She could not resist the offer. As if under a hypnotic spell, she dragged others along: 'Let's go.' And in one of those dark corners of the Rameswaram temple, the weaver from Paramakudi initiated the foreigners into a mystic world of 'medicine god' and meditation. As ganja smoke filled the air and their lungs, Anne had visions. It wasn't the leper but Krishna who stood before herLord Krishna uttering words of wisdom. She felt like a child trying to catch the meaning of every word. Leper Krishna, as he is locally called, rechristened her as Radha. He taught her to meditate, answered the questions that were nagging her all these years. Francis was dead so far as she was concerned. She had ditched him; buried him fathoms deep in her memory. Even after she had fallen under the spell of this bizarre romance,
Francis had stayed on in India for a few more days and tried to get back his lost love. No, it was all over. She had given him seven years of her life. That was enough. Vedic discourses and yoga classes went on. One thing led to the other. In the yoga lessons, the guru had to teach her the right posture, the correct placement of legs. Sometimes she needed his help. The magic touch dissolved all barriers. It was total surrender. Francis had won her body; Krishna conquered her body and soul. She wrote about him in her diary: 'You are my god. You speak like Lord Krishna.' They set up a love nest at Rameswaram. Just a room, a part of someone's house. The rent was Rs 20 a month. It was a dark and dingy place. Still, she loved it. She cooked food for him, washed his clothes, fanned the flies away from his sores, shared his bed, ate the leftover from his plate like a devout Hindu wife of old. All the money she had brought from home, over Rs 4,000, she spent on him. When it was over, she wrote to her parents and sister and got more. Though he did not believe in modern medicine, she got drugs from France to treat him. She did the domestic chores when he was out, preaching and guiding tourists. She went to the common tap on the roadside to fetch water. Once a week her fair hands would get dirtied with cowdung. The room had to be purified with cowdung water. There was also the binding factor of ganja between them. Life went on like a song till the bank balance touched the bottom. Then it struck a sour note. There were tiffs over money and the kind of medicine she wanted for herself. He believed in nature cure. Though she did not like to trouble her people in France too often, she wrote again asking for money. She also did something which she had never done beforepushing pot. But she soon got fed up with the business and gave it up.
Amidst their poverty, Anne fell sick. She had fever. For three months she was in that condition. After an interminable debate on nature cure, a local doctor was called. She was treated for malaria. It was not malaria. She became weak, pale and skinny. She was no longer the peach of a girl which she was earlier. More than the starvation and sickness, what hurt her the most was a sense of guilt, of being a burden on her god on earth. Instead of being a ministering angel to him, she needed his care now. She did not know what to do. v One of the French tourists who halted at Rameswaram, Elizabeth, came to her rescue. She got her in touch with the French consulate in Pondicherry. The inevitable parting came. Anne was convinced that she had to go. She told him. She would die if she did not go now. She would find some work in France, send him money, and come back after two years with more money. Then they could build an ashram. Krishna always dreamt of an ashram of his own. The French consul in Pondicherry got her admitted in a nursing home. She was suffering from typhoid, the doctors said. To the man's tearful letters from Paramakudi, she wrote back: 'Don't make me sad.' And September last, after forty-two months of this strange love life, Anne Marie took Air France's midnight flight, 177, to Paris. She is now at Grasse, the city of flowers, with her sister. From Grasse, Anne Marie writes to The Week-. 'I haven't got a job yet. I might move over to Paris. It is easier to find jobs there. And I want to get back to India soon, I will be more happy there. I'll get back as soon as I make enough money for return ticket . . .' For her dream-god, in faraway Paramakudi, love now comes via airmail. Occasionally, Anne sends him money. In the evenings
6 | THE BEST OF THE WEEK
Krishna sits alone on the banks of the Vaigai, building ashrams in the air. Won't she come back? The sands of Vaigai stir softly. MAXWELL FERNANDEZ
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi lying in state
11-17
November
1984
INDIRA GANDHI'S ASSASSINATION
DRESSED in a bright orange sari, which was soon to turn scarlet, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi emerged from her 1 Safdarjung Road residence at ten past nine. Hollywood star Peter Ustinov was waiting to interview her for an Irish television network. The cameras were ready on the lawns of the adjoining building, 1 Akbar Roadthe Prime Minister's residential office. Sharda Prasad, the PM's media adviser, had already joined the foreign TV crew for a last-minute check. Keeping pace with Mrs Gandhi's brisk walk towards a security passage, interlinking the two bungalows, was constable Narain Singh, with an umbrella in hand. Following them were R.K. Dhawan, the Prime Minister's aide for several years, G. Parthasarthi, her adviser on foreign affairs, and her trusted valet, Nathu Ram. With the Mexican silk trees in full bloom across the road, the morning carried a nip of the approaching winter. Everyone was oblivious of the lurking danger. Waiting in ambush inside the T M C gate, near which the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) commandos stored their weapons, was sub-inspector 'Beant Singh. He opened the gate
leading to 1 Akbar Road, and emptied the chamber of his .38 service revolver, shooting Mrs Gandhi five times from pointblank range. As the Prime Minister fell, the second assassin, constable Satwant Singh, rushed from a nearby booth and sprayed her with bullets. It was a deadly burst of twenty-five shots from a Sten gun. A bullet ricocheted off something and hit assistant subinspector Rameshwar Dayal in the thigh. Unmindful of it, he rushed to the aid of Mrs Gandhi, as others ran for cover. The critically wounded Prime Minister lay unattended for a while till Dr Opai, one of the doctors on duty at her house, summoned a vehicle. Immediately after the shooting, the assailants raised their hands in surrender. Two ITBP commandos, inspector T.S. Jamwal and constable Ram Saran, rushed ahead and locked their arms behind their backs before hustling them to a guardroom. What happened inside the room is a mystery. The assassins, when taken out from the room, were found riddled with bullets. The ITBP men testified later that they opened fire on the assailants when one of them tried to snatch their firearms inside the room. They claimed that Satwant, upon being asked why he had killed the Prime Minister, said: We have done what we wanted . . . Now you can do whatever you want.' Having taken seventeen shots at the PM's killers, the ITBP duo gave them up for dead. That Satwant was alive could be discovered only after the arrival of the local policemen. 'They are dead . . . we shot them,' one of the ITBP men is reported to have told the police. But on examination, it was found that Satwant still breathed. He was quickly removed to the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital along with Beant, whom the doctors pronounced dead. Two crack commandos were subsequently posted at the recovery room, where Satwant lay after an operation. He had to be kept alive to unravel the conspiracy which had stunned the nation.
People flock around the slain Prime Minister's body

So stringent was the security at the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital that the two commandos, who were under countersurveillance, were barred from coming out of the room. The doctors attending on Satwant, also selected after thorough screening, were warned in no uncertain terms against leaking out any information about the patient's condition. However, it is learnt that Satwant showed steady progress after the bullets were removed from his body. The local police were informed of the assassination attempt at 9.28 a.m.-within ten minutes. According to Home Secretary M.M.K. Wali, the assassins struck at 9.18 a.m. In the vehicle carrying Mrs Gandhi to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences was her daughter-in-law Sonia, besides Dr Opai and Dinesh Bhatt, personal security officer on duty. Sharda Prasad, waiting on the lawns nearby, was alerted by the gunshots and so was Bhatt. Sonia had come out rushing,
I N D I R A GANDHI'S ASSASSINATION | 11
dressed in her household clothes and was completely shaken by the sight of a blood-splattered Mrs Gandhi. It was chaos all round, with the security fortress reduced to a shambles. By the time Mrs Gandhi was put in the vehicle, Dhawan had regained composure. He and M.L. Fotedar, political adviser to Mrs Gandhi, joined the convoy which sped towards AIIMS. They left before doctors from the nearby Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, who were informed of the tragedy, could reach the PM's house. At the AIIMS casualty, the very sight of Mrs Gandhi lying on a stretcher, her eyes wide open and body wrapped in a blanket, unnerved the three junior doctors on duty. The initial flutter over, the medicos rose to the occasion. They attended to her and informed their seniors. Among the experts, the first to arrive was Dr J.S. Guleria, head of the department of medicine. He was followed by other senior doctors including P. Venugopal of the department of cardio-thoracic surgery, Prof. G.R. Gode of the department of anaesthesiology, Prof. M.M. Kapur, and Dr I.K. Dhawan, head of the department of surgery. There was virtually no delay in shifting Mrs Gandhi to the operation theatre. 'As it happened during morning hours, the assisting staff was already there to carry out another major surgery,' said a senior doctor. 'We took the PM straight to the eighth floor, cancelling the other operation.' For Dr Guleria, the physician, it was the 'second early morning calamity'. He was among the doctors summoned to Teen Murti Bhavan when Nehru died. 'Years back I had cut her father's veins and this time . . .', he was at a loss for words. Catherine Thomas, the matron in charge of the operation theatre, too had attended on Nehru as a staff nurse, and also on Sanjay Gandhi during an operation he underwent in the Emergency days. In her twenty-four years of service, the 31 October experience was the most traumatic. By the time Dr K.P. Mathur, medical superintendent of the
Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital and Mrs Gandhi's personal physician for twenty years reached AIIMS, the Prime Minister was already on the operation table. He remained with the AIIMS doctors all through, struggling to revive the patient he had known so well. It was a battle against all odds as, according to one version, Mrs Gandhi was 'dead when brought to the hospital.' She was kept alive 'clinically' on the heart-lung bypass machine put at around 10.30 a.m. and taken off at 2.20 p.m. when the doctors finally gave up hope. As the heart-lung bypass was done by Dr Venugopal, the cardio-thoracic expert was shown to be heading the expert team. 'Otherwise it was a group of equals, all of them specialists in their respective fields,' explained an AIIMS official. He said the 'wretched' death certificate was signed around 2.30 p.m. after which the Institute formally pronounced Mrs Gandhi dead. When Mrs Gandhi was on the operation table, almost every drug that could possibly have been used was made available to the doctors. Stored in a side room were sophisticated medical equipment like the electroencephalogram, which is used to ascertain whether the brain is alive or not. It, however, was not used. The medical experts, after putting Mrs Gandhi on the heartlung bypass machine, began 'repairing' the damaged organs, sans the heart, which was somewhat intact. The machine maintained the 'oxygenization and temperature of the body tissues'. Explained a doctor: 'The machine keeps the blood circulation going, even though the heart may not function . . . It is a machine which bypasses the heart and the lung to pump blood.' As Mrs Gandhi had lost a lot of blood, nearly eighty-eight bottles of blood were used during the operation. Additional supplies of her O Rh negative blood group were brought from the Red Cross Society. 'But nothing helped. Her body had simply been blasted off, except the face. Below the neck, it was
I N D I R A GANDHI'S ASSASSINATION | 13
all wounds,' remarked a surgeon. He said that was why the body was shown to the family, including Rajiv, only after it was embalmed. Sonia, who, after arriving at the hospital, had complained of some 'chest problem', which a doctor described as asthma, recovered after some time. She had wept bitterly in the casualty ward, but slipped into a glum silence later. She remained seated outside the operation theatre on the eighth floor, where Rajiv, who flew in from West Bengal, joined her around 3.35 p.m. He came to the hospital accompanied by Amitabh Bachchan, the superstar family friend. Among those who received Rajiv at the hospital included Parliamentary Affairs Minister Buta Singh, who had suddenly taken ill. Buta Singh lay on his hospital bed, staring at the ceiling. When we approached him for his comments, he simply folded his hands. By his bedside was a weeping MP from Tamil Nadu. Mrs Gandhi's grandchildren, Priyanka and Rahul, were with their mother outside the operation theatre before Rajiv's arrival. Priyanka left in the evening. Rahul stayed put. Maneka Gandhi, the estranged daughter-in-law, came with her son Varun, first in the morning and then in the afternoon. During her second visit, Maneka anxiously inquired, 'What has happened? I am hearing all sorts of rumours.' She was referring to a message flashed by a news agency announcing Mrs Gandhi's demise long before it was officially made known. The police outside the hospital had a tough time controlling the crowd, whose number was swelling with each passing hour. Besides the VIPs, who were allowed near the operation theatre, many commoners and pressmen reached the eighth floor. In the prevailing confusion, the wounded ASI Rameshwar Dayal lay unattended. Then a senior doctor noticed Dayal and deputed his juniors to look after him, whose injuries fortunately were not very serious. As the dressing rooms opposite the operation theatres of the
hospital were occupied by chief ministers, Central leaders and bureaucrats, the doctors were left with no place to change clothes. It was not a time to complain, they knew it well. Dr H.D. Tandon, whose tenure as director of AIIMS was to end that day, was as active as others. While Dr A.N. Safaya, the medical superintendent, held fort downstairs, Dr Tandon camped on the eighth floor. The crowds were quite hopeful of Mrs Gandhi surviving the crisis. But when Fotedar was seen leaving the hospital around 12 o' clock in a limousine, to be followed an hour later by R.K. Dhawan and Artin Nehru, rumours began flying. While Arun Nehru had mumbled while leaving that 'nothing can be said now,' Dhawan said, 'She's still in the operation theatre.' Newsmen got the first definite indication of Mrs Gandhi's death from an intelligence official. He was heard telling, 'Woh to khatam ho gay en? (She is no more.) Later, he rang up the special assistant of Home Minister Narasimha Rao, saying that the minister should come straight to the hospital from the airport upon his arrival from Warangal. It was around 3.25 p.m. and Rajiv arrived a few minutes later, a white scarf with saffron border around his neck. He was wearing dark glasses. One was reminded that Mrs Gandhi had worn dark glasses while taking the mortal remains of Sanjay to 1 Akbar Road from Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in June 1980. The crowds then shouted, ' S a n j a y bhaiya kahan gaye? (Where has brother Sanjay gone?) Now the crowd wailed, 'Indira Gandhi amar rahe.' By the time President Zail Singh reached AIIMS, cutting short his foreign tour, the news of Mrs Gandhi's death was public knowledge. Indications of the impending communal violence, which was to engulf the whole of India, specially Delhi, were already there. A motorcycle lay smouldering on the road as the presidential motorcade swerved into the institute, with some people even pelting stones on it. The police, demoralized as they were by the killing of the
INDIRA GANDHI'S ASSASSINATION | 15
Prime Minister by her own securitymen, were found completely wanting in controlling the mob frenzy, which spread on the Aurobindo Marg, on which AIIMS is located, with government and private vehicles belonging to one community being set ablaze. The crowd around the hospital melted only after Mrs Gandhi's body was removed to 1 Safdarjung Road in the night. Next morning, the scene shifted to Teen Murti Bhavan, where the body was kept in state till the funeral on 3 November, and scores of other areas in Delhi where mad mobs, returning after paying homage to the departed leader, indulged in incidents reminiscent of Partition days. VINOD SHARMA AND G.K. SINGH
16-22
December 1 9 8 4
THE BHOPAL TRAGEDY.
DEATH came like a thief in the middle of the night when the storage tanks of the giant Rs 25-crore Union Carbide plant at Chola on the south-western outskirts of Bhopal, capital of sprawling Madhya Pradesh, started leaking deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas on 2 December. Within minutes, a thick fog had engulfed Jayaprakash Nagar, a vast slum which had sprung up in front of the factory, and the residents started coughing. First it was persistent coughing and irritation of the eyes and then thousands gasped for air as the deadly gas, a derivative of cyanide, deactivated the haemoglobin in the blood. At 1.30 a.m. a newsman of the Hindi agency, Hindustan Samachar, was woken up by the persistent ringing of his telephone. Thinking that it may be one of those crank calls, he took the receiver off the hook. Within minutes, his daughter came with the news that a strange gas had started leaking out of the Union Carbide plant. He telephoned the police control room. The officer on the line was the superintendent of police himself. 'Run,' he said, 'and don't ask for any reasons. Just get your family together and run.' Such was the panic that gripped Bhopal.
A child affected by gas being treated
By 2.30 a.m. on Monday, 3 December, Bhopal was in a state of panic. The dead lay unattended as thousands fled their homes into the cold countryside. In the heart of the city, the sprawling Hamidia Hospital started getting its first patients while nobody knew what exactly was wrong. The company's officials refused to divulge what had happened. The factory authorities insist that the siren was sounded but they are not certain when this was done. The leakage started a little after midnight and it was reportedly plugged at 1.40 a.m. on Monday after nearly 30 tonnes of MIC had escaped into the air. Those living in Jayaprakash Nagar say that they did hear a siren but it was around 2 a.m. when the gas had already done its damage. Javed Khan, a private taxi-owner, said that he heard the siren when he and eleven members of his family were fleeing in his tiny vehicle, 'but by then the angel of death had already come'. Similar stories were heard from many of those who are undergoing treatment in Hamidia Hospital. At the Amarpali Social Service Centre, Abida Begum insisted that she heard the siren at 3 a.m. when she had started vomiting blood. She was brought to the hospital before dawn. Over 500 people had been admitted to Hamidia Hospital; Bhopal's other three hospitals were carrying their load as well. But the strange part was that the city's administration had collapsed; there was not one government official to release even the most elementary information about what had happened. 'It was like the scenes which I saw in films about World War II. Streets strewn with bodies and an exodus of people running for safety,' commented a journalist. Men, women and children were running away from the city. Some escaped from the old city to the new city. Some walked, admirably enough even under such pressure, as long as 20 km. But some failed to reach places of safety. They died on their way. The affluent rushed out in their vehicles. VIPs were the fastest to get out of Bhopal. At
T H E BHOPAL TRAGEDY I 19
the railway station, few survived. The station superintendent, Harish Durve, died in his chair in his room where the body of the booking clerk was also found. The control room had become a gas chamber where all the employees had fallen unconscious. All traffic had stopped and for eight hours the station was like a graveyard. A pall of gas was over Bhopal followed by a pall of gloom. The tragedy took a toll of over 3,000 human lives and a similar number of catde. Five thousand people were seriously affected and over 1,00,000 were taken ill. The majority of the victims were children. A large number of pregnant women lost their babies. Many thousands became blind. The areas affected were Kenchi-Chola, Jayaprakash Nagar, Tila Jamalpura, the railway station and Chandwad. Here people had huddled together and died and there was no count of the number of the dead even as late as Thursday when things had come back to normal. In areas like Jehangirbad, Chotabazar and the surrounding suburbs, people fled. When reporters visited the heart of Bhopal on Tuesday, it was eerie: every door was locked and most streets were empty; only a few people were wandering aimlessly around. Of Bhopal's population of 1 million (unofficial figure is 1.2 million), over 5,00,000 had fled in one night. The surrounding towns do not have the facilities to absorb such an exodus. Indore, two hours away, Dewas, Hosangabad, Obaidullanagar and other small towns were suddenly inundated with gasping and mostly dying people. In Obaidullanagar alone, forty people died on Tuesday and this was the official figure. The Union Carbide factory had become Yama' for the citizens of Bhopal. Not that they did not have suspicions or fears about the chemicals being used in the plant. Earlier, there had been cases of dangerous gas leakages from the factory. But the company's political clout and high-level influence had saved it every time. Ministers, who used to assure the people every time
about the safety of the city, were the first to abandon it. For many long hours there was no administration and no one to help the unfortunate people of Bhopal. Perhaps one cannot blame the officials totally. For no one could ever have imagined such a catastrophe and the administration was illequipped to face such a situation. People were left to fend for themselves. As they ran, some fell down and died. The majority of them were the poorest of the poor, emaciated, undernourished and with no resistance. Those who bore the brunt first were the slum-dwellers outside the factory complex. With them died their cattle as a number of dairies were located in the area. The gas was deadly. A few minutes of inhaling congested the lungs. After a shorter period of contact, one felt itching of the throat, eyes and stomach and then nausea. According to Professor Heeresh Chandran, who was in charge of the post-mortem of the victims, the cause of death in most cases was pulmonary oedema. It was respiratory failure due to collection of fluid in the lungs. The lungs of the dead had 250 to 300 cc of fluid. In the hospitals thousands waited outside for medical aid. There were hardly enough doctors and nurses. On the first day, there were not enough medicines. Hospital corridors were converted into intensive care units. A rope was tied from one end of the corridor to the other to hand saline and glucose bottles. While the hospital staff was finding it difficult to attend to thousands of serious cases, about 1,00,000 people with minor complaints thronged the hospitals for attention. The four medical institutions in the city, Katju Hospital, J.P. Hospital, Hamidia Hospital and Women's Hospital, were forced to admit many more people than they could accommodate. Inside the hospitals, the scenes were heart-rending. The cries of babies and screams of older people filled the air. On the first day, there was hardly anything to eat. People did not even know whether they could drink water; no one knew whether the poisonous gas had contaminated the water supply or not.
In their homes many people did not know whether they could eat vegetables and cereals. There was no one to clear their doubts. In fact, the doubts persisted even after three days. 'What about the standing crops?' many asked. 'The experts are studying,' was the answer. By afternoon of the first day, as attempts were being made in hospitals to revive patients, efforts were also made to revive the collapsed administrative machinery. Chief Minister Arjun Singh, who denied having fled the city, announced the arrest of five top bosses of the Union Carbide factory. He also announced die decision to close the factory. He ordered a judicial inquiry and, two days later, it was announced that Justice N.K. Singh would head the commission. There were vultures to take advantage of the tragic situation. Petrol prices touched Rs 25 a litre. Some private doctors overcharged. Auto-rickshaw drivers made a fast buck. But there were some shining examples too. Many voluntary organizations in the city, churches and gurdwaras came out to assist. Students, NCC cadets, the Girl Guides and Scouts were in hospitals and residential colonies offering help. Bread, milk and fruit were brought in for the victims. Even mohalla committees were formed to organize aid on a vast scale. The second day saw a somewhat better organization in the hospitals: 600 doctors and nurses from nearby district hospitals were summoned to help the local staff. Some specialists from New Delhi were also brought to Bhopal by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But the problem on the second day was the disposal of the dead. Hundreds of bodies lay unclaimed in Hamidia Hospital. Thousands queued up to identify the bodies. Many poor people could not claim the bodies as they did not have the money to carry out the last rites. Bhopal's divisional commissioner then had a bright idea. He reportedly asked the municipal commissioner to cremate 350 bodies together at the Vishramghat ground which, ironically, is
close to the factory. The municipal commissioner requested the city engineer to persuade the committee in-charge of the cremation ground to agree to the 'proposal.' He showed the commissioner's note to the committee in the presence of an MLA. The committee refused to give any written permission. Instead, it asked for a photograph and death certificate of each body. The area surrounding the Union Carbide factory could be spotted easily from a distance as vultures were hovering over it. Hundreds of dead buffaloes were lying around. It was tragic that the caste system operated even when Bhopal was facing such a tragedy. There were few people to remove the bodies as members of the community who normally did the job were affected by the gas. Chief Minister Arjun Singh admitted the shameful situation. He said that 'people who remove the bodies of dead cattle' were being brought to Bhopal from nearby towns and villages.
On the second day, the rush to the hospitals increased. Unable to cope with the crowd, tents were pitched on the hospital lawns, thanks to the timely help of the Indian Army. Volunteers were seen assisting the nurses and doctors by carrying serious patients on stretchers and distributing medicines. State transport buses, corporation trucks, jeeps, three-wheelers and cars carried patients to the hospitals and bodies to the cremation grounds. By afternoon, the voluntary force was reinforced by sisters of Asha Niketan, workers of political parties, members of Bhopal Jaycees and Lions Club. At the factory, sleuths of the CBI began the interrogation of members of the staff, and experts of the Government of India and state government began deliberations on the next step. The second day also saw the visit of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to the city which galvanized the administration. He announced grants of Rs 40 lakh from the Prime Minister's Relief Fund and Rs 5 lakh from the Congress which gave the state government some hope. Rajiv Gandhi went straight to Hamidia Hospital to console the ill. To most of them, his coming was a blessing in disguise. Medicines which were mostly absent on Monday suddenly made their appearance. By the third day, the city slowly started limping back to normalcy. The administration decided to destroy the 30 tonnes of gas that remained and asked experts to find a way to do this. The factory's experts are reported to have said that it would take them three weeks to do this. But when the accident occurred, 30 tonnes of the gas had escaped in two hours. The state government which was always shy to deal strictly with the Union Carbide factory, appointed an inquiry commission, a committee to work out the compensation issue and another committee to plan rehabilitation work. The government is also reportedly making arrangements to file a damage suit against the company for $ 15 billion (Rs 1,800 crore) in a US court. With three committees
having been appointed, unpleasant queries could be evaded with stock responses like 'a commission has been appointed' or 'the committee would look into everything.' The Governor, K.M. Chandy, returned to the city from Bombay on Wednesday. In the hospitals, relief money was distributed, Rs 500 to those taken ill, Rs 1,000 to those who are seriously ill, and Rs 10,000 to the families of those killed. The collapse of the administration in the first two days was such that no one knew how many were killed. So much so that by the third day, newsmen who kept a tab on cremation and burial grounds had more accurate figures of those killed than the state administration had. Even then, few people knew what immediate steps should be taken if affected by the gas. But by the third day, an alert information department put up advertisements and ensured that All India Radio made announcements on the dos and don'ts for those suffering from gas poisoning. Even days after the incident, no one in Bhopal knew the long-term effects of the poisoning. The treatment given was for symptoms, a fact which was admitted by V.P. Sathe, minister for chemicals. In any other place such an incident would have resulted in the rolling of some heads responsible for the tragedy. But in Bhopal only five executives of Union Carbide were arrested but allowed to stay in the factory premises to help run the plant and be of assistance should any emergency occur. Had such a tragedy happened in the US, Union Carbide would have been worried about its survival. For in the US the compensation to be paid to such victims is high and the law and courts are very severe on such lapses. The company did not have to worry on that count about the Bhopal tragedy. Moreover, the state government has appointed a commission to negotiate the compensation terms. It was indeed a welcome development for the company as an out of court settlement would be simpler and
less expensive. However, to be fair, Chief Minister Arjun Singh made it clear that the appointment of the committee would not affect the process of law. He said that the law would take its own course. According to legal experts, there was nothing much for Union Carbide to worry about as the laws in India are not as stringent as they are in the US, specially in the case of compensation. In the first week of December, there was only one state capital in India which was not affected by the election fever raging all over the country. Yet, there were discussions on the impact of the tragedy on the elections. Chief Minister Arjun Singh called friendly senior journalists and requested them not to 'blow up' the issue at this juncture. However, in Bhopal the mood was transparent. The state capital, which is a stronghold of the Congress(I), was no longer congenial for the ruling party whose main worry was that the Opposition would try to make an election issue of the tragedy. The party feared that if the role of multinational companies and the part their executives play was blown up, it might cause inconvenience to people like Arun Nehru, general secretary of AICC, and Arun Singh, parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister; both of whom joined politics after leaving their jobs with multinational organizations. However, in Bhopal there was no big effort by the political parties to exploit the issue for election purposes. There were reasons for this. The tragedy that struck Bhopal was far too serious. In such circumstances, there was no place to take up narrow political issues. Indeed, Bhopal has raised some far more serious issues which will have their impact on the industrial and environmental life of India. In industry, a fresh study of the functioning of multinational companies is the immediate demand. Whether multinationals ignore the safety standards practised in developed countries is a serious question. Indeed, N.K. Singh will study this at length. If multinationals have double standards in their operations, even on such crucial aspects like safety
measures, a fresh policy towards them will be justified. There is another aspect to the whole issue. No development is worth it if it is to ignore life itself. In this context, the relevance of environmental aspects cannot be minimized. In any case, the policy to locate factories producing dangerous chemicals at remote places needs to be strictly enforced. Human error and failure of machines cannot be controlled. Such cases will be repeated even if the machinery is sophisticated and the men handling it are experienced and efficient. What is needed is to keep such factories away from habitation. The costly lesson of Bhopal should open the eyes of the administration in the country: if ignored, it can only be at our peril. K. GOPALAKRISHNAN AND ASHOK ROW KAVI
Madhava Rao (centre), the first Indian with a new heart, gets a fresh lease of life
21-27 July
1985
FIRST I N D I A N WITH A NEW HEART
MADHAVA Rao was genuinely surprised, and even a bit alarmed, when he first learnt that his heart was letting him down. He had always taken good care of his body and was a champion athlete in college and used to play strenuous games like tennis and cricket, but at the age of forty-five his heart was beating it into him that he wasn't the fit fiddle he thought himself to be. He had gone for a medical check-up and had told the doctors that he had difficulty in breathing. The doctors put him on the electro-cardiograph machine and found that his left ventricle was not doing its work properly. It is the left ventricle, one of the four chambers in the double pump called heart, that sends purified blood to different parts of the body through the aorta, the biggest blood vessel. For the first time in his life, Rao was hospitalized. He spent twenty days in hospital and when the doctors told him that he was fit to resume work, he went back to the Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. (BHEL) plant in Bhopal where he was general manager, operations. This was in September 1976 and Rao
certainly did not imagine then that he would have to go for a new heart in less than nine years. After all, heart transplant operations were still a media event and no Indian had yet received a new heart and survived. Rao did not know then that he would be the first Indian to walk with another person's heart in his chest. Even though Rao went back to work after recovering from the ventricle problem, he never felt fit and was often apprehensive about his heart's condition. In April 1983, by which time he had risen in BHEL as executive director, the problem recurred. He was again hospitalized but his health continued to worsen. Lie was losing weight rapidly and it looked as if he did not have many more months to live. His sister and her husband, Vathsala and Shripathi Holla, were alarmed by his condition when they came from the US to attend the marriage of Rao's brother. As both were doctors (Shripathi is a neurosurgeon and his wife a neonatologist), they could make out that he was sinking. They invited him to the US for better treatment and he accepted. In April, Rao was in his sister's home at Clarks Summit in Pennsylvania. His wife, Indira, went with him. In Pennsylvania, Rao would undergo a hundred medical tests. The ones he had at the Community Medical Centre in Scranton were just the beginning. It was another Rao (Dr M. Rao) who led the team of doctors who examined him and they came to the conclusion that his heart was so bad that even surgery would not make it function better. They frankly told him that he might live with that heart for six months at the most. The doctors clearly explained to him the options before him. He could live with the heart uncertainly for six months; or he could get it replaced with another heart, though there was the risk of his dying on the operation table itself. And the cost of the operation would be enormousas much as $100,000 (approximately, Rs 12 lakh).
The chance of death immediately after an ordinary heart transplant is not much these days. Some reputed hospitals in the US have been performing heart transplants as a matter of routine and their success rate has been improving with the availability of new drugs and with surgeons becoming more confident. The survival rate was only 20 per cent in the late 1960s but now it is over 80 per cent. Besides, nearly 50 per cent of those with transplanted hearts live more than five years. Rao and his wife pondered over the statistics provided to them by Vathsala and Shripathi. He was then convinced that the risk was very low in his casejust 3 per cent. But the financial aspect still worried him. Vathsala believed life was more valuable than money and so she and her husband said they would bear most of the expenses. Once Rao made up his mind to go for another heart, his case was referred to Dr W. Davis and Dr John Pennock of the Milton Hershey Medical Centre at Hershey, Pennsylvania. The doctors studied the case history and evaluated the need, or rather necessity, of a new heart and then accepted Rao for transplant operation. They asked him to come back to the Medical Centre on 14 May for clinical examination and psychological tests to determine if he was fit, mentally as well as physically, to receive a new heart. The selection process is very strict since heart transplant does not just mean ripping a heart from one person and sticking it in another. Though a heart transplant is not a very complicated surgery, several factors have to be taken into account since it demands a great deal of precision in matching. There are many things to be considered. Normally, heart transplant is done only in end-stage patients with intractable diseases who, without transplant, may not live more than a few months. Doctors usually ask themselves four fundamental questions before accepting a heart transplant patient. Is the patient sick enough to warrant it? Is the patient so sick that it
FIRST I N D I A N WITH A NEW HEART | 31
may prove to be of no use? Can the patient's ailment be controlled with conventional medical or surgical therapy? Are there any absolute contraindications to heart transplant? Contraindications are symptoms or circumstances that indicate that the transplant is unsuitable for the patient. There are several contraindications to a normal heart transplant. One of them is severe and irreversible pulmonary hypertension, though some such patients can have a new heart along with new lungs. If the patient is more than fifty-five years old, that is also considered to be a contraindication. Among other contraindications are: active infection, cancerous tumours, general lack of nutrition, severe trouble with the liver or kidney or lungs and insulin-dependent diabetes. Significant psychological abnormalities and any inability of the patient to have proper care after the transplant are also taken as contraindications. In the case of Madhava Rao, everything was fitting. He was under fifty-five (he was born on 6 October 1931) and his immune system was in fine condition, his psychological profile was good and there was no serious trouble with his liver or kidney. No diabetes or cancerous tumours either. After the tests on 24 May, Rao was told to come back to the hospital for registering himself as a patient for heart transplant. On 28 May his name was put in the hospital computer's active waiting list so that he would automatically be called when a suitable donor heart became available. The doctors told him that, normally, a patient had to wait for four or five weeks to get the new heart. In some cases, the time would be much less. It all depended on the location of the transplant centre, the available donor pool, and the efficiency of the different organ bank networks. At that point of time, it seemed, no one knew where Rao's second heart was or who was carrying it around. Rao left the hospital along with Vathsala at 6 p.m. on 28 May and reached her home two hours later. Within a few
minutes, the telephone rang. The call was from Milton Hershey Medical Centre. The caller informed Rao that a donor heart had been found for him and it matched him satisfactorily. Could he come immediately? the caller asked. Rao and Vathsala started back to the hospital and this time Shripathi, too, was with them. Around midnight, the hospital admitted Rao as a potential recipient of a heart transplant. A few hours earlier, an accident victim had died in a hospital somewhere in the US. As the victim's family, which wanted to remain anonymous, was willing to donate the heart, the hospital immediately called Kidney One, an agency that supplies organs to hospitals. Kidney One, in turn, contacted the Milton Hershey Medical Centre, which after going through the data on the dead person, decided that the heart would fit Rao. The donor's size, weight and blood type matched Rao's needs and the donor was under forty, which is the age limit fixed for heart donors since coronary artery diseases are common beyond this age. The accident victim did not have any contraindication to heart donation, such as heart diseases, active infection or diabetes. Rao was extremely lucky in getting a donor heart so quickly, when more than 400 patients die awaiting donors every year in the US, after registering for heart transplant. In fact, in a year, 75,000 Americans need new hearts but the availability is only 2,000 or so. There are more people (though their number is not very large) who are willing to donate hearts but the criteria for donation are strict and in some cases doctors lack motivation, just like most people who are opposed to or not bothered about donating their hearts. While the heart was being removed from an anonymous person's body in a place unknown to him, Rao himself was being readied for the operation. It was late in the nightthe small hours of Wednesday, 29 Maybut immuno-suppress drugs had to be given four hours before the transplant. The
donor heart, which was yet to arrive, would be of no use if more than four hours were allowed to lapse after it was removed from the body. So Rao had to be on the operation table and the surgeons could take their scalpels the moment the heart arrived. The immuno-suppress drugs were given so that his body may not reject the new heart or anything foreign that came with it. One such drug used on Rao was Gyclosporine, which had helped pioneer American heart transplanter, Dr Norman Shumway, save the life of many of his patients. Other immunosuppress drugs that are normally used are Immuran and steriods. In the meantime, doctors had done a cross-matching of donor lymphocytes (white blood cells in lymphatic cells) with the recipient's serum in their search for antibodies in Rao against the donor cells. The presence of such antibodies would have created problems. Rao was taken to the operation theatre at five in the morning. The heart-lung machine, which would perform the functions of his heart and lungs during the operation, was checked. But the doctors waited for the signal from Kidney One that everything was all right and that the donor heartput in a sterile container of icewas on its way to Milton Hershey. At 8 a.m., a helicopter landed on the hospital's helipad and a medical man hurried out with the heart from Kidney One. Milton Hershey doctors examined it. It was in good condition. Only then did the surgeons make incisions in Rao's chest. He was connected to the heart-lung machine and the heart was stopped by using conventional crystalloid potassium. The main veins carrying blood to the heart and the aorta and the pulmonary artery, which carries blood to the lungs, had been cut. The damaged heart was removed and the new heart was put in. The surgeons sewed the vessels with their hands. Then the heart was started, using an artificial pacemaker. The heart went tick-tick, tick-tick, its normal double beat. The operation took exactly an hour. The surgeons led by Dr
John Pennock had opened up Rao's chest at 8.30 a.m. They sewed up the vessels at 9.30 a.m. It was the first successful heart transplant on an Indian. Rao was then carried to the critical care unit for cardiac, transplant patients. At night he woke up from anaesthesia and responded well to commands. Still, as a precaution, he was attached to a breathing tube. The next morning he was on his own and the respirator was removed. And within three days, the artificial pacemaker and chest tubes were also taken away. Now Rao was transferred to the post-operative care unit and was kept in 'reverse isolation' so that he was protected from outside influences. He spent twenty-three days in the hospital and had weekly biopsies of heart to see if there were any indications of his body rejecting the new heart. He himself could see on a screen how this test was being done. The doctors inserted a tube through a vein in the neck into the heart and he could see them picking up a heart muscle with a tweezer. Rao was discharged from the hospital on 20 June but biopsies of the heart were still being taken once every two weeks and then once a month. After three months, doctors told him that he could return to India and resume normal work. On 30 June when The Week met him in his sister's house, Rao looked very fine and completely normal. He was eating well and preparing his coffee and there were no dietary restrictions. He was doing normal work without any difficulty and was walking two miles every day. However, he was taking the precaution of not lifting heavy objects or stretching his arms for fear that jerks may break the stitches in the chest. He said about himself: 'I am now a new man and have interest in everything. New life has made me very happy. I'm mentally alert and physically active.' He hoped to resume work with more energy and enthusiasm. The happiest person was Rao's wife, Indira. She said: 'Whatever he got is like a bonus for me. I am now ready to
donate my organs.' Just then Rao noted that, despite his new heart, he had no change in his feelings and emotions. M.S. JAYASCHANDRAN WITH HASMUKH SHAH IN PENNSYLVANIA
20-26 October 1985
ISLAMIC BOMB?
'YOU have been here for some days. Do you think it is a police state?' This was the first question Pakistani President Gen. Ziaul-Haq put to me soon after I was ushered in. The meeting with Gen. Zia took place seven days after my arrival in Pakistan at his working residence in Rawalpindi rather than his official residence at Army House. Clean and dapper in his well-tailored clothes, Gen. Zia's greeting was effusive as he began reminiscing about his old college, my alma mater, St. Stephen's College, Delhi. But nothing in the pleasant week prior to the interview had prepared me for that first question. I had, during those days, visited Lahore twice, Peshawar and Murree, where the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been detained for a while. The most striking impression was that of the Afghan refugees in Peshawar, who are said to be one in seven there. The day we reached Peshawar also happened to be the last day of Muharram. It was, in fact, the only time one saw the police out in full force. Outward indications of martial law were, on the whole, few and far between. Benazir Bhutto's residence, in the Clifton area of Karachi,
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with President Zia-ul-Haq
the busiest city of Pakistan and its commercial centre, was one such place. She is still under house arrest, the house being guarded by half a dozen policemen who looked far from alert. A mobile police unit too is present. Not far from the Bhutto house is the residence of Fatima Ali Jinnah, sister of Quaid-eAzam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The mansion, which covers a large area, is in a dilapidated condition. One wondered if those massive gates had ever been opened since the death of Miss Jinnah. Mohenjo Daro too was on the itinerary. The body of Bhutto's son, Shanawaz, who died in Paris of unknown causes, had been brought to this airport and driven to Bhutto's home town Larkhana, 28 km away. The coffin was escorted by 150 cars and greeted by a 'peaceful crowd'. But even now, days after that event, the Mohenjo Daro airport terminal is full of security personnel. One trip not on the itinerary, but nevertheless arranged, was to the Wagah border. It was a strange feeling to catch a glimpse of India from the other side of the border. The Pakistan Rangers who man the border are stationed just 3 metres away from the Indian frontier post. What struck one was the physique of the Pakistani soldiers. Each one was over 6 feet tall with the built to go with it. Contrary to popular belief, a Sikh and a non-Sikh were on the Indian side. And it was not an exception, we were informed. An easy informality exists between the soldiers of the two countries, though there is a line, figuratively and literally speaking, that neither would ever cross. Courtesy and friendliness marked every visit and every meeting. Government officials, journalists, academicians, diplomats, architects and scholars in the arts were some of the people I met. Everyone had the same thing to say: "We are bending over backwards to be friendly with India. Why does not India reciprocate?' Another common refrain was: 'India dismembered Pakistan. It will take us years to forget that episode.'
ISLAMIC BOMB? I 39
In his interview, Gen. Zia too stressed the same points. Present during the interview were Majid Mufti, secretary, information and broadcasting, and Khalid Ali, director-general of external publicity. The interview was recorded by Gen. Zia as well. Excerpts: Mammen Mathew: Your excellency, you've met Rajiv Gandhi twice. Do you feel that he is in any way different from Mrs Indira Gandhi? Do you see any change in New Delhi towards Pakistan? Gen. Zia-ul-Haq: Sorry to see a very sad exit of Madam Gandhi. We find that Rajiv Gandhi has brought with him his youthful experience, his pleasing manners, his dynamism as the Prime Minister of India and from that point of view we are very hopeful for a better relationship with India not only to normalize our relationship but to improve it. I have had three meetings with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and we hope that together we can show to the others that neighbours can be friendlier.
Q; The biggest stumbling block to bettering of relations now seems to be the nuclear bomb question. How do you propose to convince India that you do not intend to make the bomb? A: I really do not know whether this is a stumbling block or not. Many people have asked me what the biggest stumbling block is and I told them that Kashmir apart, the biggest stumbling block is the mistrust, misconceptions . . . apprehensions about each other. Whether we have a nuclear programme, whether it is peaceful or not, is not relevant at this stage. But with regard to the nuclear programme, I personally feel we have no one to be convinced. Because I leave it to your logic and your judgement whether it is necessary for a large country like India to assure her smaller neighbours that she is not after some hegemonistic designs or militarism, or chauvinism, that she does not want to bully her neighbours, to put it very crudely, or is it necessary for smaller neighbours like Pakistan to convince India that our intention is peaceful {laughs). It is the other way around. But Pakistan's nuclear programmea very modest programmeis for peaceful purposes. Q: Will Pakistan be able to give a satisfactory explanation for the use of enriched uranium? A: That is another aspect of this. Pakistan's nuclear programme, as I said, is for peaceful purposes. It is a very modest research programme and we have been able to acquire successfully the technology for enrichment of uranium. In a peaceful nuclear programme, or in any nuclear programme, you can convert it into a non-peaceful one any time you like. It is within one's capability. But Pakistan's requirement is not to have a military capability which Pakistan can be very boastful and proud of. Pakistan's problem is in the developmental field. And in order to develop our country, we have to find ways and means of fulfilling the aspirations and ambitions of the people of Pakistan. Without energy, you can't do anything. Pakistan's energy requirements are immense. Its resources are very limited. We
ISLAMIC BOMB? I 41
have practically reached a kind of ceiling in what we can get through hydroelectricity. There is the Kalabagh Dam project, which will come in ten years' time. But after ten years, our energy requirement would be so much that even Kalabagh Dam will not be able to fulfil it. Therefore, Pakistan has got to have a nuclear energy programme. In order to have a nuclear energy programme, we ought to have a complete, self-sufficient indigenous nuclear fuel cycle. In that fuel cycle, enrichment of uranium fills a very important part. And the assessment is that you need something like twenty reactors by the end of the century. And the total programme can be indigenous. This is the reason why Pakistan has acquired uranium enrichment capability, not only for making a bomb, but for peaceful purposes. Q; The other thing that has been in the minds of most of us in India has been the allegation that you are training the Sikh terrorists. Is there any truth in the reports that some training camps have been held to help the Sikhs? A: There must be some aims and objectives. If I and the Government of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan want a peaceful relationship, every effort must be made to achieve that end. If we do not want a peaceful relationship, all our actions must be oriented towards having friction with India. Now, for the last eight years, Pakistan has proved to a sufficient degree that we want to have a peaceful relationship with India. Therefore, Pakistan also does not tolerate any interference from outside. Why should Pakistan, if it is a responsible state, interfere in the internal affairs of India? This is my first argument. The second argument is that in a border like (that between) Pakistan and India a lot of smuggling activity takes place. Not only on this side, but also on the western side. And in India's case, not only on this border but also with the other three states which you have, smuggling takes place. And in that smuggling
activity, sometimes a lot of things happen. A year ago we found that something must have gone from this side. And from the other side came the weapons in order to subvert our elements. There are certain elements in each state which have their own activities. And it is their activities which are projected in a wrong manner. And I think, perhaps, I do not say that the Prime Minister is such a naive person or the Government of India comprises such people who can be swayed but I think this is a process of misinformation which is continuously being fed to the Prime Minister and certain officials. I give you an example. Presume Pakistan is all out to make the best result of the current situation, and they want to escalate insurgency in East Punjab. Now our efforts should be similar to the ones which India did in the case of Bangladesh. You compare the two. Compare the effort which India did in training Mukti Bahini to whatever allegation is being made against Pakistan. If the effort is to that size, I accept the blame that West Pakistan is all out to destabilize, but if the effort is not anywhere to that size, it must be construed that it is not the Pakistan Government or its agencies which are interfering in India's internal affairs. It is to the contrary. Q: So, there was no strategic policy on your part to destabilize our nation? A: To destabilize . . ? It is not in our interest. Why should we indulge in this? I consider myself as part of many of the Indians who must have been overjoyed by the election in Punjab. And I am one of them because at least it proves that it is the Akali Dal which has won and not Pakistan's efforts. Q: I think there is a general sense of relief in Pakistan after the successful Punjab elections . . . A: Yes, quite true. But, there are certain elements on both sides which do not want an agreement. Q: There is one area where our two armies have been in physical
ISLAMIC BOMB? I 43
confrontation of late, in the Siachen glacier. been avoided?
Could this not have
A: (Clears his throat.) I will just . . . since I knew you will ask this question . . . (picks up a map from the side table). I don't want to prove anything. (Starts explaining like a General.) You can see this map. This is the Line of Control between India-held Kashmir and Pakistan's northern areas. This is the famous Karakoram Pass, right here. And this is the border with Pakistan and China. Now this Line of Control was marked, right up to this place 9842. It is not marked or it was at that time not demarcated, up to the Karakoram Pass. But Pakistan and China have jointly demarcated the border. You see the red sign? Now, if India does not recognize this or does not want to conclude their border agreement with China, we are not to be blamed for it. Because, further on is the border of China with India with which we are not concerned. But, up to here [pointing to the Pak-Chinese border), we have earmarked every inch right up to the Karakoram Pass. (Not satisfied, President Zia brings out a larger map) Just to give you a rough idea, this is the same line up to the Karakoram Pass and 9842. This side is Indian Kashmir and this is the northern area of Pakistan. This is the border which Pakistan and China demarcated. This is the glacier area up to a place called Indira Col. This is the border which Pakistan and China had demarcated jointly. There are three important passes over the glacier. Siala (hilly area) and Bilafondla and Gyongla. You cannot cross into the glacier other than through these three places. (Pointing to the map, he continues.) And this is a glacier and this is a glacier and this is India. Now one fine morning the Indians decided that this is their territory. So, they moved troops from this side over the glacier and occupied the three passes. If there was a dispute, as a good neighbour, India should have come to us and said look, something is wrong here, just
demarcate this boundary. Indian troops are now located at Gyongla and Bilafondla and Siala. So Pakistan has no option but to occupy some passes from this side. We are now eyeball to eyeball. Pakistan's claim is very specific and India's claim is that this is their territory. Let us go back to the de facto position. What was before you occupied, you go back and we will go back. Let us sit at a table and we will talk. This is such a simple, minor problem. Q: It should not be an irritant between the tivo countries. A: It should not be. Because there is no gold mine, no oil well, very simple ice, which you cannot even drink [laughs). Then what are you fighting for? Q: Pakistan still refuses to give India the Most Favoured Nation status in trade relations while India gives the status to Pakistan. Why has Pakistan discriminated against India in this matter? A: Trade is a very important relation. We have been at pains with India to have some sort of arrangement by which trade between the two countries should grow. But, basically, the political relationship, economic relationship, starts with India. Pakistan could import anything that it liked. India will not import anything because this was not in their trade policy. So, the 1974 agreement carried on until 1978. In 1978 we found, you won't believe, that from the Indian side, chakki (stones for grinding) were being exported to Pakistan as spare parts of machines (laughs). So we switched back to the 1974 agreement. We said that there will be restricted trade with India and we offered, like we have with many countries, a state-to-state relationship. If you want to improve the trade from our side, the trade will be controlled by the state. We have an agency. And your side is entirely up to you. This debate carried on for two years. Then I went to Delhi. In 1980 when I passed through and I asked Madam Gandhi, again, in order to improve relations, we must get the trade going. I said let us begin so that then the
ISLAMIC BOMB? I 45
businessmen will come and transportation will start and all the rest of it. She said, yes. Then, we had a delegation of Indian private businessmen. We introduced them to our agencies, some private and some state-owned. And they said, yes. Then, eventually, it went on for another two years. Certain lists were prepared, and this exercise is still going on. And the last meeting took place as late as July 1985. And the ball is now in their court. Q: What do you think of India's e f f o r t s to defuse the situation in Afghanistan and help find a political solution to the problem? A: Very commendable, very commendable. Right from the very beginning, we have been of the view that India can play a very important role. Not only as a neighbour of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but India itself had very good relationship with Afghanistan and a lot of trade was going on. Other than that, we appealed to India that you are the chairman of the NonAligned Movement. And I asked Madam Gandhi particularly, and recently in Moscow Rajiv Gandhi also, see, you have good relations with Russia. I am not saying that you should spoil your relationship with Russia and make it deteriorate at the cost of others. Far from it. But play your role as chairman of the NonAligned Movement having good relations with the Soviet Union. Play the role that India should in a situation like this, in order to lay peace in this region. So, India's role, what Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has done, is very commendable, and we further expect that they will be able to impress the Soviet Union to seek a peaceful solution through political means, for which efforts are already going on. Q; With the lifting of martial law, will you allow complete restoration of political freedom, as it was before? Or will there be any restrictions? A: The previous regime was worse than martial law. There was no political freedom. There was a political party in power which
had strangulated all political activities. This was the regime which brought about a political crisis in Pakistan. There was a civil war on our hands when I intervened. I am not justifying this. But this is the reality. But our effort is that after martial law is lifted, there should be total political activity. The process has already started. Q: In the future political process, what will be the role of the armed forces? A: No more than in any other democratic set-up. Q: In your own assessment, what is your most important contribution as Pakistan's ruler during the last eight years? A: Many people have asked me this question. I tell them, look, it is for you to judge, and it is after all for history to judge. How can I blow my own trumpet? I should take pride in one or two things. I take pride in putting Pakistan back on the Islamization process . . . we feel very proud of. It is not my personal contribution. The entire Pakistanis feel proud to be Pakistanis. It is this spirit of Pakistan, as you call it, this spirit has been induced in the last five or six years. And I think it is enough to remember. MAMMEN MATHEW
ISLAMIC BOMB? I 47
20-26 J u l y 1 9 8 6
FORESTS WHERE NAXALITES RULE
WHEN my contact man offered to take me to the hideouts of Naxalite guerrillas in the forests of Khammam and East Godavari districts, my thoughts went to Jan Myrdal. Jan, the son of Swedish economist Karl Gunnar Myrdal who won a Nobel Prize in 1974, and his photographer-wife, Gun Kessle, were the first to venture into the interiors of Andhra Pradesh's forests for a first-hand experience of the Naxalite underground. The Myrdals had hoodwinked the Indian foreign ministry, and also the Swedish embassy where Jan's mother had served as an ambassador, to undertake their adventurous journey in December 1979 and spend ten days with the guerrilla fighters. Naturally, I was elated at the invitation, though I had already made a few trips, like several other Indian journalists have, to villages on the periphery of the forests. My guides on those occasions too were committed activists of the blood red path. They would take me up to select areas of the forests and say thus far and no further. But this time they agreed to give me a glimpse of their world.
Coupled with elation, I felt some twitchings of apprehension. This was a dangerous area I was stepping into. Nearly 40 per cent (45,000 men) of the state police force were on the Naxalite hunt and one could be shot in an encounter, fake or real. The government of NTR was on the offensive and had enacted the Terrorists and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act and the Urban Areas Police Act to track down Naxalites and their sympathizers. I knew I was neither, but not many policemen would have cared to learn the truth before pressing the trigger. I decided to take the risk and go along. My fears were partly overcome by the company of Gummadi Narasaiyya, the Naxalite MLA elected from Illandu. During the first few days of my journey, I was to travel with Narasaiyya, and the police, I assured myself, would not try to harm someone with an MLA as his companion. Once, during the course of the journey, the police came very close to making an arrest. This was at an obscure village called Gundala in Illandu taluk and I was yet to have my first taste of forest life. As a police party stopped us and fired questions about our interest in the village, one of my guides told them that I was a student of Osmania University doing research on tribal life. I was, of course, not anxious to correct him. The explanation seemed to satisfy the police but their suspicion then shifted to one of the guides who, they decided, was not a good type. They would have arrested him but the MLA put his foot down. Narasaiyya belongs to the CPI(ML) faction led by Pyla Vasudeva Rao, which itself is a splinter section of the CPI(ML) group of the late Chandra Pulla Reddy. It was the Chandra Pulla Reddy group that had played host to the Myrdals, whose trip to the forests coincided with a secret convention of guerrillas in the state, and so they could get to know almost all important leaders without much trouble. The starting point of my journey was Khammam town
FORESTS WHERE NAXALITES R U L E | 49
where on my arrival from Hyderabad, I was met by a contact man. Unlike the Myrdals, who had carried seven big suitcases to the forests, I had not overburdened myself, carrying nothing more than a few pairs of clothes, some scratch pads, a cassetterecorder, a small camera and a few film rolls. As dusk was falling, we proceeded to a hamlet where I was to spend the night in the house of a schoolteacher. My subsequent hosts (there were several of them, including a spirited arrack dealer) were less enlightened people but no less hospitable. But I often had to sleep on the floor as some of my hosts were too poor to have the luxury of a cot. I also washed my clothes, which was a big bother; but once in the forests, soiled clothes did not matter. The first week was spent in touring the plains of Khammam district. There was no permanent guide assigned to me. One party worker would take me to a point and vanish without a word of goodbye. Sometimes I had to wait unending hours for the next contact to turn up. For two days I was holed up in a hut as I was told not to move during daytime. Most of the travelling we did during the week was by an old military jeep that the MLA had bought. The jeep had to be abandoned at Illandu and it was when we were trudging along that the patrolling policemen had their acquaintance with the 'researcher from Osmania University'. The place was swarming with men. Illandu is one of those disturbed areas where a police inspector shoots first and asks questions later. Illandu is also a relic of the past where the subedari system of the Nizams is still followed. Nearly 20,000 acres of Tekulapalli area alone is held by seventy-five pattedars who were in the Nizam's army and they collect fees from 'tenants' who have been paying land tax for two generations now. Our journey into the forest was on a creaky bullockcart that was swinging from side to side, like a tiny canoe heaving in the backwash of a steamer. On the way we were joined by a
sarpanch (the Pyla group has eighteen panchayat sarpanch and one panchayat samiti president) in whose company I was later to have an unsavoury experience. The sarpanch was invited to a community feast by a washerman of a Khammam village and the man took me along as a special guest. As the feast began, it dawned upon me that I had bitten more than I could chew: one of the exotic dishes served was raw meat, which I had to swallow for fear of offending the sentiments of the hosts, but it turned my stomach for two days. That perhaps was the lone 'revolting' experience I had with the Naxalites. The first night in the forest was exacting, rather than exciting. As I crept into an empty urea bag, hoping to slide into a senseless slumber after the tiresome journey all day, a bitter chill too crept into the bag and a cloud of mosquitoes hovered over my head, chasing away sleep. My companions slept undisturbed, making me wonder whether the mosquitoes were being partial. After all, like mosquitoes, the Naxalites too draw blood. When, in mock seriousness, I complained about it the next morning, my companions told me that they, too, had not slept uninterrupted. They had taken turns to keep vigil against possible attacks from the police as well as by rival Naxalite groups. While the police movements could be monitored from information supplied by tribal supporters, it was not so easy to detect the moves of rival groups as they also have supporters among the tribals. The main enemy of the Pyla group in the fratricidal battles is the People's War Group of Kondapalli Seetharamiah which follows the annihilation line preached by Charu Mazumdar. Later in the day, I was handed over to a guerilla fighter, whom I shall call Ravi. After my companions left, Ravi took me through the thick bushes and prickly undergrowth to a small patch of clearing where an attractive girl, clad in khaki, sat near
FORESTS WHERE NAXALITES RULE | 51
a boiling pot, kindling the fire with dry twigs. Within her reach was a gun, its long barrel resting on a stone. It was then that I noticed that Ravi, too, was wearing khaki shorts and shirt. I had at last reached a dalam. Dalams, I had been told, were the smallest unit of the revolutionary army and comprised four or five guerrillas who spent a good part of their lives in the forests. Dalams were first formed in this region during the Telengana agitation in the late 1940s in which thousands of communists were mowed down by the Nizam's army and mercenaries. New dalams were formed at the beginning of the Naxalite movement two decades later in Srikakulam and Parvatipuram, which too was suppressed with a heavy hand. After the splintering of Naxalites into myriad groups, most of the dalams chose to follow Chandra Pulla Reddy who was one of their main organizers. The Reddy group split into two factions in 1984, one led by Pyla Vasudeva Rao and the other by Nirmala, the wife of Chandra Pulla Reddy who died in 1985. The dalam I was with had five members, including two women, under a commander. Two of them acted as couriers, carrying messages and bringing food and provisions. I noticed that the couriers used one route to leave the camp and another to return. As another precaution, the dalam members did not stay at the same spot for more than two days at a stretch. Ravi told me that all the needs of the guerrillas were looked after by the party. But their needs were a bare minimum. Like others, Ravi had in his coarse rucksack a khaki uniform (besides the one he was wearing), a lungi, a shirt and a blanket. Everybody had gunsrifles for ordinary members and revolvers for underground organizers (UG cadre)and everybody had empty urea bags to sleep in. For common use, apart from cooking vessels, there were three torches, a wristwatch and a small Murphy radio.
One of the guerrillas sat under a tree cleaning his gun. A few minutes earlier I had watched this callow youth fumble with a Hindi textbook, haltingly reading out simple sentences. Ravi said every member of the dalam was expected to have at least an elementary knowledge of Hindi and English, apart from Telugu. Hindi was being taught because the guerrillas often had to operate in the forests of Madhya Pradesh. Just then a courier, carrying a small vessel the mouth of which was covered with tree leaves, appeared from the bushes. The contents of the vessel looked like rice pudding. Ravi gave me a share of it and said it was a special dish of the tribals known as jawa. As I was polishing it off, he further explained that jawa was made in large quantities as the tribals, instead of cooking for the day, had the practice of cooking food needed for three or four days. In short, the food we were eating was stale! How stale it was became clear soon when the loud rumblings in my stomach announced that my innards had no intention of accepting the tribal speciality. The uneasiness subsided somewhat after I took a tablet that Ravi gave me from their stock of medicines. They had tablets for indigestion, diarrhoea and malaria, the scourge of the forests. Ravi said that more revolutionaries had been driven out of forests by diseases and hostile climate than by their disenchantment with ideology. Desertions, Ravi said, were a continuous process. 'We do not see in the new cadre the kind of commitment cadres had two decades ago. They want to go home if their mother is ill or their brother is getting married. In our days, when I was young, we did not go home for years. In my case, I visited my family after living seven years in the forests without a break.' During 1979-80, there was a large reduction in the strength of the dalams. Besides desertions, there were surrenders and killings by the police. The new recruits were mostly romantic youth who wanted to have an adventure in the forests, like
shooting a few policemen. And they would get disenchanted and leave if nothing of that kind happened immediately. They, however, had the option to work in the party's front-line organizations and could return to the forests if they were wanted by the police. I asked Ravi about his group's firepower but the reply he gave me was very vague. Not even the guerrillas knew much about the group's hoard of arms and ammunition except that it had a good stock with several types of guns and grenades. Before the Emergency, its parent organization, the Chandra Pulla Reddy group, had its own drilling machine for making cartridges and bullets. Most of the guns of the Pyla group were bought from a Hyderabad-based manufacturer. It also used to get guns from Dhirendra Brahmachari's factory. Though the main task of the dalam was to stoke the fire of revolution and protect other party workers and sympathizers from attacks by the police and landlords, they were also participating in the 'mass line' activities of the party. The mass line was adopted under the leadership of Chandra Pulla Reddy and in the first phase the thrust was on organizing the small farmers, the tribal poor, women and youth. The tribals were taught better methods of cultivation, night schools were started in the forests and a sort of trade union was set up for the farm labour. It was in the second phase that they entered the electoral arena. The third phase was for setting up gram committees to take up civic problems. The Naxalites have intervened in issues like cheaper liquor for tribals and higher rates for tendu leaf pickers. Contractors have been forced to contribute for village development. At Mangalagudem, near Khammam, for instance, they could collect Rs 7 lakh for a bridge. At Pudiprolu, also near Khammam, they built a school and a junior college. Collections from contractors of a village are spent for the development of
that village itself and the priority everywhere is for building schools, veterinary hospitals, libraries, roads and wells. If more money is needed for a project, the villagers are persuaded to contribute to the funds at the rate of five paise for every kilogram of ration rice or sugar which they buy. Such work in the forests is done by the dalams, each of which is assigned the charge of fifteen to twenty villages with which dalam members keep daily contact. The character of the dalams has changed so much over the years that now they even help the tribals write petitions for government loans, electricity and borewells. The dalams receive directions from the party once a month, when the dalam commanders and their zonal secretary meet to discuss the various issues. Work in the plains is done by ordinary members of the party and its front-line organizations like Raitu Coolie Sangham, Progressive Democratic Students Union, Progressive Youth League, Progressive Organization of Women, the literary wing called Prajarasa and the cultural wing called Arunodaya. The picture I got of the dalams was quite different from the frightening one painted by the police. Through their counterpropaganda, which included street plays, the police had been depicting the guerrillas as a bunch of desperadoes shooting and looting without any qualms. I found them to be simple folks, carried away by their ideology, working quietly in the forbidding climate, not grim, menacing figures. I also observed that the impression of the tribals about the guerrillas did not vary very much from mine. They generally regarded the guerrillas as their friends while their attitude to the police was just the reverse. Policemen had a bad reputation in the villages, earned more from their petty acts of extortion than from atrocities. Many tribals had joined the dalams to escape police harassment, which turned out to be the main reason for Marxism-Leninism to take deep roots in the forest soil. However,
there were also instances of tribals handing over dalam members to the police. After a week of travelling all over the forests, I bade farewell to Ravi and his guerrillas. As agreed upon, I turned over my notes and the exposed film rolls to him. I was again on my own and trudged towards one of the villages outside the forest where I was to have a new guide. At the rendezvous by the village road, I had plenty of time to myself before the guide turned up on a motorbike. He did not tell me where he had come from but straightaway said we were going to the Godavari forests. After riding for a few hours, the bike was parked in the house of a party worker and a new guide came to take me to the forests, where I was to be handed over to another dalam. The reception I got in this dalam was less than cordial. They seemed to be suspicious of my movements and once questioned why I was taking photographs of the tribals and talking to them. But it was at this dalam that I got an opportunity to attend the marriage of a couple who were Naxalites. The wedding was simple: just a meeting under the party flag. The simplicity of the dalams' ceremonies is one of the reasons for the support they enjoy from the tribals who feel weighed down by their own customs. The bride and the groom had followed the rule that they should live apart in separate dalams for six months before they were given permission to marry. And a few months after the wedding, they would have to part again and could meet each other at the annual reunions that the party would organize for them. The newly-weds were advised not to have children as such encumbrances could come in the way of their party work. Annual reunions are also organized for guerrillas who have married tribal girls who are not members of the dalams. While leaving this dalam, too, I had to turn over my notes
and film rolls to the guerrillas. A few days after I returned to Hyderabad, the notes and two rolls of film were delivered to me. One roll was missing. I checked with my contacts and after a few days the missing roll also arrived. It had been exposed to the sun! G.S. RADHA KRISHNA
Anand being presented a gold medal by Rev. Fr. V.V. Abraham at Madras on winning the Junior World Championship in 1987
16-22 August 1987
V. A N A N D J U N I O R CHESS CHAMPION
INDIA'S emerging chess might was confirmed recently when Vishwanathan Anand of Tamil Nadu won the world junior chess crown, the first world chess title picked by an Asian since the advent of modern chess. Anand, the country's youngest International Master (IM), won the prestigious title at the place where he first seriously studied the gamePhilippines. India has been in the background in international chess all these years except for Sulthan Khan's great feats in the early part of this century. The modern chess renaissance in India actually began when Manual Aaron first won the Asian zonal title over twenty-five years ago. Chess literally took a break in the country of its origin for nearly two decades since Aaron first won an international master title for India in the early 1960s. It is only recently that the game has really made vast strides in the country. On an average, at least one international master title has been won each year, and the eleven international masters in the country at present are a testimony to the improved standards.
Our players are now knocking at the doors of the grandmaster (GM) title and soon we should be turning out the first grandmaster, and hopefully many more after that. The credit for this should go to the government which has been supporting players financially for foreign participation. The cash incentives (including Rs 2 lakh for a GM title) announced by the government seem to have renewed the interest among players. Chess in Asia first received a major boost in the Philippines, with the deposed President Ferdinand Marcos pumping a lot of money into the game. And now, seventeen-year-old D. Viswanathan Anand has put India and Asia on top, at least at the junior level. Winning the world junior crown is no ordinary achievement. At least 20 per cent of these winners have emerged as senior champions and about half of them have gone up to the candidates' matches which decide the challenger to the world title. The Soviets, who have helped Indian chess by training the top players regularly at the National Institute of Sports in Bangalore, may now perhaps be assessing the implications of their training programme. Born on 11 December 1969, Anand is the son of a retired general manager of the Southern Railway. Anand's chess career took a distinctive turn around 1978, when the family was in Manila where his father worked as a consultant. Young Anand got introduced to chess at the junior level and he recalls the name of Jesse Torre as one of his earlier guides. When Anand's family returned to India, he first took part in a district-level meet at the renowned Tal chess club in Madras. Within three years, he developed into a strong player and shot into the limelight, winning the top board prize at the national team championship held in Bombay in 1983. By virtue of this performance, Anand was seeded to the national 'B' league. The youngster then went on to finish fourth in the
national 'A' league at Ahmedabad, which put him at the top rung of Indian chess. Anand showed his class in the international chess arena by finishing third in the world sub-juniors at Paris in 1984. He had led the field at one time in that tournament and his tenth place in the Finland world juniors' event and seventh place in a tournament in Norway showed that he was emerging as a strong junior player. Anand put his name in the international chess scroll after he won the Asian juniors title in Hong Kong which, incidentally, is a crown which immediately confirms the IM title. In chess, most strong junior players go on to become top players at the senior level too, and all eyes in the country turned to Anand when he won the senior national crown in 1986. At the age of sixteen, he was the youngest Indian to reach an international rating of 2,500, equal to that of a grandmaster. But it would take time for Anand to get the GM norm as at least two GM norm scores spread over twenty-four games have to be established. At the Tumkur nationals two months ago, I had the opportunity to watch Anand from close quarters. After being down at one time, losing one of the rounds, Anand retained his calm to emerge victorious. He is humble, gives credit to the opponent's game and has a healthy lifestyle. These factors will help him retain his sharp game and quick reflexes for a long time. In some ways, Anand resembles the great Bobby Fischer, specially when you see him make his moves in a matter of minutes while his opponents struggle with the chess clock. Anand has now eclipsed most of his worthy contemporaries, Pravin Thipsay, Dibyendru Barua and D.V. Prasad. He has given the biggest ever boost to Indian chess. Undoubtedly, he will soon be a grandmaster. The question is whether he will be content with being a grandmaster or will go on to the candidate's
V. A N A N D J U N I O R CHESS CHAMPION I 61
level and try his luck at the world chess title itself, which has been so zealously guarded by the Soviets after they wrested it from Bobby Fischer. SAI PRAKASH
2 2 - 2 8 May 1 9 8 8
BETTER ARMED, BETTER PREPARED
'When Operation Bluestar took place, we But now we are. Not only are we going complex, we shall also hit back outside it. that the state shall sit up and take note. graveyards on wheels.'
were not prepared for it. to die fighting inside the And hit back in a way The buses shall become
'Lt.-Gen.' Karaj Singh Thande of Bhindranwale Tiger Force FOUR years after the June 1984 operation, the Golden Temple in Amritsar has again emerged as the symbol of Sikh resistance: a bastion of the separatists who have virtually set up a state within a state. The temple is again under siege and it does not need a prophet to foresee that another twist is about to be added to the blood-soaked history of Punjab. 1 he Golden Temple today has more militants entrenched inside it than it had during Operation Bluestar. And they are much better armed today. The dungeon-like rooms facing the parikrama of the temple are occupied by groups like the Khalistan Council office run by Nirvair Singh and Jagir Singh, the
The veiled face of terror
Khalistan Commando Force (KCF), the Khalistan Liberation Army (KLA), the Babbar Khalsa and the Bhindranwale Tiger Force. And in the more habitable rooms on the first floor live other extremists, some of them with their families. Overlooking the entire temple complex are the relics of the pastthe towering bungas (watch-towers), sporting at times the Khalistan flag, have been heavily fortified by the extremists. 'We have rocket launchers positioned there on top,' said a KCF activist a day before security forces surrounded the temple on 9 May. Almost all the withering fire directed at the security forces in recent days which killed several persons (DIG S.S. Virk was shot through the face) came from these bungas which had their tops knocked off by army shelling four years ago. The militants are now clear about their response should the security forces enter the temple to flush them out. 'Lt.-Gen.' Thande of the Bhindranwale Tiger Force said he had instructed units outside that the moment the security forces enter the temple, they should enact a bloodbath the like of which has not been seen before in Punjab. With every passing day after mid-December when they first decided to take over the Golden Temple, the militants have become bolder. On 29 April, a Babbar Khalsa activist was caught by the CRPF personnel as he was entering the temple, but he shook himself free, and ran into the temple. A minor skirmish led to a major exchange of fire. Said a CRPF official: 'The terrorists inside the complex have adopted a new method. Now they provide covering fire to their comrades coming into the complex, or those retreating from it.' But the 29 April episode, minor in the context of the Sikh temple, led to a calamity in Batala, a flourishing industrial township in Gurdaspur. After four bombs exploded in the crowded Chakri bazaar, the people of the town, mostly Hindus, went on the rampage. The town was promptly placed under curfew. It was the first sign of the outbreak of a virtual civil strife
BETTER ARMED, BETTER PREPARED | 65
which the Sikh extremists have been relentlessly provoking in Punjab. Remarked an unrepentant Babbar Khalsa activist: 'After the Golden Temple was fired at, only four bombs exploded in Batala. But the day the- Golden Temple is invaded, we shall set off hundreds of bombs all over Punjab.' The Babbar Khalsa activist was not alone in expressing such sentiments. Almost the entire militant leadership inside the Golden Temple was unanimous about the frightening fall out of another operation inside the shrine. And it was scarcely a coincidence that a day after the security forces laid siege to the temple complex, a powerful bomb ripped apart the offices of a foreign bank in the newly constructed glass building of the LIC, overlooking Connaught Place, in Delhi. Babbar Khalsa activists have been barred by their leadership from issuing statements. But the fact that even the Babbar Khalsa, which till recently was going in for selected targets, should have opted for indiscriminate bomb explosions makes it clear that a new level of desperation has crept in as the noose around the Golden Temple is tightening. Considered close to the Babbar Khalsa is the Khalistan Liberation Force (KLF) led by Avtar Singh Brahma. Despite having adopted an extremely sympathetic attitude to the line advocated by the Akal Takht Jathedar, Fauja Singh Fauji, a KLF activist, reflected a common militant viewpoint on another armed operation inside the temple complex: 'Let them enter the Darbar Sahib. We shall show them what we are capable of. We shall all die together.' For some time now, the militants inside the Golden Temple have been going out of their way to provoke the security forces. They are quite clear in their strategy: once an armed operation takes place and several of their cadre die fighting, they would emerge as heroes of the Sikh community. The 1984 army operation, the militants argue, gave a tremendous fillip to the separatist movement, endowing it with some legitimacy. As Nirvair Singh of the Khalistan Council said:
'We leave it to you to judge whether Operation Bluestar was a step forward towards Khalistan or not. Even if we die defending the Golden Temple, we should have only done the correct thing: clear the path for a separate state/ All the militants The Week spoke to stuck to the demand for Khalistan. 'We follow Sant Bhindranwale. He said that the day the army entered the Golden Temple, Khalistan would be born. We cannot settle for anything less,' was the refrain. Nirvair and Jagir Singh went a step further and argued that 'the Sikhs should have fought for Khalistan in 1947 itself.' They blamed leaders like Master Tara Singh and Baldev Singh for the present state of affairs. Jagir Singh argued that the demand for Khalistan was nothing new as it had been made by Guru Gobind Singh. 'Eaj bina na dharam chale hai, dharam bina sub dale male hai (You cannot save your religion without political power, without
religion nothing is possible),' he quoted the tenth guru and added that hundreds of Sikhs were prepared to die for the cause. It is a fact that a number of young men are joining the militant organizations. They live a spartan life, eating langar food and wearing the traditional choga and kuccha prescribed by the gurus. And for most of these young men who have a lowermiddle-class background, sporting a gun is the in thing these days. The way the militants operate is notable. For raising funds, it is normal for them to either loot a bank or ask rich men to contribute. But before striking, they give the family an 'opportunity' to become true Sikhs and continue to live in the same village. The first condition for this is that women should wear salwar, kameez and dupatta. They also tell the villagers in the border areas not to watch the serial Ramayan on television. In the border districts, the militants insist that all schoolteachers should wear clothes according to Sikh tenets. In some schools, they have even forced the authorities to change the uniforms of children to conform to Sikh practices. All this would seem a far cry from the 'Khalistan' which would have 'true secularism by which Hindus, Muslims and Christians would live according to their own religious tenets and would be run according to the Khalsa raj envisaged by the Sikh gurus', as claimed by Nirvair Singh. According to Nirvair and Jagir Singh, 'Khalistan is already a reality. Some areas are under our control. Some are with India. The fight is on.' In this fight, the immediate aim of the extremists is to create terror and force migration. In many districts they resort to sending threatening letters to Hindus and at times even to Sikh families, ordering them to leave their homes. Despite assurances from the administration, and the creation of more and more police districts, each under a superintendent to ensure better policing, the people are feeling far from secure. For they have found that the militants have, in most cases, followed up their
threats with cold-blooded killings, while the administration has stood by helplessly. When asked why they kill innocents, a KCF functionary replied: 'When Sikh innocents were killed, nobody raised a finger. These people (those who are migrating) are the persons who said that their mother tongue was Hindi when the census was being taken. If they have nothing to do with Punjabi, they need not live in Punjab.' The separatists, in fact, claim that 95 per cent of the Sikhs want Khalistan. But an elderly Sikh in Gurdaspur retorted: 'You can take it from me that 90 per cent of Sikhs are not for Khalistan.' While opinions on this may differ, what is not in question is the aim of the militants to foment large-scale Hindu-Sikh riots in the state. This has mercifully not taken place, largely because the majority in both communities is against any such eventuality. Nevertheless, the situation is indeed explosive in Batala, Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Fatehbad, Tarn Taran, Beas and Pathankot. Earlier, Sikh families used to come to the aid of Hindus. But not of late, as the terrorists are not sparing Sikhs either. In some districts, Sikhs are not participating even in the cremation of those slain by terrorists. Of course, there is no problem in villages dominated by Hindus. But what is notable, despite the stepped-up terrorist violence, is that even now there is no animosity between the Sikhs and Hindus. While the militants are bent upon provoking a showdown, the government finds itself on the defensive. To avoid an armed action, it devised a strategem: release of Akal Takht Jathedar Jasvir Singh Khalsa and pitting him against the diehard Khalistanis. The Akal Takht jathedar was supposed to succeed where Operation Bluestar had failed. For it is futile to flush out extremists time and again from the Golden Temple complex without being able to take charge, on a long-term basis, of the premier Sikh shrine. This point was emphasized by former
Director-General Julio Ribeiro, now an adviser to Punjab Governor, S.S. Ray. The government's plans received a setback with the sudden exchange of fire in and around the temple complex. By trying to go in for a long-drawn-out siege, it has lost the element of surprise. The advantage now obviously rests with the militants who showed that the lessons of the past have been learnt. Almost all the top militant leadersPanthic Committee members including Manochal and Wassan Singh, KCF leaders like Labh Singh and Sukhdev Singh Jhanke, Babbar Khalsa jathedar Sukhdev Singh and KLF chief Avtar Singh Brahmawere outside the temple when the showdown between the security forces and the armed separatists occurred early this month. The militants have learnt not to put all their eggs in one basket. The question is: has the Central government? K. GOPALAKRISHNAN, G.K. SINGH AND B.S. BAWA
1 8 J u n e 1995
THE WORLD'S YOUNGEST MD
WHEN boys his age were reaching for a razor to clear the stray strands of hair from their faces, Balamurali Krishna Ambati was already wielding the scalpel to probe the complexities of the human body. While the others were feeling their way through the first light of adolescence, he was thumbing through Gray's Anatomy and such other medical tomes. Adolescence did not pass him by; he conquered it with a record-breaking effort that saw him become the youngest doctor in the world last month. The record had belonged to an Israeli medical student who at eighteen had graduated from the University of Perugia in Italy. 'It was a well-planned and perfectly executed effort that involved all the members of the family,' says his father, Dr Ambati Mohan Rao, who is in his fifties. Bala, as the prodigy is fondly called, concurred that once he decided to go for it, 'it was only a question of staying focused'. The decision itself was not planned. 'It just happened,' he says, trying to make himself audible over the drone of the mosaic polishing machine at a relative's house in Madras; the sparsely furnished new house had
been opened for the family during their stay in India last month. The Ambatis, like many other non-resident Indian families, make it a point to fly down to India at least once in two years; a reaffirmation of their roots, as it were. Roots that could be traced to genius perhaps. Says Dr Rao: 'My father was an Ashtavadhani (a person who could do eight different mental feats simultaneously). In the 1930s, he became the first ICS officer in the entire district and was the first non-White district magistrate in 1931 in Cuddapah district (Andhra Pradesh), without a law degree.' On 19 May at the Lincoln Centre's Avery Fisher Hall in New York when Bala received his degree in medicine, it was as much a triumph of Indian culture and family values as it was of his intellect. It was his deep attachment to his family that took Bala to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine; after a year at college in Buffalo, 300 miles away, a homesick Bala had sought a transfer to New York. If Bala was gifted so was his brother Jayakrishna, seven years his elder, who is doing his internship in ophthalmology in the US. Says Dr Rao, a senior official in the Department of Corrections of the New York city government: 'His brother is almost like him, perhaps better than him in some respects. Therefore, we took it for granted that Bala will also be talented. For a two-year-old he was very curious and would count things with great interest.' Bala too acknowledges Jayakrishna's role: 'My brother was always just a few years ahead of me. He went through everything just before I did. So I didn't have to repeat the mistakes he made.' They have had their share of fights and broken a few chairs as children usually do, but all that is forgotten when it comes to academics. 'We think alike. Many times when we are watching TV, we come up with the same jokes at the same time,' says
Bala proudly. This rare chemistry resulted in their first collaborative book, AIDS, The True Story: A Comprehensive Guide, when Bala was just eleven; its second edition is coming out soon. The brothers have also got ready their second book on the 'threats to the global environment'. 'We completed it last month and are looking for a publisher,' Bala says. He foresees more such collaborative efforts in the future. 'Both of us are specializing in ophthalmology. We have a long history of working together with great promise, so it is very likely that we'll be doing something together,' he says enthusiastically. The Ambati saga began in 1979 when Ambati Mohan Rao moved to the US. 'Like anybody else, I was enamoured of the economic prosperity of the US', Dr Rao said, and it was a research assistantship of the National Science Foundation that took him there for a doctoral programme; his family, which was in Velio re (Tamil Nadu), moved in with him a year later. Bala, then three, was already showing signs of precociousness. By the time he was four, he had a way with numbers and was solving maths puzzles in a manner that left others baffled. Not even an accident that scalded Balaa result of his curiosity to see what was on the stoveand kept him in hospital for three months, could curb his inquisitiveness. And from the time he joined first grade at age six, it was 'acceleration' all the way. Within a few weeks of his joining the first grade, he was promoted to the second. In three years he was in the seventh grade, and by the time he was thirteen in 1991, he had graduated in Biology, thus becoming the youngest graduate in the history of New York University. But the acceleration (as double promotions are called in the US) was not without its speed-breakers in the form of administrators. Apart from administrators, I haven't been resisted all along. And my father was the most important person in overcoming the obstacles. Sometimes we had to go to the Mayor's office or the Governor's office,' says Bala.
THE WORLD'S YOUNGEST MD | 73
Were the administrators being difficult because he was not American? 'No, specially in the US or UK or other parts of the world, administrators are inert. They want the status quo,' says Dr Rao. 'They have to open their minds to see the realistic way and how this boy can be profited.' 'Never work hard, work smart,' is the dictum he follows and his sons have gone one up on this: they work hard as well as smart. Proof of this is the clutch of awards for excellence which they have picked up. One of them is the NASA award at the International Science & Engineering Fair in Mathematics that Bala bagged in 1989. He is also a Presidential Scholar, and a National Merit Scholar. The parents did not spare any effort to give their sons the best of education. 'I spend about $3,000 a year on buying journals like Time, US News and World Report', says Dr Rao. 'Also Scientific American and New England Journal', chips in his wife Gomathi, ever the source of strength for the family. An M Phil in Tamil literature, she is basically a mathematics teacher who also has an EDD (doctor of education) in teaching gifted children. But her role has been that of the homemaker, in keeping with the family's philosophy. 'Our philosophy is that one spouse must be at home. I openly say that if my wife can earn more than me, I will stay at home and keep the house,' expounds Dr Rao. The senior Ambati is a hard taskmaster and belives in 'beating the deadlines not just meeting them'. Whether this is happening at his workplace or not, it is surely happening with his academically talented sons. They have set a scorching pace for themselves and are at least ten years ahead of their peers. But it has not left them, specially Bala because of his prodigious rise, friendless. 'I have friends of all ages,' says Bala modestly. And a sense of humour too. He has his bag of jokes and those on lawyers are a particular favourite. He lets out this one as a sample: 'What does one call a lawyer who is buried neck
deep in sand? Not enough sand,' he laughs. But what thrills him most is the fact that he has already worked with some of the giants of medicine, something that few boys of his age can boast of. 'I have not lost anything of substance,' he says firmly, to a suggestion that he has lost out on his childhood. 'I've gained a lot more than I possibly could. Certainly, I won't be getting so much attention if I was in high school!' Nor would comparisons have been made with Doogie Howser, the sixteen-year-old doctor in a popular TV serial which has since completed its run in the US. 'I joined the medical programme two years before the serial went on the air. It's a case of art imitating life,' Bala says dismissively. If Bala has come this far this quick, it is because he believes in himself and in the Indian cultural values that stress family ties. Says he: 'In all Asian cultures in the USIndian, Chinese, Vietnameseacademics is a group effort. Of course, in medical school my brother and I are all by ourselves, but still an element of closeness is there.' Dr Rao himself is one of those who climbed the ladder of success rather quickly. He went to IIT, Madras, in the 1960s to study industrial engineering. Besides qualifying in applied mathematics and operations research, he has several publications to his credit. Though it was not exactly a struggle, the rise to the top was guided by the cornerstone of simplicity. Says he: 'I was paid $8,000 when I left the country. By the time I got my doctorate, I had $8,000 in the bank. I did not starve. I used to cook at home. The same food that we eat at home costs a hundred times more outside. A dosa costs $7.50. The whole family and friends can be fed for that amount.' Such an approach has not meant all work and no play for the bespectacled Bala. 'You can't afford not to relax,' says the youngest Westinghouse Science Talent Scholar who works in inspired spurts. He hates the labelling of academically talented
T H E WORLD'S YOUNGEST MD | 75
persons as bookworms. 'Why attach such tags only to brains while beauty is appreciated as just that?' he asks, his deepthroated voice booming across the empty room. His voice and physique have kept pace with his mental development and no one can guess that the 6'2" strapping doctor is only seventeen. And Bala too makes it a point not to disclose his age. 'I don't tell people how old I am because I want to have a regular relationship with them; I don't want to be on a pedestal.' It is also a measure of his confidence that he will not stomach stupidity. 'If somebody says something stupid and they are proud of that stupidity, I get angry, but I don't say, "I am seventeen and I am a doctor and therefore I know more than you do." What I say is, "Basically you are wrong because of this, this and this," and I leave it at that. I don't need to show my resume to them. All I have to do is use the force of my argument.' Not many seventeen-year-olds speak with such an authority. Something he has been doing for several years now at various forums, ranging from high school gatherings to engineering and medical colleges to Rotary clubs. And his favourite topic has been AIDS ever since he co-authored the book on AIDS with his brother. Their interest in AIDS brought Bala and his brother to India from February to April last year for doing research on the transmission dynamics of HIV in the country. It essentially involved testing the serum in batches of, say ten, thereby necessitating fewer number of tests. Says Bala, about the project: 'The Indian Government and the state of New York provided the funds for our work which is now being reviewed. There is some reluctance because there is a slight loss of sensitivity. But on a mass scale, we are missing a lot of people anyway, this will allow you to screen more because it is cheaper. So this makes more sense. It is an idea that is on the table.'
There is one more thing that has taken shape in Bala's mindthe dream of winning the Nobel Prize one day. Indeed, how many can even dare to dream of such a possibility. V.M. RAJASEKHAR
T H E WORLD'S YOUNGEST MD | 77
21 January 1990
A GENIUS VANISHES
DR Bashisht Narain Singh could very well have been another Dr Srinivasa Ramanujan. He had that profound intellect that makes a genius, but instead of winning laurels, Dr Singh was thrown by a callous government into the confines of Ranchi Mental Hospital. And a few months ago he just disappeared. The son of a lowly-paid police constable, Bashisht Narain Singh belongs to Kara Basantpur village in the Bhojpur district of Bihar. Even as a student of the village primary school, his extraordinary knowledge of mathematics was noticed. After passing out of the prestigious Netarhat High School in Ranchi with first class first, Singh registered for BSc at Science College, Patna, in 1963. It was here that the turning point in his life came. The college principal, the late N.S. Nagendra Nath, an eminent physicist and mathematician from Mysore who had studied science under the great C.V. Raman, was giving a lecture to the first-year degree students. Suddenly, he came across a problem that he was not able to solve and the young Bashisht Narain Singh stood up and said: 'Sir, the formula you
are using in solving the question is not applicable.' Offended, Nath tried to put the impudent student in his place, challenging him to solve it. The young man replied without batting an eyelid: 'I can solve the question in not one but five ways.' And he did. A pleasantly shocked Nagendra Nath narrated the incident to Prof. Nagasundaram, another eminent mathematics lecturer at the college. Nagasundaram called Bashisht Narain to his chamber and gave him twelve extremely difficult problems of mathematics to solve. The young man solved them using five different formulas, leaving Nagasundaram speechless. The very next day Principal Nagendra Nath met ViceChancellor George Jacob and told him about the prodigy Nath urged the vice-chancellor to make a special provision for Singh to appear for the MSc examination. 'To reach MSc, Singh would have to wait for five years as he is in the first-year BSc class. In my view, this will be an injustice not only to the talented soul but also to the nation to wait for five years,' Nath told the vice-chancellor. Finally, at the instance of the vicechancellor, the university Act was amended and Singh was given permission to take the MSc examination the same year; he passed with a first class first. Nagendra Nath knew that he had found a mind of great brilliance and wanted to send him to the US for advanced studies. So he wrote to this friend, John L. Kally, of California University, asking whether Kally could take him there for doing a PhD. A few days later, Prof. Kally himself landed in Patna, interviewed Singh, and left after promising to do his best for the young man. And Kally made good his promise. Singh went to the US and joined California University for doing his PhD on 20 September 1965. Kally offered to be his guide. After merely a month of research on 'The piece of space theory', Singh submitted his thesis and was awarded a PhD degree. The US government
A GENIUS VANISHES I 79
tried its best to keep Dr Singh there by offering him a number of prestigious jobs with a handsome salary but Singh wanted to serve his nation and joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, as a professor of mathematics. After a year, he quit the job and joined the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, as a senior professor-cum-research director. For at least a year, he also taught at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Dr Singh's friends say that his marriage proved his undoing. His parents forced him to marry Bandana Singh of Khanpura village in Saran district in 1973. Bandana was fond of a superficial lifestyle while Singh, with his inquisitive nature, wanted to do more and more research. When he could not strike a balance between the two, Dr Singh, it is said, began to lose his mental balance. The marriage broke up and when Bandana sought a divorce, Singh had a nervous breakdown. His parents admitted him to a private mental hospital at Ranchi and the state government bore all the expenses for the treatment. It is said he would have regained his faculties but for a sudden change of attitude on the part of the government. It was the Karpoori Thakur government that had decided to bear the expenses for Dr Singh's treatment. But the Dr Jagannath Mishra ministry that took over in 1980 thought otherwise. Health Minister Umeshwar Nath Verma, while going through Dr Singh's file, thought he would be saving precious government money by shifting him to the state-owned Ranchi Mental Hospital. As if this was not enough, Verma also asked the officials not to pay the amount already incurred by Dr Singh in the private clinic. Ranchi Mental Hospital is one of the country's worst managed institutions. Once admitted to this hellhole, all chances of Dr Singh staging a recovery vanished. On 9 August 1989 Dr Singh left for Pune with his brother who wanted to get him treated there. At Gaurarbara station,
near Jabalpur, the brothers got out of the train to have tea. Dr Singh somehow wandered away and has been missing since. Ranjeet Singh, a social worker of Arrah, informed the Bhojpur collector of the scientist s disappearance. But the complaint was never looked into. KANHAIYA BHELARI
A GENIUS VANISHES I 81
Dasarath Manjhi's path-breaking saga is the stuff of folklore
3 February 1 9 9 1
MAN WHO MOVED A MOUNTAIN
THE man could be mistaken for Moses coming down the mountain. A long staff in hand, his long, loose sand-coloured kurta billows like a biblical robe as he stands in the glare of the sun against the rocky mountain he has conquered. A seer-like stance. And a divine fire burning in his eyes. Only the scruffy beard, the unkempt hair tied into a small knot on his pate, and his earthy features mar the Moses-like mien. But that does not matter. For, as in the story of Moses, it is faith that has triumphed in the life of Dasarath Manjhi. A faith that is undying and indomitable. If Moses parted the Red Sea to take God's chosen people to the shores of safety, Manjhi made a mountain part and yield a pass. Moses had done it in a flash, striking the waters with his staff. But the Harijan of Gehlore village in Gaya district pounded the Rajgir mountain with his hammer for twenty long years to hew a pathway that is 350 feet long, 16 feet wide, and 12 feet high. It has been a labour of love, epic in dimension and celestial in spirit. And Manjhi's path-breaking saga has passed into folklore. Yet the villagers of Gehlore called him a mad man
when he had set out on this soul-stirring mission in 1959. Most of them ridiculed him, others plainly told him that he was attempting the impossible. Even his father, Mangaru Manjhi, who is no more, had advised him: 'Beta, turn hawa mein ghar bana rahe ho (Son, you are building castles in the air).' But Dasarath Manjhi would not be deterred. He had a score to settle with the mountain. Says the man in his picturesquely strange words, fit enough for an Arabian Nights story: 'I was angry with the cruel behaviour of the mountain. It had broken my wife's earthen jar. I was in the mood for revenge at any cost. And I became the winner at last.' The decision of the grim warrior to make the mountain submit to him was taken on a chilly day in 1959. He had crossed the Rajgir mountain to chop some wood to keep the home fires burning. After completing the work, he was resting under a tree when Faguni, his wife whom he adored, rushed to him in tears. She was bringing him water to drink in a clay jar, but the jar had broken while she was passing through the roughhewn mountain pass that was hardly one and a half feet wide. A jutting rock in the mountain had hit and smashed the jar she had so precariously balanced on her head. Dasarath did not react immediately, but merely stopped chopping the wood. And when he reached home that evening, he was a very thoughtful man. That night he had a dream: the mountain was challenging him. 'In the dream, the mountain told me that it would break my wife's jar every day and I would have to watch it helplessly. That was a challenge; it wrenched my heart. I decided, then and there, to teach the mountain a severe lesson,' he says. He was then a sturdy thirty-year-old, full of courage and determination. Early next morning, around 5 a.m., he picked a chisel and hammer and rushed to the mountain to strike away at the jutting rock which had broken Faguni's jar. 'I cut the rocks the whole day. I didn't even eat. I was very angry with the rude
Dasarath Manjhi at work in his pathway
behaviour of the mountain,' says Dasarath in a voice that is still fervent. He would have worked into the night, but then Faguni had arrived on the scene requesting him to return home. From that day onwards for a month, Dasarath cut the rocks, punishing the mountain from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day. But he hardly made much headway. The rocks were as adamant and unyielding as he was. Besides, his wife and children were starving as he was no longer chopping wood. 'I was the sole breadwinner in the family. I had to look after my wife, a handicapped son, a daughter and my father,' points out Dasarath. So he went back to work. For some twenty days he kept the chisel and hammer aside as he laboured in the fields of local landlords to earn his daily bread. Those were days of anguish. Says Dasarath: 'You may not believe it, during those days, I could not sleep a minute. I felt the mountain was making faces at me.'
MAN WHO MOVED A MOUNTAIN | 85
Soon, he decided to go back to the mountain, after work. 'I cut the mountain from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. and another two hours after sunset every day. I also decided not to work in the fields on Sundays and continue the assault on the mountain till I got a wide pathway. By the grace of God, I battled like this till 1966.' That year a great famine in Bihar forced him to stop his work. By then the people of Gehlore had woken up to the fact that Dasarath was no madman. Says Siyaram Sharma of Pathan Katti: 'People came to realize that the distance from Atri to Wazirganj50 mileswould be reduced to a mere 8 miles once the pathway was built. And so Dasarath was assured that he would be given all help. Clearly, that would be a big relief to the poor villagers of the area who, otherwise, would have to pay at least Rs 10 as bus fare for a one-way trip.' Finally, Dasarath received some money: Rs 4,000 from the block development officer of Atri who was impressed by the man's single-minded devotion. Later, in 1979, when Dasarath was halfway through his work, Chief Minister Ram Sundar Das met him while on a tour of Gaya. Says Dasarath: 'It is a matter of pride for me that a man like Ram Sunder Das came to see me and gave me Rs 500 as a reward.' With the money that the block development officer gave him, Dasarath purchased straw and woodto ease his workload. He would place the straw and wood on the rock, set fire to them, and then sprinkle water on the rock so that it would be softened. By this method, he succeeded in carving a pathway 250 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 9 feet high in 1979. Eventually, in 1981, the mountainous mission was over. The pathway was now 350 feet long, 16 feet wide and 12 feet high. Dasarath had overpowered the 'monster' that had broken his wife's jar and his heart. But, alas, Faguni was not there to share his hour of triumph. Says Dasarath with sadness welling up his throat: 'Unfortunately, she died barely two years after I
started cutting the mountain, her enemy.' Today, a wizened sixty-year-old Dasarath is known as 'Sadhu' in the nearby villages. And people who have come to savour the fruits of his labour save half an hour when crossing over from Atri to Wazirganj. Yet, the landlords have hearts of stone. They still call him a 'Musahar' (lowliest of Harijans). A landlord asked me in all seriousness: 'It is the duty of Harijans to work for the benefit of other castes. What is so great about this man's pathway that you have come all the way from Patna to write about him?' And the government has been indifferent to Dasarath's achievement. Since 1981, he been spending much energy and money in meeting officers and political leaders in Gaya and Patna for the sole purpose of connecting the pathway to the road. The distance from the pathway to the road is about '4,200 steps.' He met Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav on 4 April last year but so far nothing much has come out of it. Dasarath, however, is enthused that Jail Minister Udai Narain Chaudhary has assured him that the project would be carried out very soon. After completing the pathway, Dasarath has helped his clansmen dig thirty irrigation wells. The weather-beaten workworshipper is dismayed that the government has not provided pumping facilities for these wells. 'For the past eight months I have been knocking at the doors of the district magistrate in Gaya and the chief minister in Patna. But they are not paying any attention to it,' Dasarath says. However, Dasarath is optimistic that his dreams would take shape in the near future. He says, 'Rajkamal Babu of Calcutta is making a film on me. Shooting is going to start in the first week of February. He has agreed to give me Rs 50,000. I will spend the entire amount on my mission. Besides, one Arun from Patna is also making a documentary on me, and he will also pay me a good amount.'
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The simple-living Dasarath spends his days rapt in his dreams. Though his aims are lofty, he is saddled with domestic worries. His son, Bhagirath, is a cripple and works as a labourer at a brick-kiln in Varanasi. And his only daughter, Laungi Devi, is a widow with three sons who have been living with Dasarath ever since their father died two years ago. Dasarath owns one and a half acres of land, provided by the government in 1980 to his handicapped son. On this plot stands the hut he has built and a vegetable patch. His famished looking, half-naked grandsons tend cattle all day. But faith sustains Dasarath Manjhi. Faith that moves mountains. KANHAIYA BHELARI
18 August 1991
TRACKING THE TIGERS
FACTORIES in an industrial hub churning out thousands of grenades a day. Huge arms dumps with lakhs of detonators. The best of guerrilla communications gear. A brigade of hard core operators who have roped in an army of local politicians, smugglers, drug-runners, financial fiddlers, couriers and professionals. Hideouts in all cities, in almost every taluk. A coffer overflowing with remittances from round the globe. Property worth crores of rupees. A propaganda machinery that can brainwash Goebbels. The LTTE in Tamil Nadu has all this and much more. The LTTE network is finely spun, like a massive web of steel filaments, covering more than half of Tamil Nadu, which the Tigers consider as their own. For them, the state has been a bankable backyard in their war against Colombo and they have invested heavily in it, taking calculated risks ruthlessly. The enterprise they have shown has been astounding. On a May night last year, they shifted to Jaffna an entire grenade factory men, material and machinesthat had been functioning in Coimbatore. Grenades for the Tiger arsenal were produced on
a war-footing for seven months in the relocated factory in the Jaffna forests till the mechanics from Coimbatore became homesick. They got back to Coimbatore and set up another factory, this time with more sophisticated machinery smuggled in from north India. The scale of production was now truly mammoth5,000 grenades a day which were shipped to Jaffna at regular intervals till the Tamil Nadu Police raided the unit this August. In late July this year, ten crates of high-explosive detonators made by the multinational ICI India Ltd at its Gomia factory in Bihar reached the godowns owned by the LTTE in benami names on the outskirts of Tiruchi. In the crates were 1 lakh detonators to be taken to the Thanjavur coast and smuggled out to Jaffna. Ever paid a Rs 1.75 lakh bill at a small pharmacy for a single purchase on a single day? That was the kind of medical bills the Tigers were running up even this July in Tiruchi. On their shopping list were thousands of bottles of intravenous fluid, stacks of bandages and cotton rolls, painkillers and medicines, even surgical equipment meant for Tigers battling the Sri Lankan forces at the Elephant Pass, the bund that connects the Jaffna peninsula to the rest of the island. In January, a severely injured Tiger was moved from Tamil Nadu to one of the best-equipped hospitals in Bangalore. The very night he died, his body was taken to Kulathur in Salem district; it had been his last wish that he be buried in Salem at the very spot that the Indian intelligence agencies had trained him in 1984. His friends then got back to Bangalore to take care of ten others who were being treated in the hospital. Following the crackdown in the garden city, some of the injured were shifted to a medicare haven in Nanjagud. The drive by the CBI's Special Investigation Team (SIT) and the grit of Chief Minister Jayalalitha who reversed her mentor MGR's policy of breeding the militant brigade may
have yielded some results. But what has been exposed in raids is less than the tip of the Tiger tail. Apart from Tamil Nadu, the Tigers have left their pug marks in parts of Karnataka, Kerala and even faraway Bihar, where injured militants have been treated and explosives obtained. Besides, the Tigers have conduits to the Bombay underworld, the People's War Group in Telengana, and the Khalistani and ULFA militants to whom they sell weapons. They have also a well-forged chain of operators in Britain, Canada and Germany to funnel funds to the war chest. But Tamil Nadu has been their lifeline. Without Tamil Nadu, the Tigers cannot carry on the war for a free Eelam. The network is simply amazing. Playing around with astronomical sums in hard cash, the Tigers could convert, apart from Madras, nine districts here into bases for war supplies Coimbatore, Periyar (Erode), Salem, Dharmapuri, Tiruchi, Thanjavur, Pudukottai, Madurai and Ramanathapuram. Unfazed by the crackdown by security forces, twelve divisions of the Tiger network still operate from these bases, taking care of intelligence, communications, arms production, purchase of explosives, propaganda and political work, finance and currency conversion, food and essential supplies including books for Jaffna schoolchildren, medicines, fuel, clothing and transport. The key LTTE operators heading each unit, who have extensive local contacts and are shifted out of sight the day they come in for adverse notice by the police, coordinate the operations through a communications network that beats what the state machinery has. Funds have never been a problem. Working hand-in-glove with smugglers on the Thanjavur coast, they could ensure not just trans-shipment of goods, but also conversion of Indian currency. As Tiger girls arrested last year disclosed, the money generated from smuggling in gold was being ploughed back into smuggling out war material. Besides, the LTTE is known to
TRACKING T H E TIGERS | 91
collect a fee of Rs 1 lakh from Tamils leaving Jaffna for good; some of the refugees paid in gold ornaments, which were converted into ingots and disposed of in the Tiruchi, Coimbatore and Bombay markets. One of the key smuggler-operators of the LTTE in Tiruchi is Jany 0ohny) who goes around as a freelance photographer and has even accepted assignments from the police. Another source of money, which was handled by Vicky alias Vigneswaran till his recent arrest in Coimbatore, has been drugrunning for which Sri Lankans have been notorious. Money also poured in from the sale of forged passports and foreign university degrees in courses ranging from engineering to MBA. And, according to a modest estimate, the Tigers have invested more than Rs 1 crore in property in Tamil Nadu. While they have spent liberally on purchasing vehicles off the shelf and payrolling important contacts and policemen, they have been cutting costs too. For instance, Jaipal and Loganathan, who helped them make grenades in Tamil Nadu and in Jaffna were given a small salary of Rs 1,700 a month. The Tigers quickly reacted to the changed policy of the state government by launching a secret but intensive drive to enlist local Tamils as direct links in the operations. Besides giving the hard core militants the much-needed cover, this would help them expand their support base in the state. Thus, they have befriended smuggler dons operating away from the coast for clinching business deals, doctors and laboratory technicians for buying medicines, mechanics for arms making, clothing agents for getting the striped uniforms, and chit funds operators for money changing. The bait being hefty commissions and payoffs, there are enough people willing to take the risk. In Tamil Nadu, the number of people who have not met a Tiger is meagre. The organization is highly systematic, with each district being allotted a specific assignment. The task cut out for
Coimbatore was manufacturing guns and grenades and getting spares for AK-47 assault rifles; Salem for treatment of the wounded and for purchasing medicines; Erode, which is famous for its handloom units, for dyeing the battle fatigues; Madurai for intelligence-gathering; and Thanjavur for smuggling. Apart from being the main transit point for men and material, Tiruchi was the main source of detonators, which came from licenced local explosives' dealers, who obtain the components from companies like ICI Ltd. Some explosives input also came from Erode, Salem, Dharmapuri and North Arcot. Ail the goods found their way to the centrally located Tiruchi, before being taken to the Thanjavur coast, where they would be handed over to local smugglers for trans-shipment to the island. The large consignments used to be moved through private transport companies, while smaller ones were taken by the LTTE's own fleet of Maruti Gypsies. Controlling the entire operation was the communications wing; each vital centre had a Sanyo walkie-talkie set linked to a sophisticated wireless network on the island. Coimbatore has been a familiar terrain for the Tigers ever since they were given training here and they were quick to grasp the potential of the industrial city, where a die or prototype can be readily made from any diagram. Not less than ten units, some of them innocently, have been supplying material for the Tigers' grenade factories, the last batch of which was shipped to the island early this year. Heading the arms-making operations then were Killiyan and Udayan, who had links with the Dravida Kazhagam (DK) faction leader, Kovai Ramakrishnan, who is believed to be close to the Tiger chief, V. Prabhakaran. It was with the help of Ramakrishnan's deputy, Aruchammy, that the Tigers began manufacturing Arul-89 and Arul-90 missiles in ordnary foundry units. When the police caught them in the act in August 1989 and arrested two Sri Lankans and five Indians including
TRACKING THE TIGERS | 93
Aruchammy, the Karunanidhi government did everything to soft-pedal the case. The case, from which Ramakrishnan was kept out allegedly at Karunanidhi's behest, is still dragging on in the court with everyone out on bail. Though the Tigers recalled Killiyan in the wake of the case, they did not retreat from the arms-making business. Instead, they made Raju the new chief of the operation and also set up a team under Guna (who killed himself along with Dixon in Coimbatore on 28 July) and Raghu, who is now under arrest, to organize an even bigger network. First the team used people like Dravida Kazhagam sympathizer Shanmugham to get them houseseach was to be located on parallel or nearby streets so that in the event of a raid on one, they could easily take refuge in another. The rental advance was fantastically high, so was the rent. Some women supporters of the Tigers would occupy the houses along with their childrena ploy to fool the suspicious and vacate when the real operators moved in. Meanwhile, Guna and Raghu carefully marked out owners of foundry units who were on a lean patch, bought them over, and set up new arms production centres. Though the grenades with plastic shells were produced with manually operated machines, they have proved their worth in the Lankan war. Jaipal, Loganathan and Ravi, all locals, operated the machines while quality control was the responsibility of Raghu, an explosives expert who can handle weapons of any make. Last July, sensing that the police were once again on their trail, they dismantled the units overnight and shipped the equipment along with the mechanics to the Jaffna forests where the units were reassembled. By then they were getting gelatine and explosives supplies from contractors engaged in blasting stones at Sulur, Palladam and Avanashi. They were also the sources of explosives used in the rail blast in Tiruchi for which some DMK men were arrested. The case was withdrawn during the Karunanidhi regime.
Later, the Tigers set up an automatic unit at Ganapathy in Coimbatore under Gowrishankar, apart from three manually operated units in the name of Ravichandran. A house rented through Shanmugham was converted into a godown and brandnew Maruti jeeps were purchased to transport the goods to Tiruchi. Said a neighbour: 'There would be a lot of movement at night, but we did not try to find out what was happening.' But, according to K. Muthukaruppan, SP, the neighbours kept their eyes and mouths closed thanks to the loans that the Tigers were liberally doling out. Coimbatore has also been a key centre for coordinating the transport of arms to the coast via Tiruchi and to liaise with new hideouts set up in Mysore and Bangalore. That was why the communications expert Dixon, who blasted himself with gelatine sticks when cornered in Coimbatore, used to shuttle between the city and Tiruchi. The LTTE network spread right across the contiguous Erode and Salem districts, arranging vital supplies and back-up links. The Tigers, as well as the rival PLOT of Uma Maheswaran, had their training camps in Salem's Kolli Hills in 1984. After driving out PLOT, the Tigers entrenched themselves there and made use of the heavy concentration of cloth mills and dyeing units to procure their striped uniforms and bags to carry their weapons. They also got reams of cloth from a Tiruchi-based Binny's agent. The purchases were on a massive scale; the local police tailing some Tigers shopping in Erode early this year learnt that some bills came to Rs 10 lakhfor cloth purchased over a fortnight. The Tigers have also landed property in Erode, including a dairy farm, besides large investments in chit funds and private finance companies. In fact, when some injured Tiger girls fled Erode with a wireless set last January, the decoy they used was a finance company man. Says Panchapakesan, DIG (Intelligence): 'Apart from smugglers, some finance companies
TRACKING THE TIGERS | 95
have been giving advances and paying for the goods bought for the LTTE.' The Kolli Hills have also been a base for treating injured cadres and for purchase of medicines. Early this year, the police identified a secret board and lodging arrangement for Tigers who were moving in and out of Salem at the foothills of the Yercaud ranges. Employing a Lankan Tamil repatriate and helped by a DK man, the Tigers had set up this base to store their purchases and transport them to Tiruchi. Among the huge stock of medical items seized in a recent police raid, the bandages alone were worth Rs 5 lakh. With the police turning on the heat, the Tigers have lately been taking injured cadres across the border to Mysore, Bangalore, Kolar and Nanjagud. Bangalore has also been a shopping centre for military black boots and gun spare parts. At least three front organs of the LTTE have operated from Bangalore; two Tamil publications too were being brought out from there. Madurai has been a beehive of LTTE intelligence operators, largely due to its proximity to Ramnad's Mandapam that is teeming with refugees, many of whom are recruited by the militants. The Tigers have planted informers in the refugee camps to keep track of the movements of rival militant groups; the refugees are a mine of information, most of which they overhear or glean from their relatives. The information is then passed on to various units elsewhere, a fact which has helped the cadres give the slip to the police. For instance, when the police were raiding four benami godowns of the LTTE in Tiruchi, the news was conveyed in a flash to some wounded Tigers undergoing treatment there; they instantly vanished from their hospital beds. At least four hospitals in Tiruchi have been regularly treating Tigers on the recommendation of DK and DMK activists. Brought to Thanjavur by speedboats from Jaffna, the Tigers are taken to these hospitals by jeeps. For the recuperation of
those discharged from hospitals but considered still unfit, the LTTE has rented dozens of houses in and around Tiruchi, including the Srirangam island. Srirangam was the scene of a raid last year in which a large stock of explosives was seized. Giving support to militants in Tiruchi have been people like DMK activist and lawyer Maruthanayagam, who has always been at hand to pull the Tigers out of trouble whenever cases have been slapped against them. Another LTTE supporter was poet Kasi Ananthan, who is said to have met Rajiv Gandhi some weeks before his assassination. And one of the major hauls of explosives after the dismissal of Karunanidhi was from the house of a DMK strongman of Samayapuram in Tiruchi. Yet the Tigers only stepped up their activity as the seizures from the doctor Gopalakrishnan's home at Muruggapettai, near Tiruchi, showed. The sprawling house, strategically located on the Erode-Karur road, had served as a vast godown for medical supplies for the militants. Thanjavur is crawling with policemen and as K. Kasim, DIG (Tiruchi Range), says, 'There is an unusual calm in Vedaranyam now.' His officers have detained the LTTE's man in Nagapattinam and five naval units are keeping vigil on the coastline. Vedaranyam indeed could have been a difficult terrain for the Tigers but for the intense hostility between the police and the public. Says a local police officer: 'Smuggler Shanmugham's death has pitted their supporters against us.' The days of Tigers driving jeeps to the beach may be over, but the police get little help from the local people to trap the Tigers. In the Muthupet swamps, for instance, the smuggling operations go on unhindered despite the arrest of two local dons. The Tigers have for long cultivated a specialized group of couriers who can move across the swamps in the dead of night. Said a customs officer of nearby Pattukottai: 'As long as we didn't interfere, it was fine. Now the question is, what will happen if we have to open fire?'
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If the crackdown has not deterred LTTE supporters, one reason apart from the lure of money is that many of them hail from Prabhakaran's village of Velvettithurai, which has always been a smugglers' paradise. Their loyalties run deep; this explains the modest response to the government's directive to refugees to register themselves. All this only goes to strengthen the fact that the Tigers, in their fight for Eelam, need Tamil Nadu more than anything else. Why then did they risk the exposure of their safe haven by assassinating Rajiv Gandhi would always remain an enigma. Was it because they feared a more ruthless crackdown if he had returned as Prime Minister? Or was the assassination, as Home Minister S.B. Chavan suggested, part of a wider international conspiracy in which the Tigers merely played a part? No one will ever know for sure. VINCENT D'SOUZA
5 January 1992
CARELESS DOCTORS, GREEDY HOSPITALS
THE Indian medical system is ill. The symptom: a fatal disregard of ethics. The diagnosis: money mania spawned by cut-throat competition. Rake in money every way, that's the reigning motto. If the patients' interests are sacrificed in the bargain, that's their funeral, literally. The curative industrythe hospitals, the pharmaceuticals and the doctorsare having a ball. And to hell with Hippocrates. From state-of-the-art speciality hospitals to government health centres, the wails of those who face the medical scalpel are growing louder by the day. If the rates are killing in the five-star hospitalshere they really value your moneysheer callousness and neglect do the job elsewhere. Instead of pursuing the noble cause of curing the sick, the industry is busy adding to the pestilences created by nature and man-made maladies. Drug abuse is as rampant as shoddy treatment. Most of us Indians must be Virgos, inveterate hypochondriacs, if the number of drugs and formulations offered for our voracious consumption is any indicator. Believe it or not, there are about 9,000 companies selling more than 60,000
such concoctions and if we were not medicine maniacs, we would have been happy with a fraction of them. For, we need just 248 essential drugs to take care of 99 per cent of our diseases. And many of the drugs that are thrust into our bodies through various orifices or jabbed in with the needle are plain harmful. We would have cared if we knew which potion would act like poison. But, alas, we don't. Nor for that matter do most of our doctors. They are babes in the drugs bazaar, spoon-fed by smart-talking salesmen who palm off hazardous combinations that pass off as sure-fire remedies. Sure-fire they really areto the manufacturer. He rakes in a tidy sum from combination drugs which, at times, sell at ten times their manufacturing cost. No wonder the much safer single-ingredient drugs are no longer the doctor's choice. The World Health Organization has often talked of the need to educate doctors on drugs. But who cares? The only onthe-job education that most of them receive is from salesmen who are paid to paint over the ill effects of the drug. As Dr H.H. Siddiqui, professor of pharmacology in Delhi's AIIMS, says, those serving in medical colleges and big hospitals have access to information on every new drug; not those in villages and districts. Since there simply is no machinery to educate them, harmful combinations are prescribed as if they were candies. In fact, even the drug controller's ban on forty-three drugs has hardly been effective. One of the banned combinations is estrogen-progesterone (EP), which was promoted in the 1960s as a wonder drug during pregnancy tests. It turned out to be a distorting wonder: it led to babies being deformed. Yet EP forte is still being prescribed. It, in fact, has found a new application-it is being widely used for inducing abortions or delaying menstrual flow. Another harmful combination is chloramphenicolstreptomycin. The first ingredient is good for treating typhoid
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and the second for tuberculosis. But their combination, which is being indiscriminately prescribed for diarrhoea and amoebic dysentery, can have deadly side-effects. Chloramphenicol by itself is a villain as it loves to hit the bone marrow, which produces blood cells. Streptomycin, too, is no saint: it has a penchant for causing deafness. In any case, most diarrhoeal cases call for nothing more than good old granny's prescription: lots of water laced with sugar and salt. Or maybe some antibiotics. The prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, describes this oral rehydration therapy as 'potentially the most important medical breakthrough of this century'. Yet, if there wasn't the good old diarrhoea around, a number of drug manufacturers would have suffered from a constipation of profits. At the last count, there were seventy-five companies making 200 cures for it. One of them contained halogenated hydroxenequinoline, a chemical that sounds as bad as it actually is. It could hit you in the eyedamage optic and other nerves. Japan banned it in 1970 after nearly 10,000 cases were filed by victims. Even our neighbours like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka later banned it but we, in our infinite wisdom, did not take any action. Such blind indifference explains why the production of clioquinol, which is available under a host of brand names, has increased by 50 per cent despite proof that it causes sub-acute myclo optic neuropathy. More than 80 lakh diarrhoeal cases were reported in India in 1989 which meant that nearly as many anti-diarrhoeals were prescribed. The penchant of doctors for cardiotonic agents and corticosteroids could be a prescription for trouble. 'After antibiotic abuse, we are going to have steroid abuse in the country,' warns health activist Dr Unnikrishnan of Delhi, since steroids hamper a child's normal growth and suppress natural production of steroids from endocrine glands. Yet steroids like cortisone are widely prescribed for afflictions ranging from tuberculosis to skin rashes.
CARELESS DOCTORS, GREEDY HOSPITALS I 1 0 1
According to a WHO report, 'corticosteroids have long been used in management of tuberculous meningitis in the expectation that by lessening the inflammatory reaction, neurological damage is reduced. However, the possibility exists that in suppressing inflammation, corticosteroids will also reduce the penetration of anti-TB drugs into the cerebrospinal fluid'. In India, steroids are regularly prescribed not only for unmanageable asthmaa Bangalore firm had sold a corticosteroids-based remedybut also for mild seasonal respiratory problems. And once a patient takes steroids for a mild respiratory problem, he is nearly hooked for life. Drug companies of course have to list the side-effects of a drug. But they do not have to declare the product irrational or dangerous, even if it is. 'This is the malady of our health programmes,' says Dr Mira Shiva, who for long has been campaigning against irrational drugs and for proper information for doctors. 'The government should have a rational drug policy and weed out the ones without any therapeutic value,' she says. But again, who cares? There is not even an official list of the thousands of brand names, let alone a machinery to monitor their quality. One of the important recommendations of the Hathi Commission report of 1975, the first major study on pharmaceutical industry after Independence, was that thirteen commonly used drugs, like some painkillers, should be sold only under their generic names, not the brand names. Had it been accepted, the price would have become rational and some top manufacturers would have sat and wept. But the government has never liked the rich shedding tears. It ignored the Hathi report, which called for the creation of a national drug authority to keep a close watch on essential drugs, quality control, advertising and labelling systems, gap between price and manufacturing cost, prescription of toxic and addictive drugs, spurious and substandard drugs, and violation of drug policy.
Not that the commission's efforts were entirely wasted. The report was acclaimed elsewhere in the developing world and Bangladesh immediately implemented it. Incidentally, Bangladesh has also banned all cough syrups, which, like tonics, are irrational and wasteful drugs. One can well hear our politicians and their pharmaceutical financiers saying 'ahem' in collusion. Being men of the world, the manufacturers know how to persuade doctors to ply patients with unnecessary drugs. Apart from bombarding doctors with disinformation, their salesmen charm them with pretty gifts; there are also hard-nosed hacks who receive a regular supply of hard cash from themwhere there is a pill, there is a price to be paid! Powerful antibiotics are prescribed since they cover a wide spectrum of infections and save the doctor the trouble of a diagnosis. A team of Calcutta doctors, led by Amiya Kumar Sarkar, recently found that three-fourths of typhoid patients did not respond to the standard chloramphenicol because they had earlier received this antibiotic for common cold and fever. Those afflicted by red eye or microbial conjunctivitis are usually advised to use chloramphenicol eyedrops. According to a WHO report, red eye 'is commonly overdiagnosed' and is 'a self-limiting condition . . . Antibiotic therapy can shorten the period of discomfort but it also carries the risk of local toxicity and hypersensitivity'. Reports a clinical pharmacologist, Molly Thomas, of Christian Medical College, Vellore: 'The new quinoline antibiotics are widely and often inappropriately prescribed . . . without regard to the cost or the ever present danger of the emergence of drug-resistant organisms.' There is yet another dangerous factor: studies reveal that excessive use of antibiotics damages the kidney and liver permanently and causes agranulocytosis (infected ulcers in the throat, intestinal tract and skin) in children as they hamper the production of infection-fighting white cells in the blood. Yet
most general practitioners and specialists prescribe them to children even for minor afflictions like earache which, according to one school of medical thought, can be contained in twentyfour hours without an antibiotic in 85 per cent of cases. However, according to an infection specialist in a referral hospital at Delhi, 'The main danger from antibiotics is when they are stopped abruptly. Patients discontinue the drug once their discomfort is over without caring for the full course advised by the doctor. Abrupt discontinuation results in developing resistance to the drug. This happened to tetracyclin. I think nearly half the urban population of India is resistant to it. And so it has been replaced by cephalexin, which is stronger.' Along with the advent of new drugs, the prescriptions get longer. As a Bangalore biochemist, D.S. Sheriff, wrote to the National Medical Journal of India, 'The exploitation of the pharmaceutical industry by physicians and vice versa has resulted in the growing size of prescriptions though it is well known that the cost of the prescription does not reflect the quality of treatment.' According to a medico-legal specialist, Mihir Desai, of Bombay, 'There is no law that prevents a doctor from prescribing strong drugs.' A senior doctor in a referral hospital recalled an interesting episode. While on his rounds, a heart specialist came across a miserable elderly woman whose prescription chart had five itemsdigoxin to strengthen the heart muscle, hydrochlorothiazide to remove excessive fluid from the body, potassium chloride to prevent loss of potassium, procainamide to regularize heart beat and stemetil to control the nausea caused by these drugs. The specialist ordered immediate stoppage of all drugs and the next day the patient was better and eating well. Her heart condition too was found to be normal; the five drugs had been prescribed for a symptom that was actually caused by some other minor disorder. If she had continued on the drugs, she
would probably have died and the doctor would have written the cause of death as 'arteriosclerotic heart disease'. Anabolic steroids have been marketed in India as growth stimulants for children though a British clinical pharmacologist, A. Herxheimer, feels that 'giving children anabolic steroids . . . will increase their growth, but also lead to premature cessation of growth in the long bones of the limbs, so the size of the limbs will be smaller in the end than it would be if the child grew more slowly and naturally'. The drug industry is also fattening itself by hard-selling vitaminsisn't vitamin deficiency one of the most frequently heard 'diagnosis' in India, admittedly a country of malnourished people! Pregnant women are advised vitamin formulations, but according to a WHO report more than 400 to 1,250 micrograms of Vitamin A can cause birth defects. Vitamin B injections, manufactured by 126 companies, are pumped into patients who complain of weakness and bodyache in doses as high as 100 milligrams while the body can take no more than two milligrams a day. Similarly, though the body does not accept more than 5,000 units of Vitamin A, doctors prescribe up to 10,000 units. This at a time when there is a shortage of Vitamin A which leaves 40,000 children blind every year. And studies in Sweden have proved that excessive intake of Vitamin D can cause heart diseases. The latest rage in the Indian medical circuit is the painkiller. In Britain, 7,000 people are admitted to hospitals every year because of aspirin-caused intestinal bleeding. A Spanish study found that 33 per cent of patients suffering from intestinal bleeding had taken aspirin. Yet 'the general practitioner in India prescribes aspirin as a rule for abdominal discomfort', said a doctor at Delhi's AIIMS, 'as also as an analgesic (painkiller)'. According to him, painkillers have almost come to be the mainstay of general allopathic practice in India and so it is not
surprising that analgin has 162 brands in India. Very often deaths caused by painkillers are not detected as they are ascribed to intestinal bleeding or blood disorders. Indiscriminate use of the essential painkiller ibuprofen can lead to serious cardiovascular side effects, including hypertension and heart problems. Maternal mortality in hospitals too is often found to be caused by the high intake of obstetric analgesics (those which reduce labour pain). According to an editorial in the Indian Journal of Anaesthesia, 'out of all maternal deaths reported, nearly 75 per cent were found to be in those in whom bupivacaine 0.75 had been used for epidural analgesia'. And bupivacaine is the most commonly used drug for easing labour pain. Incidentally, Caesarean and forceps deliveries are big business though most people feel that Caesarean deliveries are unnecessary. A survey in Kerala, where private clinics exist in most villages, revealed that 31 per cent of deliveries were by Caesarean section. More significant, 70 per cent of the hospitals where Caesareans were routine were privately-owned. In Maharashtra, the Mangudkar Committee found that the average rate of Caesarean childbirths in government hospitals was 5 per cent while in the private sector it was nearly 30 per cent. According to Dr Putandare, a member of the committee, private clinics charge between Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 for Caesarean delivery while a normal delivery fetches them Rs 300 to Rs 700. Dr Harish Grover, dean of the IMA College of General Practitioners and president of the Delhi Medical Association, rationalized the increased rate of Caesareans: 'Anaesthesia is comparatively safer now. So difficult labour cases can now be managed without forceps and vacuum. The ultrasound has revolutionized patient management. The doctor knows all about the foetus, the amount of amniotic fluid, etc. And so Caesarean section is a safer method and it has reduced infant mortality rates.' Added a gynaecologist in a Delhi hospital: 'These days
urban women marry later or delay families. After thirty-five, women are more prone to abnormal uterine activity and delayed dilation of the cervix. They are also more vulnerable to high blood pressure. So doctors consider it safer to resort to Caesarean section.' But the assumption that the Caesarean method is safer is being increasingly questioned. According to a senior obstetrician in a government hospital in Delhi, the chances of the baby inhaling amniotic fluid into the lungs are more in Caesarean cases. This is prevented in normal delivery by the squeezing of the lungs by the convulsing muscles. Caesarean section also renders the uterus weak and the scar would rupture in subsequent pregnancies. To prevent this, subsequent deliveries too would have to be Caesarean and hence the saying, 'Once a Caesarean, always a Caesarean.' And studies have revealed that chances of developing hernia are more after Caesarean deliveries. More common than Caesareans is the vaginal incision usually done to ease the baby's passage and to prevent the tearing of the vaginal tissues. Rarely is this done with the patient's consent and according to a Canadian health expert, Corolyn De Marco, it is 'totally unnecessary and has no scientific validation'. Writes a British medical thinker, Vernon Coleman: 'Giving birth used to be a fairly simple process. Today, it involves ultrasound, amniocentesis, epidural anaesthesia, pelvic angiography (radiographic study of blood vessels) and a dozen other complicated, expensive and dangerous procedures.' A number of drugs that reduce labour pain can cause life-threatening complications for the mother and the baby. Many spinal anaesthetics can cause permanent backache; many urban mothers in India would vouch for that. Similarly, X-raying the abdomen of pregnant women can cause hereditary diseases in unborn babies. According to experts, X-rays and other diagnostic systems
are more abused than used these days. A WHO scientific study group reports that routine chest X-ray accounts for 50 per cent of all diagnostic radiology. And according to a Brighton diagnostic radiologist, Nicholas Bishop, 'There is no such thing as a routine chest X-ray,' which means that half the X-ray investigations done in the world are a sheer waste of film and time. Interestingly, clinical radiation accounts for 87 per cent of man-made radiation, which means the nuclear facilities account for only 13 per cent. Activists of the medical consumer awareness forum, Medico Friends Circle, allege that private hospitals encourage doctors to order expensive and unnecessary diagnoses which are often harmful. A good number of doctors allegedly get kickbacks from diagnostic establishments to which they send their patients. 'The commissions paid in Bombay are as high as 40 per cent of the bill,' alleges Dr Amar Jaisani of the Foundation for Research in Community Health. 'The same system of kickbacks works between the specialists and general practitioners. Recently, the general practitioners in the Malad suburb of Bombay jointly demanded 50 per cent "cuts" from nursing homes to which they were sending patients.' However, according to Dr Harish Grover, patients encourage this practice by going directly to specialists. 'The specialist wants to make sure of his diagnosis through investigations. He looks at even minor ailments as those which can possibly be serious disorders and he orders a host of diagnostic investigations. Overinvestigation can be reduced if patients are told to approach the general practitioner as a rule. If there indeed is a serious disorder, the general practitioner can refer the patient to the specialist.' Most of the investigations are useless. Last year, Dr K.V.R. Reddy and three others conducted a study in AIIMS where investigations are not as frequently ordered as in private nursing homes. The team found that routine blood and urine tests were
often of little use in arriving at correct diagnoses. In 86 per cent of the cases, the results were no different from earlier diagnoses. And 8.6 per cent of the tests were found to be worthless. Even ultrasound investigation, considered safer than X-ray, is often done unnecessarily, particularly in private nursing homes. Children suffering from pyloric stenosis (narrowing of the muscular tissue surrounding the stomach), for instance, are routinely subjected to ultrasound examination though conventional clinical tests would give a correct diagnosis in nearly 80 per cent of the cases. Similarly, many specialist referral hospitals boast of cytology-based screening programmes for early detection of cervical cancer. But a study by Ashok Sehgal and others of the Maulana Azad Medical College of Delhi revealed that half of the cases can be detected by visual examination. The diagnoses racket runs so deep that a mere stomach upset could find one being put through endoscopy (inspection of the insides of the bladders), said a doctor in Bombay's JJ Hospital. 'Very often endoscopy is done just because the hospital has the facility,' he said pointing out that a team of doctors led by S.P. Mishra of MLN Medical College, Allahabad, had studied this phenomenon for more than a year. Its conclusion: 'Young dyspeptic patients need not have an endoscopy but should be treated first with antacids or/and H2 receptor blocking agents for six to eight weeks. Only if they do not respond should they undergo endoscopy.' Often surgery becomes a fad, said a senior surgeon at Bombay's KEM Hospital. In the 1960s, removal of the appendix and tonsils were fashionable. 'It is now the age of the coronary bypass, one of the most expensive surgeries which costs anything above Rs 50,000. Considered medical opinion now is that a bypass is beneficial only in the short-term,' according to the surgeon. Said Dr K.K. Aggarwal, vice-chairman of Heart Care Foundation of India: 'It all differs from person to person.
CARELESS DOCTORS, GREEDY HOSPITALS I 109
Indication of bypass surgery is the failure of adequate medical treatment to control the symptoms. A mere presence of coronary artery disease is not an indication of bypass. Bypass is not a panacea: it does not give you a cure, it is only a temporary relief.' Removal -of the uterus too is an in thing. According to Montreal Health Press, this is more common in countries where doctors are paid per operation than where doctors are salaried. Seven out of every ten women above fifty-five in the US have lost their uterus. But in Britain, where medical services are nationalized, only two women in ten have been thus deprived. No such statistical studies have been done in India, but the fad is fast catching on in the cities. Perhaps the most rampant malpractice is in administering injections. According to Dr Manohar Kamath of Bombay, 90 per cent of all injections given in this country are useless. Rather, they could prove dangerous to the patient. Dr H.V. Wyatt of England examined 3,005 children paralysed by poliomyelitis. His conclusion: in 28 per cent cases, paralysis set in after the injections. Wyatt swears that 'paralysis usually occurred first in the injected limb.' But then injection and intravenous (IV) drip are almost the mascots of modern medicine. A doctor in a government hospital in Delhi pointed out: 'IV infusion is the quickest means of making money. Each bottle costs Rs 50 or more. Ten such patients a day would fetch the clinic Rs 500 from IV alone.' The danger, he says, is that patients could be exposed to infected needles and sub-standard drugs. Six patients who underwent cardiac surgery in an expensive Bombay hospital died last May because the vials of sodium bicarbonate contained ammonium chloride which caused the acid levels in the body to go up. Patients admitted with loose motion are regularly given IV drip to rehydrate the body, but most doctors agree in private that they could instead be asked to drink water and other fluids.
Despite the tall claims made by private hospitals, intensive care units in many of them are badly managed and lead to a high death rate. According to a study by David Wright and others, 80 per cent of critical incidents in ICUs are caused by human error, mostly resulting from the unfamiliarity of the staff with hi-tech gadgetry. Given that hospital infections and drug reactions cause quite a few fatalities in the highly sterile Western world, the situation in our filthy hospitals is far too scary. According to anaesthesiologist V.G. Appukutty of Madras Medical College, 'In a paediatric ICU, infection is one of the main causes for high incidence of deaths.' There are about 6 lakh hospital beds in India and if one is to assume that they are all occupied, 60,000 patients are there at any given time because the hospitals are infected. Most anaesthetic deaths, say experts, are caused by lack of continuous monitoring of the level of oxygen in the patient's blood. Lack of power generators in a posh Bombay hospital caused the death of an infant, a forty-five-year-old woman, and another patient in November. Instances of surgeons leaving pieces of cotton and surgical instruments in a patient's body are reported almost every day from various parts of the country. Says Sunil Nandraj of Medico Friends Circle, Bombay: 'On the one side we have a problem of lack of medical care for a vast majority of our people. On the other is the problem of surfeit of medical care, thanks to uncontrolled private practice. When questioned about promiscuous practice and prescription, doctors, particularly in the private sector, point to clinical freedom. It has come to such a state that they can ignore the needs of the patients and do what they want to.' Health activists in Bombay allege that most private nursing homes keep patients for unnecessarily long durations with the sole intention of increasing the billing. The managements encourage the doctors to advise patients 'hospital rest' and there
are allegations that the doctors are paid a 'cut'. A study by Ajay Kumar, N.K. Parmar and A.K. Gupta in three government referral hospitals in Delhi revealed that the average length of stay of patients in an Indian hospital 'ranges from six days to eighteen days with an average of around fourteen days'. In AIIMS, the average was 12.63 days. 'In the private nursing homes of Bombay', said an activist of the Medico Friends Circle, 'the figure could be double that of AIIMS.' The team's report had some other interesting statistics: a decrease of one day in an average length of stay (in the hospitals in the country) would make available about 41,000 beds each year and would mean a saving of Rs 162 crore. Bringing down the average length of stay to the present international levels (eight to nine days) would mean 2.46 lakh additional beds and a saving of Rs 897 crore. But what are such statistics when, as Amar Jaisani puts it, the practice of medicine has become an end in itself? The real aim of providing better health is often forgotten. More than 70 per cent of medical manpower in India is in the private sector and, as Anant Phadke of Bombay points out, 'there is talk of privatizing it further'. Quick healing with strong drugs helps doctors earn quick popularity. As a medical philosopher, Ivan Illich, said, foremost among the doctor-caused diseases 'was the pretence of the doctors that they provided their clients with superior health. Then, during the last fifteen years, professional medicine became a major threat to health'. According to a British pathologist, David Spain, doctorcaused disease 'can now take its place almost as an equal alongside the bacteria'. Says Dr A.S. Deshpande of Bombay: 'Eighty per cent of the ailments do not require interference by a physician and 80 per cent of the ailments in which the physician interferes are aggravated by his interference.' R. PRASANNAN WITH K.M. RAKESH
26 J u l y 1 9 9 2
ANGER IN AYODHYA
THE gloves are off. Aflame with white-hot anger, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is once again shaking its clenched fist like a man possessed. As it stomps around for a bare-knuckle fight over the Ayodhya shrine, the tremors are felt in Lucknow and New Delhi. And it appears that nothing on earth, not even the courts of law, would weaken the VHP's resolve to construct the Ram temple. The faith of millions of Hindus, thunders the VHP general secretary, Ashok Singhal, is beyond the jurisdiction of the courts. When the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court ordered a halt to the temple construction work on 15 July, the VHP ignored it with supreme nonchalance. In fact, the construction activity, which had been rather sluggish, gained a frenetic pace the day after the court order was issued. The VHP, with its saffron brigade of sants and mahants ready to battle the might of the nation, is determined to force a showdown. A showdown that the VHP leaders knew could provoke the dismissal of the Kalyan Singh government in Uttar Pradesh (UP), which had vowed to remove all hurdles in the path of the
temple construction. The sharp edge of belligerence in the VHP's action came as a shock to many BJP leaders in UP, who had believed that it would be content making ominous noises but would not do anything that might endanger the government which had four more years to go. The consternation in BJP circles was unmistakable, even though the party might well benefit electorally in UP and elsewhere in the event of Kalyan Singh's dismissal over the Ayodhya issue. Most of the BJP ministers refused to discuss the development: 'Don't ask me, ask the chief minister,' was their embarrassed response. Even the fiery Uma Bharati, MP, who was present at the inauguration of the temple construction on 9 July, sought to underplay it. 'Why should there be any hue and cry?' she asked. 'The Rajiv Gandhi government had declared that area (the shilanyas spot near which the construction began) as undisputed. What happened today could have taken place even during the regimes of Rajiv Gandhi or V.P. Singh.' But soon pressure mounted on Kalyan Singh to implement the court order. With the threat of dismissal looming large, he finally asked the district magistrate of Faizabad, two days after the stay order, to take action against the temple builders. That could well be a turning point in the relationship between the BJP and the VHP, the two branches of the RSS parivar. While the BJP leader, L.K. Advani, declared in Parliament that his party would not violate court orders, the VHP leadership asserted that the construction would not be disrupted, whatever the price. That the VHP had discussed, and prepared for, the eventuality was clear from the quick and uniform response of its various leaders to the stay order: Singhal and Onkar Bhave in Ayodhya, Vinay Katyar in Delhi and sundry lower-level leaders in Lucknow breathed fire that nothing could stop the construction. Said a VHP leader: 'The BJP had the sense to support our movement, while all other political parties opposed us. As a
result, the BJP has gained politically. But our movement would have gone on even if the BJP had not existed. Our commitment to the temple is much more important to us than the fate of a mere government.' The VHP's decision to begin the temple construction on 9 July had been taken at a meeting of its Kendriya Marg Darshak Mandal (central steering committee) in Ujjain as far back as 13 May, the sadhus and mahants in the committee having grown impatient with the BJP government's soft-pedalling of the issue. The mahants were also irritated by the public refrain that their temple movement was a mere political ploy intended to help the BJP and that they would rake up the issue only on the eve of the next elections. The committee once again discussed the decision and ratified it at a meeting at Ayodhya on 6 and 7 July. The change in the VHP's attitude towards the BJP was striking. Over the last one year, the VHP itself had slowed down the temple programme, hoping that the BJP government would sweep away the road blocks. But Kalyan Singh's attempts to oblige the VHP led only to further impediments and legal tangles. Even as the VHP was tackling the encroachers and genuine landowners in front of the shrine by buying up their property, the government acquired 2.77 acres, including the land that the VHP had bought a few weeks earlier. Predictably enough, the acquisition was challenged in court on the ground that a part of the acquired area figures in the original dispute relating to the shrine. The High Court passed an interim order which, while allowing the takeover, forbade transfer of the land to a third party and also erection of permanent structures in the area. If the government had not sought to acquire the land, the VHP could legitimately have begun construction on the plots that it had purchased outright. Now, with the acquisition and the litigation, its hands were tied. Resentment against the government steadily rose in the VHP as the prospect of getting a quick judgement receded.
ANGER IN AYODHYA I 1 1 5
By March this year, the VHP had had enough. The attempts to reconcile contradictions and begin building the temple without violating the law had failed. It was then that the VHP began razing the structures in front of the shrine, including five small temples, with the help of the Ayodhya Development Authority. The resultant outcry led to a fact-finding mission by a team of MPs and members of the National Integration Council, which declared that the demolitions had violated the court order. Oddly enough, no one thought of taking the issue to court and the Centre too did not exert itself. As the controversy died down, the VHP continued its programme, engaging contractors to dig the ground for laying the foundation of the temple. The government had, in effect, handed over the land to the Ram Janmabhoomi Mukti Nyas, an organization created by the VHP to oversee the temple construction, thus violating one of the two conditions set by the High Courtthat the land acquired by the tourism department should not be transferred to a third party. And when the cementing of the pits began on 9 July, the second conditionthat there should be no permanent constructions on the acquired landwas also violated. 'Yes, we have employed the contractor for the concreting and we are paying him,' admitted R.S. Agnihotri, the VHP's media coordinator. The enthusiasm displayed by kar sevaks and Bajrang Dal activists on 9 July had waned and the work was being carried on by contract labour when the atmosphere became suddenly surcharged on 15 July, following the court order staying all construction activity. The next day, nearly a thousand volunteers assembled in pouring rain, forming human chains that passed, from hand to hand, the metal pans of mortar to speed up the concreting work. More ominously, effigies of the three judges who had passed the order were burnt, while Singhal bitterly attacked the order.
The widespread feeling in BJP circles is that the government's notification of last November acquiring the land was a serious blunder and that it would be a blessing in disguise if the final decision of the court in this matter goes against the state. In fact, the government is even thinking of denotifying the acquisition so that it would no longer be directly involved in the activity in the disputed area. Besides, that would help the VHP build on land it had bought. However, it is not clear whether the land on which the VHP has begun construction belonged to it. Abdul Mannan, counsel for the Sunni Central Waqf Board, contends that it was not owned by the VHP and that the construction was in nazul plots 585 and 586, both of which are disputed in the original Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid suit. But then in a Shia-Sunni dispute at Doshipura in Varanasi, the Supreme Court had ruled that two Sunni graves in front of a Shia mosque should be shifted elsewhere since the land belonged to the Shias. But the then Congress government did not carry out the ruling on the plea that the shifting of the graves would create a law and order problem. The BJP government hopes to make the same plea, after denotifying the land acquisition. Curiously enough, the start of the temple construction has not witnessed the kind of frenzy seen last year when the VHP had locked horns with the then chief minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav. Though the storming of the shrine then was a symbolic act, passions had flared. Hindu residents of Ayodhya and Faizabad, who danced on the streets on that day, now go about their business hardly excited by the activity in front of the shrine. Many middle-class Hindus are in fact deeply perturbed by the VHP's defiance of the law. Said a shopkeeper: 'This is dangerous not just for the Muslims but for the Hindus as well.' The shrine, which has been left untouched, is guarded by ten companies of Provincial Armed Constabulary, four companies of the CRPF and a 200-strong UP Police contingent. Five more
A N G E R I N AYODHYA I 1 1 7
companies would soon join them. The beefing up of the security has strengthened the belief that the Centre would acquire the area to allow a temple to be built without harming the shrine a proposal floated during Rajiv Gandhi's rule. Some others had earlier suggested building a Ram temple around the Ram chabootra, a platform in the shrine's compound, just adjacent to the shrine. Even the Babri Masjid Action Committee had not been averse to this idea. V.P. Singh, too, had sought to acquire the undisputed areas in front of the shrine, during his last days in power, by issuing an ordinance, which was then hastily withdrawn. But the VHP has consistently opposed compromises: its unvarying slogan has been 'Mandir wahin banayenge and ' wahiri means the shrine itself. Though the VHP leaders now talk about 'renovation' of the shrine, instead of breaking up or relocating it, the fact remains that the sanctum sanctorum of the new temple and of the shrine will be one and the same; the new temple will encompass the shrine, though right now it suits the VHP to concentrate only on the area in front of the shrine. But when the iron is hot, the VHP is sure to strike it hard, worrying little about 'the fate of a mere government'. DEBASHISH MUKERJI
1 1 8 | THE BEST OF THE WEEK
28 March 1 9 9 3
BOMBAY BLASTS
THE hunt has begun. Not only in the dark alleys of Bombay's underworld, but also all over the country and even abroad. The Union government's first reaction to the bomb blasts that shook India's commercial capital on 12 Marchthat there could be an international conspiracyis being taken seriously by the country's sleuths and spies. Even the small leads that they have traced seem to cross the country's bordersmainly into Pakistan and West Asia. So much so that within a week of the Bombay blasts, the Union Home Ministry called all senior officials to North Block and briefed them about the 'role of Pakistan in sponsoring terrorism in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir'. The briefing went much beyond the two named states. The prime suspect according to intelligence theories is Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) which has the motive and the wherewithal to mastermind an operation of the magnitude that was witnessed in Bombay. But ISI is never known to operate directly anywhere except in Afghanistan and, of late, in Tajikistan. So it could have got help from certain
Wreckage left by one of a dozen bomb blasts in Mumbai on 12 March 1993
West Asian outfits and Bombay's underworld, which has had shady business deals with West Asia for more than a decade. Robert Oakley, former US ambassador to Pakistan, visited Islamabad on the midnight of 10 December, four days after the Ayodhya incident. Oakley, a long-standing friend of Pakistan in Washington, arrived by a special US Air Force flight. The aircraft returned immediately, lest it should be spotted there, and came back to pick him up two days later. Oakley had come to warn Pakistan of the increasing clout of the pro-India lobby in Washington and the strong likelihood of it (Pakistan) being labelled a terrorist state. He told Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that the new Democratic administration in Washington would tighten the screws on Pakistan unless it behaved, particularly in regard to Kashmir. Oakley had come on a friendly warning mission, but that was enough to cause panic in Islamabad. Back in Washington, Oakley and the pro-Pakistan lobby succeeded in averting, though temporarily, Pakistan's branding as a 'terrorist state'. But Pakistan is now on the watch-list for six months. The country's narcotic record is also being increasingly scrutinized by Washington and a review is scheduled for this month. Anyway, Pakistan behaved. Either on Oakley's advice or on its own, Pakistan 'officially' cut off all links with Kashmiri terrorists. All ISI officials were withdrawn from the dozen-odd camps where Kashmiri terrorists are trained. (There had been thirty-seven training camps before 1991, as was admitted by Lt. Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the then chief of the Pakistan army, when the CIA director, Robert Gates, made a secret visit to Pakistan in mid-1991.) Instead, retired ISI officials and retired army officials were sent to run the camps under the nominal management of the Jamaat party. One such officer is believed to be Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former ISI chief, who was withdrawn from the Kabul cell and put in charge, unofficially, of Kashmir.
BOMBAY BLASTS | 1 2 1
Ever since Hamid Gul and the Jamaatwhich though an opposition party has, of late, been going soft on its criticism of Nawaz Sharifwere put in charge of the Kashmir cells, armed infiltration into Kashmir has been on the wane. This had till recently been attributed to the success of the Indian security forces, but now Indian intelligence circles believe that it was a prelude to a larger plot to target the other centres in the rest of India. Something which Pakistan could easily disown, yet which would further its low-intensity conflict with India. Indian intelligence did have some clues on this. In late December, New Delhi received reports about the plan to send out Kashmiri militants to two Indian cities, Bombay and Ahmedabad. Though Ahmedabad has so far been spared of any incident of the Bombay kind, another intelligence report too mentioned the same city. That was when the Indian intelligence gathered, in January this year, details of the K2 project (literally, Kashmir and Khalistan), plotted originally by Brigadier Imtiaz, chief of ISI's Cell 202, and a few others. 'We did not know whether Imtiaz was the head of the team, but we know for sure that he was involved in it,' said an Indian intelligence officer. The K2 project was conceived much before the Ayodhya incident. Phase I of the project was to establish contacts in Bombay and Ahmedabad to receive arms and explosives sent through smugglers dealing in gold and drugs and operating on the Maharashtra-Gujarat coast. Simultaneously, the training of ninety Kashmiri militants began at Karachi in November 1992, supervised by Abdul Hamid Diwani. Their brief was not to fight the security forces but to create terror in major Indian cities. Diwani is a well-known figure in the annals of international terrorism. He was involved in the hijack of an Indian Airlines plane in 1976 and is believed to have learnt the ABC of terrorism from West Asia. The Bombay mafiosi, hiding in the liberal states of the Gulf, might well have been conduits for the explosives. 'There is
An apartment devastated by the bomb blast

reason to suspect that the Bombay dons, who have of late graduated from gold smuggling to drug smuggling and are hiding in West Asia, could have established contact with the Pakistan-centred drugs-arms circuit,' said an Indian intelligence official. 'And without the help of the Bombay dons, a sabotage incident of this kind could not have been undertaken.' The Bombay Police would only be glad to confirm this. The Memons, suspected to have links with the underworld don, Dawood Ibrahim, who is hiding in Dubai, are now the prime suspects as executors of the plot. The Dubai-based dons, intelligence operators believe, could also have been the lowestlevel executors. Home Ministry officials believe that the Bombay mafiosi and their dons in Dubai have links with the Asian drugs mafia operating from Pakistani soil. In fact, the Pakistan government is a passive supporter, and the ISI an active accomplice in this multimillion-dollar trade.
It is believed that ISI officials use vehicles of Pakistan's Narcotics Control Board to transport drugs. And Hamid Gul has been linked with the international drug traffic. Similarly, the Pakistan army-controlled National Logistics Cell (NLC) has often been used for transferring both drugs and arms to the hands of West Asian groups. The NLC has also been used to transport drugs from Afghanistan to various processing centres in Pakistan. According to Home Ministry officials, the Dubai-based dons of the Bombay underworld are basically engaged in smuggling out hidrabid acid which goes into the making of drugs. A litre of this acid, commonly used in Indian industries, costs about Rs 2,000 in India, but fetches at least Rs 1 lakh in Pakistan. The smugglers are paid in cash or firearms by Pakistan. There are other reasons to suspect the Bombay underworld and its Dubai-based dons. 'No force, however powerful, can do such an efficient job as was done in Bombay without the connivance of the locals,' said a Home Ministry official. And 'there cannot be many in Bombay who know the city better than the underworld characters.' But then, which gang in the underworld? 'It could be anyone beginning from Dawood Ibrahim,' said the official. Dawood, who is dependent on the powerful West Asian business interests, could very well have been arm-twisted to cooperate in the explosive plot, if he was not a willing accomplice, said the official. According to an Intelligence Bureau source, the failure of the Indian authorities lay in their inability to detect the smuggling-in of the explosives. None of the explosives or grenades used in the Bombay operations is of Indian origin. Indeed, there had been bits of information which had filtered in from various sources, some from the Indian mission in Islamabad itself, but they were not pieced together in time. The Gujarat-Maharashtra coastthe gold-smuggling route which became a drug-smuggling routemust have been used for smuggling in the explosives.
The Dubai dons and the Bombay underworld, however devious they are, have never before shown a smartness of the scale that was witnessed in Bombay. The ISI, too, is new to urban terrorism of the sophisticated variety. The Punjab terrorists have never graduated beyond using TNT explosive and spraying bullets from automatic firearms. Then there were the ISI-trained Kashmiri militants, particularly those from the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front 0KLF) and the Jammu and Kashmir Hizb-ul-Mujahideen 0KHM). The former could be ruled out without much of a thought. Almost disowned by ISI for its championing of a separate Kashmir (as against accession to Pakistan), the JKLF is now little more than a band of desperadoes. According to an army officer, they do not seem to have enough arms. 'More than one militant of the JKLF shares a weapon,' said he. 'But the JKHM members have at least one weapon per head, and perhaps more hidden.' The JKHM is better trained in the use of explosives, but except in one instance when they destroyed a bridge two years ago, it too has never shown any expertise in handling Semtex or any other explosive gelatine. Naturally, suspicion has narrowed down to the West Asian groups but the leads stop there. West Asia is teeming with terrorist groups about whom Indian intelligence has only a cursory knowledge. Among the two or three groups that are highly suspect is the Abu Nidal group. This is the most dreaded of the West Asian groups, as it has been, involved in a large number of terrorist attacks, spread over twenty countries, on all continents except Australia. Its members are the best trained among the West Asian terrorists to handle the RDX variety of explosives. But, more importantly, the group has more than once operated in Bombay. It first made its entry in India in 1982 with the assassination of the first secretary in the Kuwait
embassy. The next known incident was the killing of Percy Morris, the British consul in Bombay, in November 1984. The Morris murder was executed in a thoroughly professional manner and the Bombay Police had then traced connections between the group and the Bombay underworld. The next was the attack on crew members of an Alitalia flight at Bombay airport in March 1988. Though the attack, executed by a lone gunman who could only wound a pilot, looked like a stray incident, the police have been able to establish his connections with the Abu Nidal group. The group is also known for killing without motive, if the payment is right. The group's links with Pakistan are well-known. Intelligence sources surmise that without Pakistan's official or unofficial help, the group could not have attempted to hijack a Pan Am flight in 1984 from Karachi, an operation in which twenty-one personsfourteen Indianswere killed. This group was also suspected to be behind the crash of the Gulf Air flight from Karachi to Abu Dhabi, killing all 111 aboard in September 1983. It is the information department of Abu Nidal which plans and implements terrorist operations. Its operational style is to inflict as much damage as possible, as had happened during the Bombay explosions. Another group on the suspect list is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) which too has shown its ability to operate in Europe and West Asia. This group's members are experts in handling RDX explosives. In fact, they are believed to be better in it than the Abu Nidal men. One device developed by PFLP-GC, discovered by the German police, has a detonator system, activated by barometric pressure in a cassette player. But the group has shown much less mercenary tendencies; it believes in highly spectacular feats, and in advertising its dubious achievements. The intelligence agencies are working on the West Asian leads and have sought Interpol assistance to supply fingerprints
of West Asian terrorists. But then, all this could end up as just an academic exercisefor the big fish could never be nabbed. What about the small fish like the Memons? 'At present, there is no way to get them extradited,' said a Home Ministry official. But there is one way, which the Israeli Mossad has often used to get hold of old Nazis hiding in South Americakidnap them and bring them home for trial. R. PRASANNAN AND K.M. RAKESH IN DELHI
Some of the seven lakh people who fled Surat
9 October 1 9 9 4
GERM WAR..
WITHIN two days of reports of the outbreak of plague in Surat, the Indian Government received a philanthropic offer. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention at Atlanta, Georgia, US, asked whether it could send four epidemiologists and lab technicians to diagnose and control the epidemic. The Union government sat tight on the request for nearly a week. For it is well known that the Atlanta lab is one of the five maximum containment facilities for germ warfare experiments of the US army. The offer was discussed at a hush-hush meeting of the intelligence agencies, the External Affairs Ministry, the Institute of Communicable Diseases, the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Defence Research and Development lab in Gwalior. The decision was to reject the offer. For, there was growing suspicion whether the epidemic was a natural outbreak or not. Hardly any ratfall, which precedes a natural plague, had been reported from either Beed or Surat. So the question is whether the epidemic had been induced by one or more outside agencies experimenting on mutated germs for
use in warfare. That American and Russian military labs are working on such organisms is an open secret. There are two possibilities. One: enemy agents could have introduced mutated and cultured germs into Beed and Surat. In the last one month or so, there had been two arrests of foreigners carrying fossilized organisms in India. The second possibility: someone has been experimenting with newly developed organisms, and their vaccines, for biological warfare. Some experts have noted that the characteristics of the epidemic have defied conventional wisdom. For instance, N.P. Gupta, former head of the Pune-based Institute of Virology, was surprised at the 100 per cent development of the plague bacteria in infected cases, which could not have taken place 'unless the plague organism itself had somewhat changed'. His surmise is that this could be some virulent form of influenza. He also cites the absence of ratfall in Surat.
Does it mean that the germs that have spread in Surat and the rest of the country are not the natural plague bacteria? That it is a mutated organism, artificially cultured in some laboratory? This possibility is being looked into seriously. Though most countries have signed the 1977 treaty banning biological experiments for military purposes, such experiments have been going on in superpower labs uninterruptedly. The US army, for instance, renovated its three BL-3 chambers at the Baker Laboratory at Dugway Proving Ground in 1992 and began liquid test of various strains of bacilli including that of the plague. Dugway is one of the biggest army-funded biological warfare research facilities in the US. Among the 116 others are the Michigan State Health Lab which experiments with anthrax, the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research at San Antonio, Texas, which produces the T-2 toxin. In January last year, the Dugway researchers released some killed strains of bacilli into the air of a containment facility. By September, they were using stimulant agents and, subsequently, live agents. As admitted by Dugway's spokesperson, Melynda Petrie, to a team of inspecting Russian scientists (the two countries have agreed to inspect each other's germ warfare sites), the initial live test would expose biological integrated detection systems to liquefied toxins including anthrax, botulism and the plague, in a sealed chamber. Now, this experiment could have taken place either in Atlanta or in the four other labs which have maximum containment facilities. (They are the two labs at Fort Detrick which is America's biggest germ warfare centre, the National Institute of Health at Bethesda, Maryland, the Plum Island Animal Disease Centre, New York, and the National Cancer Institute, Frederick, Maryland.) The next step, about which
GERM WAR I 1 3 1
absolutely no information has come out, was to use aerosolized agents. Biological warfare agents had been experimented with even during World War. II, but their dissemination, right from packing, transporting, to release in the target area, had posed the biggest challenge. One major problem had been the sensitivity to sunlight of some germs, particularly those of the plague and tularemia. Today, the aerosol spray technique, freeze-drying and microencapsulation, can increase the germs' survivability. The Russians were ahead of other countries in the diabolical aerosol technology. The US inspectors were surprised in December 1990 to find an aerosol testing chamber at Oblolensk in Russia, one of the four sites identified by the Russian defector, Vladimir Pasechnik. This facility, it was discovered later, had gone far ahead of the Americans in mutating and culturing a new strain of the tularemia germ which could cause a more virulent form of the plague, since named superplague. The Oblolensk facility could produce about 200 kg of cultured superplague a week. Pleading guilty, the Russians agreed to destroy the germs, but the Americans insisted that a US technician be allowed to stay at Oblolensk for four months, ostensibly to supervise the destruction. In those four months, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, but no one knows whether he stayed on to supervise the destruction or he carried an aerosol can in his suitcase. Another site inspected by the Americans at that time was the Biopreparat's Institute for Ultrapure Biopreparations where, according to Pasechnik, 400 scientists had genetically engineered tularemia and bubonic plague bacteria. The plague bacteria were repeatedly cultivated in containers of antibiotics to make them resistant to antidotes, and dried and powdered so that they could be packed and transported in small cans.
Interestingly, the Americans were getting new strains of various bacilli which had been mutated and cultured in the old Warsaw Pact countries. For instance, in March this year, the Czechs announced that they were destroying the Cold War arsenal of cholera, the plague, smallpox, tularemia, meningitis and rare psittacosis. No sooner had the Defence Minister, Antonin Baudys, announced this, than the Americans insisted that the arsenal be destroyed under their supervision. This rich harvest of mutated germs from across Eastern Europe in the last four years was in addition to the ones the Americans had developed and tested on their own. The information with the Indian authorities is that packaging of bacilli in aerosols had been perfected only last year, but there was no information on the testing of aerosol-packed strains. Did someone bring the aerosol can containing the germs and spray them, along with the aerosol-packed disinfectants, in quake-hit Latur or flood-hit Surat? It is a fact that massive disinfectantspraying was done at both places. Or, did the widespread vaccination and inoculation (most of it with imported vaccines) of the quake and flood victims result in the outbreak of the disease? Suspicion has also centred on the vaccine action plan agreement that India signed with the US in 1986. It allowed US testing of certain vaccines in India, though some senior officials of the Indian Council of Medical Research had objected to it. In the early 1990s, the government, almost mysteriously, terminated the agreement, perhaps suspecting the real intentions of the US. The vaccine action plan, it appears now, was part of the Reagan administration's attempts to revive the biological warfare experiments which had mostly been terminated in 1977 following the ban treaty. According to data revealed by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US army had developed vaccines for the plague, tularemia and eastern equine encephalitis by 1974.
GERM WAR I 1 3 3
In the mid-1980s, the Pentagon suddenly charged that the Russians were still at the bad old game, and in 1984 formulated a plan to build a high containment facility at Dugway. The essence of the Pentagon's position, as presented to the House Appropriation Committee following an environmental suit, was that genetic engineering and the new techniques in molecular biology could make biological warfare cheaper (a possible bait before the parsimonious Congress). The Pentagon analysed that an enemy could make (1) organisms with novel immune characteristics to beat vaccines; (2) potent toxins effective in minute quantities; and (3) plant or fungal toxins against crops. The argument was that the US had to experiment with these to be able to protect itself from any enemy using them. It got the funds and the research progressedbut much beyond the brief. As Senator John Glenn alleged three years ago, the army had spent $48 million on fifty-seven projects that could not be linked to any known biological threat to the US. Another $19 million was spent on developing vaccines or drugs associated with biological warfare which had not been developed or produced by potential adversaries. The big question is: why did the army develop them if the project was purely of defensive vaccines? As Susan Wright, the well-known anti-germ warfare expert, cautioned in 1987, 'In the course of pursuing what is portrayed as a defensive programme, there is a serious danger that the United States will proceed by incremental steps into research, development and, finally, production of novel biological agents. The line between defensive and offensive activity would inevitably be crossed.' With the revival of the projects, the old labs were working again. One of those reactivated labs was the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research which had studied the 'potency of killed plague vaccines prepared from virulent Yersinia pestis' in the 1970s. Another active lab was the one at Fort Detrick which
studied the Bryans strain, an unusual one, of plague bacteria. The Bryans strain was allowed to be studied at civilian labs; while they published their findings, Fort Detrick did not. This information came out when a civilian lab innocently reported in a scientific paper that it had sent the strain to Fort Detrick. The point of interest to India is that it signed the vaccine action plan within a year of the US reviving these biowar projects. Since the mid-1980s, the US had apparently been developing various strains of plague and other bacteria, some of them resistant to antibiotics. The known technique of germ warfare research is to culture the bacteria in antibiotics known to the enemy and make them resistant, and simultaneously develop one's own antibiotic so that one's own troops or people can be protected. This did take place during the Gulf war when the US feared a germ warfare by Saddam Hussein and vaccinated its soldiers with its own strains without their consent. The Pentagon later pleaded before the Congress that the law did not stipulate that the soldiers' consent be obtained before human-testing. Indian authorities suspect that, even if there was no foul play behind the prevailing pestilences, the Atlanta lab was now interested in testing its recently developed hand-held chemicalbiological mass spectrometer in a real-life field situation. Such tests had been going on in the early 1980s, but in 1983 the US army found that the equipment was too old to ensure safety. The recent renovation of the BL-3 chambers at Baker Lab in Dugway has enabled lab tests of the device, designed mainly to detect three strains of bacteriathe Coxiella burnetti which causes Q fever, the Yersinia pestis which causes pneumonic plague and the bacteria that is behind bubonic plague. Significantly, the Pentagon which had been diffident about asking the Congress for germ warfare funds, sought and got a whopping $170.8 million for 1994, which was a 54 per cent increase over that of the previous year. The reason given for this increase was that the army wanted thirty-eight vehicle-mounted
GERM WAR I 1 3 5
germ-detection systems. The question India should be asking now is: was this money for conducting tests abroad? R. PRASANNAN
22 J a n u a r y 1 9 9 5
SAVAGE SWAMIS
THE Ganga flows softly in stoic silence in Varanasi where thousands of mourners come every day to cremate the dead in the burning ghats of Marnkarnika and Harischandra. But when the sounds of the day die down and hungry flames from a hundred pyres along the river bank lick the congealed darkness, one can sense the waters making a low animal growl. This is the unearthly hour when the Aghoras hunt for the dead. The Aghoras are 'people without hate', a weird sect of sanyasis whose savage rituals would make ordinary mortals retch and tremble with revulsion and fear. Though I had heard many stories about their wild habits and had braced myself for a nocturnal encounter with them, my heart was in my mouth when I saw Baba Maunidas Gambhiri Bir sinking his teeth into a piece of human flesh. Baba Gambhiri Bir has been living in a 400-year-old Shiva Temple at the Marnkarnika Ghat for the last two years, eating and breathing the deadbreathing them through the foul fumes from the cremation ground. 'I eat about two kilos of human flesh every day,' he said when I met him on a winter
Bam Ram doing the Shav Sadhana
morning at the temple where he sat on the floor feeding a pack of dogs. The dogs were not as mangy as the baba who, in a railway station, would be mistaken for an insolent and drunken porter, badly in need of a thorough scrubbing. His eyes were baleful and hashish-hazy, but they burned with a fierce intensity when he emerged from the shadows that night and asked me whether I had brought all the things he had demanded for a demonstration of his cannibalistic appetite. I fished out from my bag a pint of liquor, a packet of incense sticks and a few pieces of camphor and handed them to his disciple, an austere yet pleasant young monk in ochre robes with shaven head. They moved towards a burnt-out pyre and, as directed by the baba, the disciple poured the liquor on the pyre, muttering mantras and throwing the camphor on the ashes. It took barely fifteen minutes for them to complete the ceremony. After washing his feet and face in the Ganga, the baba slouched towards a small group of mourners who were standing around a burning pyre in which the bones of the dead man were still making crackling sounds. Even as the relatives looked on horrified, the baba pulled out a half-burnt chunk of flesh from the pyre and started gnawing at it as if it were the tastiest morsel in the world. Everyone stood rooted to the ground, but the baba did not throw even a glance at them as he squatted a little away to chew leisurely on the chunk, which turned out to be from the lower thigh. After eating to his heart's content, he flung the remainder into the all-cleansing holy river and briskly walked away with his disciple in tow. I was surprised that the relatives of the dead man had not made any effort to spoil the baba's barbarous dinner but then such was their fear of the man and his esoteric sect that they dared not intervene. 'He is an Aghora with great magical powers. Anyone who stops him will only be inviting a
SAVAGE SWAMIS | 1 3 9
catastrophe,' said one of the relatives before they left the place in a hurry. 'That is all nonsense,' fumed B.N. Singh, a young man from Barkagaon in Bihar, who had witnessed the bloodcurdling scene. 'If this baba had eaten my father's body, I would have killed him.' His father's mortal remains lay in the embers of an unmolested pyre near by. The next morning at the Shiva Temple, the baba talked about the Hunger God while his four disciples who were under a vow of silence went about their work and worship. 'We eat whatever our Hunger God desires,' said the baba smoking pot. 'One who renounces the world to become an Aghora has to eat human flesh and the excreta of all creatures in this universe. It is a part of our meditation.' The baba, who had studied up to the intermediate, renounced the worldly life fifteen years ago when he was thirty. 'One day, I dreamt that Lord Shiva was calling me to the cremation ground at my native village (Tathuka Toli in Varanasi district). When I went there, I was surprised to see the Lord. He asked me to renounce my family as I was destined to seek the mystery of life and death and the universe.' He immediately left his mother, wife and two children and went away to Krimkund in Varanasi, the headquarters of the Aghora sect, where he stayed for many years. Later, he moved to the Harischandra Ghat and, finally, to the Marnkarnika Ghat. The cremation grounds are the abode of the Aghoras during their period of meditation and once they attain 'enlightenment', they make the Himalayas or the Girnar mountains their home. To become an Aghora, one has to practise the Panch Makarsfive rites the names of which start with the Hindi letter 'Ma'. They are Mansh (flesh), Meen (fish), Murda (corpse), Madira (liquor) and Maithun (sex). 'It is essential to eat the raw flesh of human beings, dogs, crows and vultures to attain enlightenment. We consider the flesh of these beings Maha
Mansh (great flesh),' said Bhadra Dharma Rakshit Ram, better known as the Jha Baba, who also lives at the Marnkarnika Ghat. While the Aghoras have no problem getting their nightly 'human fry', which they can steal or snatch away from the pyres, raw human flesh is not so easily available. Naturally, they are always on the look out for corpses floating down the Ganga and, as Baba Gambhiri Bir said, 'Sometimes, we collect unclaimed bodies left on the river bank and hide them and eat them for many days.' Ramjeet Pichas, an Aghora who left his family at Suwaraha in UP's Ballia district twenty years ago, was keen that I get him a fresh corpse to appease the great Hunger God. The taste of a corpse he had eaten for a whole month two years ago was apparently lingering in his mouth. He had got hold of the corpse during Dussehra and had kept it hidden underwater in the Ganga. The fifty-two-year-old Brahmin who has spent sixteen years at the Harischandra Ghat has also been eating the raw flesh of crows, dogs and vultures. 'This is the only way I can realize the connection between the Atma (soul) and the Paramatma (the Almighty),' Pichas said solemnly. 'Five years ago, my aged father, along with my wife and children, came to me and begged me to return home, but I told them I would never do so.' Pichas would have had a corpse for breakfast if he had accompanied me to Bhabhua, the headquarters of Kaimur district in Bihar. It was at the cremation ground on the bank of the river Suwara at Bhabhua that I met Bam Ram, a portly figure, who appeared apparition-like from the thick darkness. Clad in black cloth, he had a garland of serpents' bones around his neck and human skulls and bones in his hands. Adding to my queasiness were the sounds of jackals and dogs howling madly. Bam Ram had got hold of a fresh, unclaimed body that morning and I had arrived just in time to witness his Shav
Bam Ram at a puja before meditating on a corpse

Sadhana, a kind of meditation over a corpse. He took me to a brick platform which had a jet black image of Goddess Sarweshwari Mata and performed a puja using the skulls. He then asked me to wait there and pray to the goddess and not look back till he signalled. When he finally made the signal, I saw him sitting atop a dead man. And in between the chanting of mantras which went on for about fifteen minutes, he took liberal swigs from a bottle of liquor. However, he had no intention of eating the corpse. 'I definitely eat the flesh of any creature in the world but I will not eat this one. This is the body of a sinner, a dacoit. I cannot eat it,' said Bam Ram. 'I can only eat a sacred body while doing the Shav Sadhana.' A postgraduate in Physics and also in Hindi, Bam Ram joined the Aghoras more than ten years ago after a meeting with Awadhoot Bhagwan Ram, the spiritual leader of the sect who
died in America in November 1992. Awadhoot Bhagwan Ram, who had the former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar among his followers, had initiated a reformation in the bizarre sect, and set up schools and orphanages in Varanasi. 'He asked me to work for the betterment of prostitutes and orphaned children,' said Ram Bam, who has since been roaming the Suwara cremation ground. The Shav Sadhana, he claimed, was the most dangerous of all the Aghora rituals. He related one instance: 'A friend of mine and I were with Awadhoot Nishchalanand when he performed a Shav Sadhana on the cremation ground at Balua village in Uttar Pradesh in 1984. One can perform the sadhana either alone or in a trio. My friend and I sat at either end of the corpse while Nishchalanand sat over it, reciting the mantras. During the meditation, we heard a voice from the body and Nishchalanand fell dead over' the body. My friend went mad and I fell unconscious.' Sounds emanating from corpses are nothing mysterious: air movement in the body can produce sounds specially when someone sits on it. One could not of course argue with a skullrattling body-snatcher on a cremation ground in the dead of the night when he insisted that the corpse had actually talked. 'The corpse starts talking when we recite the mantras,' he asserted. 'Sometimes it even moves.' It could well be a case of hallucination but Bam Ram maintained that 80 per cent of those who had tried to perform the Shav Sadhana had either died or lost their mental balance because the corpse had moved. One of them was a Muslim, Usman Mian of Ram Garh village in Uttar Pradesh, who became insane while meditating over a corpse at Balmikikund in 1986. Another Aghora, Kishori Ram of Paharia in Kaimur, met the same fate at the Bhagwanpur cremation ground. While agreeing that shock and extreme fright could mentally unhinge people, a psychologist had an interesting explanation.
Most of the performers of the Shav Sadhana, he suggested, could have gone mad probably because they had already been on the brink of insanity which had made them perform the weird rite in the first place. More weird are the Aghoras' sexual rituals which often involve corpses and animals. Ramjeet Pichas betrayed no sense of shame when he revealed that he had had sex with a goat during the bazari process which he had undergone as an Aghora. 'Three years ago, I found the body of a beautiful young girl and had sex with her three times,' he said. Besides, he had performed the sex ritual with more than two dozen women, including prostitutes, and all the time he saved his semen by drinking itwhich all Aghoras have to do if they cannot hold it. Sitaram Saraswati, a teacher of English from Eluru in Andhra Pradesh who had joined the sect after the death of his wife in 1979, said that sex was essential for the Aghoras to attain the magical powers called Saikini and Mohini which would protect them during their meditation. 'The whole philosophy of the Aghora sect is based on sex,' said Baba Gambhiri Bir, reciting the cult's prime mantra, 'Bhag beech ling aur ling beech para, jo rakhe so guru hamara (One who knows the secret of not releasing the sperm during intercourse is our guru).' Singh Sawak Ram, the first disciple of Awadhoot Bhagwan Ram, however, gave a sublime interpretation to the vulgar mantra. 'This mantra has a spiritual meaning,' he explained. 'While bhag symbolizes the world and ling stands for the life force, para is related to the soul; one who knows the soul is the guru.' He argued that nothing could be unnatural in the world since no action was possible without the will of Lord Shiva, who was the greatest Aghora. The sexual rites are performed invariably on the cremation ground under cover of darkness during the bazari process to which an Aughad graduates from the elementary stage called
amari. The Aughads, being the lowest of the sect's hierarchy, are not authorized to eat human flesh; they have to be content with consuming human excreta and their own urine. 'During the bazari, the sadhu not only consumes a great deal of flesh but is expected to mate with any creature in the universe,' said the Jha Baba. The third stage is known as suzari when the sadhu is allowed to act according to his free will, and is under no obligation to perform any of the rituals. He spends most of his time in meditation with the aim of attaining enlightenment and rising to the status of Awadhoot, who may then reach the exalted position of the Aghoreshwar. At present, there are four Aghoreshwars and twelve Awadhoots and hundreds of Aghoras and Aughads in the country. While the Aughads wear the rudraksha beads just as any other sanyasi, it is easy to identify the Aghoras: they wear garlands of snake bones and carry human skulls. The skulls are used for rituals as well as for cooking food. 'The human skull is endowed with an invisible power which we call dhananjai pranvayu,' said the Jha Baba. 'The most powerful is the skull of a Teli (a subcaste of Banias), followed by that of a Kayastha. The skulls of Brahmins and Rajputs are also powerful but those of other castes are harmful to those who perform the rituals.' Nut cases? Not everyone thinks so. Among the prominent followers of the sect is Bhanu Prakash Singh, the former Goa Governor and Union minister. His youngest son, Sambhav Ram, heads the Sarweshwari Samooh founded by Awadhoot Bhagwan Ram. Sambhav came under the influence of Awadhoot Bhagwan Ram during the Kumbha Mela at Allahabad in 1982 and has ever since been living at Rajghat in Varanasi. 'My wife and I went to Awadhoot Ram three times to get our son back,' said Bhanu Prakash Singh, 'before we finally realized the depth of his devotion to the Awadhoot.' And then the Singh family too joined the sect. 'It is wrong to say that all
the devotees of the Aghore sect are fond of eating flesh and drinking liquor,' he protested. 'In fact, I stopped consuming them after I embraced the sect.' He asserted that it was due to the grace of Awadhoot Bhagwan Ram that he could become Governor. Another adherent of the Aghoras, Suryanath Singh, a lecturer at the Rajkumar Intermediate College at Varanasi, also claimed that it was a misconception that the sect allowed an indulgence in sex and liquor. Even as he was painting a sacrosanct picture of the sect, there was a commotion at the Harischandra Ghat: angry relatives of a dead man were quarrelling with an Aghoranath Baba who had tried to pull something out of the pyre. It was again the irresistible call of the manic Hunger God. KANHAIAH BHELARI
2 7 October 1 9 9 6
THE MYSTERIOUS MR BLEACH
THE events that led up to the extraordinary air drop last December over Purulia district of West Bengal read like a Frederick Forsyth novel. If anything, they are even more intriguing, shedding light on a surprising network of alliances in Britain and abroad. The man at the centre of the trial, yet to begin in Calcutta, is a mysterious Englishman called Peter Bleach. To date, little has been written or said about him except that he is clever, outspoken and forty-five years old. The Week can now reveal, for the first time, the fascinating life of Peter Bleach whose story goes to the very heart of the British establishment. For, Bleach is a dedicated member of the British Conservative Party, a 'true blue' according to friends, and feels betrayed by the British and Indian governments. 'He thinks he has been very badly let down,' says Sir Teddy Taylor, the maverick Conservative Member of Parliament for Southend on Sea. 'I have always regarded him as an honourable person. I am very worried about him,' says Sir Teddy, who has been one of his most loyal friends.
A careworn Peter Bleach in custody
A publicity campaign is growing in Britain to bring the Bleach case into the open. Sir Teddy is in regular contact with the British Foreign Office, and The Independent newspaper, which has taken up Bleach's cause, recently ran a front-page headline: 'Security services accused of set-up.' Inside, there was another story titled: 'Would-be hero poisoned by his own sting.' Is Bleach really a hero who was working for the British security services, as he claimed in The Independent*. There are those who think otherwise. According to one former colleague, the idea of Bleach working for the government is absurd: 'His past was too colourful.' So who exactly is Bleach, known as 'the Milk Tray man' because of his ability to get in and out of anywhere? (There is a famous television advertising campaign in Britain featuring a stealthy man in black who delivers boxes of Milk Tray chocolates to women by parachute and speedboat.) And how come he is languishing in the squalid Presidency Jail in Calcutta? Peter James Gifron von Kalkstein Bleach has been variously portrayed as a daydreaming Walter Mitty character and a conman. 'He has had far too interesting a life to need to make things up,' says Jo, a close personal friend. 'A lot of people think he is a conman, because he is always so charming. Yes, he has upset people, but they were the bad guys, not the good guys.' Six feet two, gaunt and strikingly good looking, Bleach is a charming, eccentric Yorkshireman. He is very affable, one of those people who can put othersparticularly womeninstantly at ease with a few smooth words and a flash of his pellucid green eyes. 'He is very much a ladies' man,' says Christopher Hudson, secretary of the right-wing Monday Club and a friend of Bleach. 'If I were a woman, I would call him a cad. He has a split personality and gets his kicks from having a number of girlfriends on the go.' Bleach has been married three times and has a twenty-three-year-old daughter living in South Africa.
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Peter Bleach, confident and free

At his local pub, the Flask, in North Yorkshire, everyone liked him. He lived in a remote farmhouse on the moors, where his neighbours thought he was eccentriche had the habit of mowing his lawn in the middle of the night. Details of his past are not easy to piece together. (Former colleagues were willing to talk, but few were prepared to give their names.) It has been widely reported, for example, that Bleach was an officer in the British army. In fact, he was little more than a Private. His father was a Major in the Royal Signals regiment and died when he was three. His mother, a former parish councillor who came from a wealthy Prussian family, is half German. She brought him up in Yorkshire as an only child. After attending St. Peter's boarding school in York, Bleach joined the British Army Intelligence Corps in Ashford. He won the Best Recruit honour, and served in Northern Ireland, but in March 1972 his services were no longer required.
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According to his army report, 'He was lazy and didn't turn up to work.' He then went to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) where he spent ten years in the army, working for the prison service and rising to the rank of Major. Sir Teddy says Bleach's military skills were highly prized and he also worked for the government intelligence services. At one point, he was in charge of death row in Harare prisonironic, now that he faces a possible death sentence himselfand he had a reputation among the predominantly black prisoners for being a right-wing disciplinarian. He was also very fond of the vicious Doberman dogs which were used by prison staff to instil terror and maintain order. Later, when he returned to Britain, he talked of setting up a Doberman breeding programme on the Yorkshire moors. According to a former colleague, he planned to export them back to Africa. 'That's rubbish,' says Jo. 'He was just very fond of Dobermans.' It was during his time in southern Africa that he fell in with a crowd of former SAS members and ex-British intelligence officers. 'They were the people you turned to when you wanted a bank account X-rayed or mail intercepted,' says a military source. 'Bleach made a lot of useful contacts, he was very good at networking.' After leaving the prison service, he worked for a private security firm. Again, his reputation among the guards was of being a tough, uncompromising employer. (On one occasion, he found a guard asleep while on duty. Reports differ about the punishment meted out, but it was severe.) He eventually moved to Johannesburg, where he was hired to look into a mismanaged trust fund in Southend on Sea involving Freemasons. Returning to Britain to investigate, he set up a private detective agency called Valenright. He rented a house in Southend, and was soon appointed chairman of his local Conservative Party ward in St. Luke's, encouraged by Christopher
Hudson of the Monday Club. Sir Teddy Taylor interviewed Bleach for the job. In 1987, he played an important role in Sir Teddy's election campaign. He persuaded his secretary and another woman, both of whom were 'drop-dead' gorgeous, to pin carnations on commuters at Southend station. 'He told them to wear short skirts and smile at everyone,' Jo remembers. 'His secretary had beautiful big brown eyes. It worked very well.' For a brief period, his office was in the Conservative Party building in Nelson Street, Southend. By all accounts, it was a picture of patriotism. 'He used to keep his Rhodesian army hat on top of the filing cabinet,' remembers a former colleague. 'The walls were decked out in Union Jacks and he had a photograph of him on a parade ground in shorts and swagger stick. There were also photos of the Queen and Prince Phillip.' Bleach was becoming increasingly well-known in social circles. He rode to the local hunt, enjoyed shooting and was always dressed immaculately. He also picked up occasional work as a bodyguard and bouncer, standing at the door for friends' weddings. Valenright was dissolved in 1990, but Bleach continued his career as a freelance private detective, working for Albion Investigations, a firm based at Heathrow airport in London. One of his jobs was to investigate a pharmaceutical factory in Cyprus which was producing a counterfeit ulcer drug. Bleach was employed as a buyer and was clearly very good at his job. 'He was the best we ever used,' remembers a colleague at Albion. Like many of the best field operatives, he was somewhat unorthodox in his methods. On another occasion, he was sent to Scotland on behalf of a London firm of solicitors. His job was to maintain surveillance on a house. 'After two days, he was fed up and couldn't be certain that the person was definitely in the house,' remembers a colleague who worked with him on the case. 'So he decided to set fire to a wooden shed at the bottom
of the garden. If the person was hiding in the house, Bleach reckoned, he would come out pretty quickly. I only just managed to talk him out of it.' He fell out with Albion over 65,000 which was used to buy counterfeit drugs. The police charged Bleach with obtaining money by deceit, but subsequently dropped all charges against him. The police had also wanted to know why he had not registered some shotguns he had kept in his farmhouse. They were registered in Southend, but he had failed to fill out the necessary paperwork when he moved to Yorkshire. It was a minor offencemore clerical than criminaland the police did not pursue it further. Then, in an ironic twist, he was hired by the News of the World newspaper as a military expert for a story about an arms dealer in Brentwood. The man was trying to sell AK-47 assault rifles to the IRAthe same type of weapon Bleach was later to drop on Purulia. Bleach's role in the dealer's conviction earned him a commendation from the Essex Police Constabulary. But he still wasn't satisfied with life, and embarked on his own career as an arms dealer. He set up a company, Aeroserve UK, and bid for contracts to supply helicopters (Sokols and Ml 17s) to the British police and the Bangladesh government's Ministry for Aid. Neither bid was successful, but he had found his vocation. He finally won his first contract in 1995 to supply '666' tank ammunition to the Bangladesh Army. In August 1995, he also set up another company, Peter Bleach Ltd, with a man called Cyril Brian Frow, sixty-two. (Bleach appointed himself secretary and director on 21 August under the name Kalkstein Bleach.) According to Jo, the company was set up to export children's Bouncy Castles' to Bangladesh. Frow, known as 'Uncle Brian', is a former nurse at Rampton Mental Hospital and is now a children's entertainer. (He resigned as a director of the company on 18 April this year.) He refused to speak to The Week. 'We
THE MYSTERIOUS MR BLEACH | 1 5 3
never talk to the press,' he said, putting the phone down. It was in the summer of 1995 that Bleach set in motion the fatal chain of events which were to lead to his eventual incarceration. In July, a Danish firm approached him with an order to deliver a large quantity of arms to an unspecified destination on the Indian subcontinent. His contact was a man called Kim Davey, who was travelling on a New Zealand passport, later found to be fake. Bleach travelled to Copenhagen, where, he says, he quickly realized that 'It was anything but a legitimate arms deal. It was clearly on behalf of some terrorist group.' Bleach says he immediately informed the British Defence Export Sales Organization (DESO) of the order, expressed his concerns, and asked what he should do. He has been quoted as saying that they advised him to 'run with it', as the British government was curious to know who lay behind the order. However, he now states in his 'confession' to the CBI that they tried to dissuade him. That makes the case more mystifying. According to Jeremy Hanley, MP, foreign office minister for consular affairs, DESO's advice was 'not to proceed further with the case', a message conveyed personally by two detectives from Scarborough CID who visited Bleach at his farmhouse. 'He was given strict advice but he chose to ignore it,' says a source in North Yorkshire Police. For some reason, however, Bleach continued to keep DESO informed and, according to a letter from Jeremy Hanley to Sir Teddy Taylor, Bleach was told that his information was being 'passed on to the appropriate authorities'. It is at this point that Bleach's account differs from the authorities'. Bleach recorded his initial phone call to DESO in which he 'promised to carry on as normal, and to do nothing which might alert the buyers'. Detectives also visited him at his farmhouse on another two occasions. So what was really being discussed? 'As time went on, Peter
wanted to get out of the deal but he couldn't,' Jo explains. 'He was in too deep and the people behind the order told him he knew too much. He had to go ahead or risk the consequences.' It might never be known exactly what went on between Bleach and the British authorities. Those who are sceptical about Bleach's version of events say that he knew the deal was potentially awkward and was simply trying to cover himself by letting DESO know what he was doing, should it later go wrong. 'He had a habit of backing both ends against the middle,' says a former colleague. Certainly he was not wealthy at the time and was looking for business. (His farmhouse in Yorkshire has been repossessed by the building society since his imprisonment.) The Week spoke to an arms dealer who once worked with Bleach but has since fallen out with him. 'No one with any sense in the arms business would engage in this sort of deal,' he says. 'You would be more discreet, ship the arms out quietly, and you certainly wouldn't go yourself. If he was in too deep and was serious about trying to extricate himself, he would have contacted the security services. You don't go to DESO.' It is claimed that 'they told him to run with the deal,' notes the arms dealer. 'Nobody in the government would use someone like Bleach for such a delicate operation. He didn't understand how the intelligence services worked. Bleach was always strapped for cash, trying to scratch a living. I think he was a bit naive.' If Bleach was working with the security servicesand at this stage, there is no prima facie reason to doubt himit would not be the first time that M l 6 had stitched up an innocent arms dealer. In a celebrated case, now known as the Matrix Churchill affair, two British businessmen faced long prison sentences for supplying arms to Iraq when in fact they had been working with Ml6. Eventually, the men managed to prove that they had not been working alone, and were cleared of all charges.
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'We had no direct knowledge of who the guns were intended for,' Bleach claims. 'Indeed, the object of the entire exercise was to discover this information.' By October 1995, Bleach says that the authorities in New Delhi had been alerted about the whole deal, because it was now known that the arms were destined for India. The British security services, he claims, had fully briefed their Indian counterparts of the names of all people involvedincluding Daveythe cargo, the type of aircraft to be used, even its registration and route. The letter from Jeremy Hanley to Sir Teddy appears to confirm his claims. 'Mr Bleach continued to contact DESO irregularly,' Hanley writes. 'On each occasion it was made clear to him that information was being passed on to appropriate authorities. Mr Bleach agreed that he was content for this to happen.' Were these appropriate authorities the Indian government and the police? And how much information had Bleach given them? If, as he says, he told them everything, why was the airdrop allowed to go ahead? Bleach duly went ahead with the mission, confident that it would not succeed. Indeed, he expected the plane to be intercepted as soon as it penetrated Indian airspace. But nothing happened. After taking off from Karachi on the afternoon of 17 December, the Antonov-26 flew to Varanasi, where it refuelled, and then went on to Calcutta. The journey normally takes forty-five minutes, but the plane touched down in Calcutta two hours and forty-five minutes later, having diverted to Purulia to make the arms drop. Nobody at air traffic control, or in the Indian Air Force, raised so much as an eyebrow, and the plane flew on to Phuket in Thailand. Late on 21 December, it re-entered Indian air space, landing in Madras to refuel. It was only as it flew from
there back to Karachi that two Indian Air Force MiG-21 fighter planes forced it to land in Mumbai. The plane stood on the tarmac at Mumbai international airport for a whole hour before the police arrived. Bleach, the Milk Tray man, made no attempt to escape, but Davey coolly hitched a lift with the airport staff back to the terminal and vanished into the night. He has never been seen again and the Interpol has issued a red notice for his arrest. In his suitcase, found on board the aircraft, the police discovered a photograph of him posing with an Ananda Margi. It has been suggested that Davey is English. Today there is another theory circulating the international arms business. According to a source in the British security services, the mysterious Mr Davey was working for the CIA. 'He has US citizenship and is currently living in the Philippines. Why else do you think he was able to walk away and disappear so easily?' Another theory about Davey, put forward by a former colleague, is that he knowingly set Bleach up. 'Bleach had made a lot of enemies in the arms trade. I think somebody just got fed up and decided to drop him in it.' As the trial draws near, Bleach's friends and supporters are becoming increasingly concerned that the Indian authorities will sacrifice him to cover up their own mistakes. As Bleach says, there was a breakdown in communication between Indian intelligence officers, which allowed the mission to go ahead. The Home Ministry in New Delhi had sent a secret letter, by ordinary post, warning West Bengal of the air drop, and the letter arrived too late. If Bleach's version of events is right, there are few signs that the British authorities are prepared to do anything to help him. In January the British Home Secretary, Michael Howard, said on a visit to India that he would not be intervening on Bleach's behalf. 'The Indian police have openly admitted, in front of British
diplomats, that they will not tell the courts about my assistance,' Bleach told The Independent. 'I must defend myself as best as I can. The entire operation should have been a perfect trap. Instead, everybody of any importance was allowed to escape. The case has become high profile, and the Indian authorities need a high-profile accused.' But events may overtake the Indian authorities, who have prepared a bulky charge-sheet. Apparently, one of Bleach's former SAS friends has offered to spring him from jail for 20,000. And there is a very real threat that someone might try to assassinate Bleach. An armed guard has now been placed outside his cell, and his foodrice and vegetable curryis checked daily for poison. There are people who are worried that he might appear as a prosecution witness. It remains to be seen whether Peter Bleach is an innocent party caught up in a dangerous game, or whether he is someone more sinister. Clearly, he has made a number of enemies in his life, and there are those who think he is being hung out to dry. But he has some very influential friends too, and he won't be afraid to name names at his trial. Either way, the villagers in Purulia will never forget the night the Milky Tray man visited them and weapons fell from the sky. JON STOCK
11
May 1 9 9 7
VALLEY OF WHITE HUSBANDS
KAMALA, why have you sent off the children to your mother's place again?' he asks almost angrily. It is not the typical Indian husband exasperated about his children visiting his in-laws too often; it is a foreigner, Stefano Mancini, from Switzerland. 'I cannot let my wife talk to strangers,' says Pushpa's husband. He too is no conservative rural Indian male possessive about his wife. Gilbert Veyrard is from France. Gerald Brown, who married Parameswari, and Deepa's husband, Fernando, take the same line. All these women with gora husbands are neither second generation immigrants on a breathless tour of their motherland nor professionals who went abroad to study and tied the knot there. They are not even matriculate and none of them has seen an English medium school. Nor have they ever ventured too far out of the beautiful yet tough terrain of the Kulu Valley in Himachal Pradesh. The Kulu Valley is believed to count almost a hundred foreigners married to local women. Several of them legalized the alliance under the Special Marriages Act with help from the
Stefano is a farmer while his wife, Kamala, is a stamp vendor
Kulu Bar Association, which wrote to their embassies thirty days in advance. 'They say Indian girls are more cultured than Western girls and know how to treat a husband well,' said the Bar Association president, Nirmal Kumar Sood. Though the association has no way of checking if they are already married, it asks them to fde an affidavit that they have no living wife. So far there have been no complications on that score. The foreign husbands speak not just Hindi but the local dialect as well. They eat typical Himachali food and dress and behave like their neighbours, merging effortlessly with the surroundings. The villagers rarely call them by their names but only by the names of their villages. If one is 'Bhekhiwala' because he lives at Bheki village, the White husband at Jheel is 'Jheeloo'. Their children are in no way different from the local children, barring an odd one with a lighter skin, and all of them study in local schools in the Hindi medium. The life is rural Himachali, without any trace of dollars or pounds flowing into their huts in the Valley. They insist that they have not come to India for money; they are here in search of peace. Stefano Mancini, who came to India twenty years ago, married Kamala in the late 1980s and settled in her Karon village in the Lag Valley, a half-hour drive from Kulu. To reach their hut on the mountain top, one has to walk 5 km on a footwide track on a slope from where it is dizzying to look at the fields miles below. Kamala, thirty-five, walks the narrow path every weekend on her way back from the Kulu courts, where she earns her living as a stamp vendor. She has a rented house in the town for herself and their three schoolgoing children, whom Stefano has named after the mountains. 'I spent three months in Gujarat during my first visit,' said Stefano. 'The next year, I spent another three months and made
V A L L E Y OF WHITE HUSBANDS | 1 6 1
a trip to Kulu. I kept going back and forth for the next two or three years.' He had met a guru in Gujarat from whom he learnt Sanskrit and the scriptures. 'Then I decided to live in India and came here. People in the West live to work and earn money. I didn't want to do that.' Besides, he was attracted by a quality in Indian women that he did not find common among women in the West: fidelity to their husbands. 'Indian marriages are solid,' he said. 'In Europe and America, marriages can fall apart at the drop of a hat even though it is more practical to live together. Divorce is very expensive.' Stefano, thirty-nine, works a piece of land they bought in Kamala's name. He grows cereals, apples, peaches and other fruits, and he does all the toiling himself. Kamala can help him only during the weekends or court holidays. He started making cheese a year ago, adopting the very technique that the Swiss on the Alpine mountains use, but every ingredient except rennet is locally made. Every morning he buys fat-rich milk from his neighbours, and at the end of the day, there is a neat round of cheese ready to go on the shelf. 'Selling is no problem during the tourist season; I run short of it in fact,' said Stefano. 'But the rest of the year is hard. The shopkeepers and others in Kulu say I am expensive. I charge Rs 300 a kilo, not a paisa less, and that is a good price for this cheese.' He has a fund of ideas to make the entire place prosperous but most of them relate to the cannabis that grows wild all over the mountains and the valleys. Hash to some, bhang or charas to others, the fine powder extracted from green cannabis leaves fetches fancy dollars in the world market and is a banned narcotic drug. But Stefano's intoxicating idea is to make a whole lot of things out of cannabis: cloth, carpets, shoes, bags, bricks, insulation panels . . . His interest in cannabis has already caused him trouble. 'If
you grow it, you get a ten-year jail term but here it grows wild,' he explained. 'So whenever any local is jealous of the prosperity we achieve through hard work, he makes false complaints and we've had it.' Stefano was arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act and is now out on bail. He is not the only foreign husband to land in jail because of a cannabis connection. Such cases crop up all the time but the devoted wives defend them to the hilt. Fear of arrest is one reason why most of them build their huts at high points along the mountain slope, from where they can spot approaching policemen and disappear. Finding Pushpa's husband, Gilbert Veyrard, is all too easy. He runs the Hira Devi Alliance Guest House close to the famous International Roerich Museum at Naggar, near Manali. The Guest House has a boutique that sells the best of Himachali handicrafts, a confectionery known for its Swiss-type cheese, and half a dozen rooms. At the entrance there is a warning in bold letters: carrying drugs is against the law. Gilbert refuses to talk to strangers about himself or his interest in India. 'I guard my privacy,' he said, 'and I don't like to be seen as a foreigner, I don't like to be distinguished from others here.' He has, however, not forgotten his moorings. His two little daughters have French names and they are fluent in his mother tongue, even though they study in local schools. It is not surprising that the Guest House is in his motherin-law's name: most foreign husbands in Kulu have retained their nationalities and passports. The marriage certificate comes in handy to renew their visas. They go home every two or three years, carrying a lot of Indian stuff to sell there and bringing an equally heavy cargo on their return. The wives prefer not to accompany them, though some of them have been to Europe for a few weeks. Those like Kamala can't even think of leaving their serene forest villages of two or three huts and settling in Europe, despite all its modern comforts.
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The few foreign women married to local men have also kept their links with their homelands intact. One of them, Caroline, chose a pahari called Koyloom as her mate, and is now on a visit to Europe. Another, a Japanese girl, settled for a resident of Palchan village, and an Englishwoman, Debbie, lives with Tarachand in a snowbound village 25 km from Manali. Most of the women have business interests in their countries and live off it, said the president of the Manali Hotel Owners' Association. Like the men, they have contracts with tour operators and exporters. Certain foreigners who regularly visit Kulu-Manali take turns to run their jointly-owned truck in Europe and visit India. And a Swiss, who spends half the year in Kulu, is the chairman of four banks in Switzerland. It is certainly not money that makes the marriage work. Rather it is the willingness of the foreign spouses to adapt themselves to the local culture and traditions. 'Most of the foreign husbands work hard on the land that belongs to the wife's family, so the in-laws like them,' said Nirmal Sood. 'Some of them do bring in dollars and pounds, and the family prospers.' Cannabis helps strengthen the bonds. The men who have married local girls, mostly of the scheduled castes, have done so for land and they let cannabis grow wild, alleged a businessman of Manali. 'Last year, the police arrested quite a few of them. Many of them are Italians and are here for drugs.' There is a feeling that they are small fry in drug smuggling and that the police never touch the big-time operators. The local people, too, are involved because the smugglers couldn't collect the leaves without their help. 'These foreigners come basically for hashish,' asserted Dharamvir Dhami, state Congress general secretary. Hardly enamoured of the foreigners, he ensures that they do not marry girls from his village of Soebag (meaning apple orchard), where
Dharamvir Dhami is against local girls marrying foreigners

his grandfather, Bansi Upadhyay, planted the first apple tree in Himachal Pradesh years ago. But generally it is a woman-dominated society, which allows the woman the freedom to choose her mate. Arranged marriages are rare among the mountain people and there is nothing illegitimate about children born out of wedlock; the mother's name is good enough for all legal documents. For the mountain people, marriage is a contract that can be broken any time, and there is no dowry. Instead, the custom provides for bride moneyrahand, which means 'damages'. 'If a man fancies a woman, he just has to pay her parents the rahand, provided that the woman is willing to marry him. If a man is interested in another man's wife, and she reciprocates his feelings, the lover has only to pay the rahand to her husband,' says Sood. The amount depends on the status of the girl and her family.
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Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh recently passed a Bill in the Assembly for the compulsory registration of all marriages and for providing maintenance after divorce or separation. The custom allows the husbands to leave estranged wives to fend for themselves. 'I want to stop all that,' Singh said last month. There is, however, no reference to foreigners in the Bill, which is awaiting Presidential assent. Lawyers like Sood fear that the Bill will only lead to social evils like dowry surfacing on the mountains. Customs die hard like the thick growing cannabis in the valley, which offers restless White men peace and conjugal bliss. VIJAYA PUSHKARNA
29 N o v e m b e r 1 9 9 8
SACHIN'S PSYCHE
IN an era of painful social change Sachin Tendulkar's persona has an inspiring incandescence: it lends hope and meaning in life for millions of Indians who rejoice in his triumphs and console themselveswhenever he failsthat he would surely do better next time. It is a cathartic experience for them. All attempts to understand Sachin's 'being' would be woefully incomplete without his cathartic sharing. Since I have had no occasion for that, this article is an attempt to explain the essential characteristics of a young man from my interaction with his friends and neighbours at Sahitya Sahawas. Sachin as a child explored the environment around him unlike today's children who live in structured surroundings most of the time. He had uninhibited access to homes, trees and playgrounds, and the freedom was tempered by the intellectual culture at Sahitya Sahawas Colony, his home in Bandra, Mumbai. Sachin, photographer Avinash Gowariker, and contractor Sunil Harshe were a terrible trio of uncontrollable energy at Sahitya Sahawas two decades ago. 'One Sunday, while everyone was watching the movie Guide, Sachin and I found each other
on the same branch of a mango tree,' says Sunil. 'It broke, sending us down with a thud, which alerted an elderly neighbour, and we ran for our lives.' During summer vacations, the trio was irrepressible from early morning till late night, playing cricket and a host of other games like viti dandi and shigrupi. Sachin lay in wait for the kill while playing hide-and-seek: he would hide when it was his turn to seek, waiting for the others to come out, so he could catch them. Sahitya Sahawas was still being built those days and the boys delighted in making booby traps in the heaps of sand and bricks lying around. They also flitted around on a rented bicycle but there were still extra calories to be burnt. And this Sachin did with physical fights: whenever he was introduced to a new friend, Sachin would challenge him to beat him. Few could. He has always been positively aggressive, raring to spar with a mightier opponent all the time, but never displaying a destructive trait. He was mischievous but capable of deep affection, says Laxmibai Gije, his nanny for eleven years. He enjoyed every minute of his childhood, and his family and friends provided him with security which probably is the sole factor behind his sense of freedom at the crease. He could be tough but not insensitive. Sunil gives an instance of the abundant caring quality in him: 'Playing "dummy" on a summer evening in Sachin's house, we were hiding under blankets and he was to identify us by touch. He wouldn't let us switch on the fan even though it was very hot. He was afraid that the pigeons in the nest there would get hurt.' A year ago, while the Indian team was practising at the Wankhede Stadium, Sachin spent much time bowling underarm to a child who was suffering from a fatal illness. 'His last wish was to play with Sachin,' says Prof. Ratnakar Shetty, secretary of the Mumbai Cricket Association. Sports journalist Makarand Waingankar recently invited Sachin to be the chief guest at an
under-fourteen Elf tournament. He turned up half an hour early, and was extremely friendly with the kids. 'Not many cricketers would do that,' says Waingankar. Sachin's toughness emanates from the training by his coach, Ramakant Achrekar: it is an attitude practised over the years and now it is a part of him. He is at his best when he is natural and free of all shackles. He does not have to grimace, stare or shout but just be what he is, enjoying every momentand that is what the people view as toughness. He is toughest when he is enjoying himself the most. For him, toughness means fulfilment, fun, shouldering responsibility and not being reckless. It indicates the inner peace he enjoys as a result of fulfilling relationships with friends, teammates and family. Family support and values have contributed much to the making of Sachin. 'He is realistic, simple and sincere. Money has not gone to his head. He is caring and jealously guards his private life,' says a very close relative. Even after Sachin became a legend, his father continued his association with his old cultural associations, and his mother retained her job with the LIC. The family has practised a value system with rigour. When someone asked Sachin why he did not move from the middle-class Sahitya Sahawas, he replied that it was the place where he grew up and where he could be close to his family. Sahitya Sahawas also affords him the freedom to move around in shorts without being mobbed; here he can have his private emotional space and feel secure. His wife, Anjali, attends all functions in Sahitya Sahawas and daughter, Sara's first birthday on 12 October drew all the children and their mothers in the colony to the Tendulkar home. Sachin's parents gave a room to a family friend in their small house for a whole year as he had no place to live at that time. There are many such instances which reveal the family's sound value system which has had a deep impact on Sachin.
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Even today, when he comes to play table tennis, he waits for his turn; and while playing cricket in the colony, he is prepared to field and bowl with the kids there. This was one kid who was really determined. As Sahitya Sahawas was a writers' colony, there was a strong temptation to keep him away from cricket. But by the time he was ten, he had a cricket bag bigger than him and he would start for his practice at 6 a.m. When he was eleven he moved in with his paternal uncle to concentrate on cricket. The commitment to the game never weakened. 'Last May, he practised alone at the nets for three days to prepare for a match against a team of the calibre of Bangladesh,' says Shetty. Faith is central to Sachin's psyche. A firm believer in himself and in God, he frequents the Shivaji Park Ganesh mandir, and his cricketing kit has an embossed image of the Lord. 'After we had done badly in Sri Lanka, Sachin and I had planned to visit the Ganapati Temple at the G.S.B. Hall at Wadala,' says Shetty. 'As he had to go to Toronto to play against Pakistan, I visited the temple on our behalf. When India won 4-0, Sachin called up from Canada and thanked me for visiting the temple.' Sachin's faith in India is there for all to see. He is the only cricketer who sports the tricolour on his helmet and he wants all others to do so. He was terribly upset when someone inverted the tricolour during the Asia Cup at Colombo. He touches the soul of India. He is our best anti-depressant. It is his faith in values, God and the country that makes him a clean cricketer untouched by controversies. It is one reason why he is reluctant to appear on liquor ads. He stands apart, giving of his best. And the best of his contributions is being a national unifier at a time when cynicism and divisive mentality are gaining ground. He acts as a great binder, a superglue. With his flair on the field, Sachin reminds us of our selfesteem. Each century of his proves his conviction that Indians are in no way inferior to anyone. When riches are becoming the
only mark of success in a country that has cherished austerity, he shows that wealth and good values can coexist. He offers solace through his innocence, talent and ability to take on the world's best. He is warm yet aggressive, friendly but fiercely competitive, enlightened but approachable. He may not love to debate about Amartya Sen but he is emotionally intelligent. His state of being is more powerful than the tallest intellectuals of the country. He learnt the art of poise from the other little master. At fourteen, when Sachin was disappointed in not getting the prize of the best school cricketer of the year, Sunil Gavaskar soothed him with a letter whose gist was, 'When you see the records of cricketers who have won the prize, you will see one name is missing, one who has proved everybody wrong. Hence, do not worry.' He has not forgotten the lesson and never makes a mistake twice. A constant learner, Sachin is also a good guide. Amit Pagnis, who captained the under-nineteen team for the World Cup 1997, says, 'Sachin clarifies our doubts gently as an equal and not from a pedestal.' Veteran cricketer Hemant Kanitkar relates how his son, Hrishikesh, found Sachin inspiring: 'Sachin kept saying, "We can do it, and we will do it," after Pakistan had scored 313 against India at a one-dayer in Dhaka.' Most achievers build their cerebral software early in life and do not greatly modify it later. Sachin is a constant learner, who does not hesitate to change the chips. He competes with himself all the time, teasing and quarrelling with Sachin of the previous day. Early in life he learnt the importance of being human. The dehumanizing environment that envelops celebrities has had little impact on him as he is surrounded by people who are equally human. He is himself in their presence: he can be vulnerable before them, shed tears and replenish his emotional energy bank. Sachin does not carry the burden of being politically correct.
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This is not because he is a genius but because he is genuine. It is not part of his cerebral software. Though courteous, he focuses his energies on the chosen field of activity and allows records to tumble on their own. Like Arjun, he only sees the eye of the fish. DR HARISH SHETTY
6 December 1 9 9 8
IN SEARCH OF ORGASM
'Now more than ever seems it rich to die To cease upon the midnight with no pain While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!' John Keats THE seismic surge proceeds like the poet's lush lines. A warm glow envelops the bosom, tiny sacs of sweat surface, the heart pumps wildly, nostrils breathe the fire of lust. Keats' route to ecstasy seems so effortless, the physiological one takes a while. So as men and women attempt to add to the species, they get ready to receive their reward for trying. It's called orgasm. It lasts barely a minute but the process is enough to trigger chaos in the constitution. Reproductive organs balloon with blood, the pulse pounds, muscles contract without command. Men will find their big toe stiffen and the little toes twist. Women will be clenched by contractions, as in their partners, at ,8-second. intervals. The climax when it comes is a paralysis of
pleasure, often expressed by humans in the same way as by the stump-tailed macaque: a round mouth agape in a mixture of discovery and surprise. Partners have been making faces at each other for at least 65 million yearsthat's when modern mammals started their evolutionary journey. It was only some three decades ago that Masters and Johnson got down to defining the parameters of orgasm in their landmark book, Human Sexual Response. But the debate continues on the most mysterious of experiences, a sensation that is so subjective that you'll have to take the partner's word for it. As Homo sapiens approach the third millennium, the craving for orgasm is only intensifying among evolutionary biologists and researchers who are studying its origins and future, and in women who have matched men in all fields except this. One reason why men like sex so much is because they are assured of their orgasmic reward. Practically every time. Not so the womenonly a minority is capable of climbing the ecstatic crest through lovemaking. The inability in reaching orgasm is one of the primary sexual complaints of women. A survey on women's attitude to sex and orgasm, commissioned by The Week, in fact, indicates that only 13 per cent of Indian women reach climax every time they have sex; 42 per cent say they have it occasionally. Does it worry the Indian woman whether she reaches climax or not? You bet! Ninety per cent of respondents indicated that experiencing orgasm was important to them. Almost a quarter of them also admit to using sexual aidswhether tablets or vibratorsto enhance physical pleasure. Surprising revelations? Not really. After all, the woman of the 1990s is emerging from her shell of domestic seclusion, demanding equal rights with her male counterpart in the fields of politics and education, and becoming a force to reckon with in the boardroom. Now, it appears, she is becoming demanding in the bedroom too.
IN SEARCH OF ORGASM | 1 7 5
The survey, done by the leading market research agency Sofres-MODE, probed a representative sample of women educated, married and singlein Calcutta, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore. The results were revealing as much as surprising. The women rated the overall satisfaction with their sex life high8.5 on a scale of 0-10. All indicators frequency, lovemaking, the stated criticality of achieving orgasm, the husband's willingness to make sex pleasurable for the partner, the claims of near perfect satisfaction with their sex lifepoint to women getting as much out of sex as men. Nearly 60 per cent of the women polled say their husbands are very concerned about making sex mutually pleasurable. Towards this end, many women (38 per cent) say they have experimented with various coital positions; 17 per cent admit to lapping up pornographic material. Yet, despite working hard to
make sex a satisfying experience, a large number of Indian women remain dissatisfied. Probably that's why a surprisingly high figure in the survey84 per centfeel the need to do something to tackle their sexual problems. 'Women are increasingly demanding to know why they too are not reaching a climax,' says sexologist Dr Prakash Kothari. It is not just the convent-bred, pizza-gorging types who are curious about climax. 'A woman from the slums came to me and said her husband finished very fast and she does not get nasha,' recalls Kothari. Nash a} People describe orgasm in different ways, and they call it by different namesclimax in English, sukun in Urdu, trupti in Tamil. Describing it is the hard part, because there are so many descriptions. One woman describes the feeling as that of a hot chocolate egg breaking inside her. Others liken it to a hiccup, a ripple or a peaceful sigh. Orgasm, Kothari says, is like a sneeze. If a woman has had one, she will know about it, 'Otherwise, any attempt to explain it will be like explaining a rainbow to a blind man!' Not surprisingly, four out of every five women in the poll say their most memorable orgasm happened at home. Now another revelation: 73 per cent of the respondents admit to faking orgasm with their partnerssome do it very often, others sometimes. This happens, experts say, because the woman is eager to please her partner and does not want him to feel she is not enjoying it. There are marriages, sexologists point out, in which a woman has never reached orgasm. Twenty-five per cent of the respondents fall in this category. Some of these women fail to reach orgasm because, in the absence of proper arousal, sex becomes painful for them. As a result, they become averse to the pleasure component of sex. Many others are too busy thinking how to do it right, that they pass by the passion of the moment. Orgasm may be a cataclysmic experience but it isn't all.
According to sexologist Dr Mahinder Watsa: 'It is a fallacy to believe that orgasm is the main thing in a sexual relationship.' Agrees Kothari: 'Sexual pleasure is not a performance to be gauged. It is a happiness to be shared between two people.' None the less, scientists and researchers do not seem to have enough of debate, often contentious, on the topic. And the launch of the little blue pill called Viagra has only added fuel to the fire. Some scientists believe that the male impotence drug could bring about a change in women's sexual lives as well. Pfizer, which manufactures the drug, has begun a study to find out whether the pill can stimulate erections in women. There's stimulating news already from University of Boston researchers, Dr Jennifer Berman and her sister Laura, who have initiated a pioneering study on women and Viagra. Their initial findings suggest that Viagra may increase the ability of many women to reach orgasm. But why do women have the capacity to climax, ask some evolutionary biologists, when they can procreate perfectly well without it? In other words, is the female orgasm mere merriment or does it serve a purpose? Does it have an adaptive value? The male orgasm, these researchers point out, doesn't come anytime: it tangos with ejaculation, and thus has critical reproductive value. It was also adaptation that made the male rush to his pleasure peak. Since the reproductive success of the early man cave man, if you insisthinged on the availability of receptive females, when the opportunity arose, it was the guy who got on with the job quickly who had the edge over the slow-mo type. Moreover, once the job was accomplished swiftly, he could get back to chasing a boar or a bison, a must for survival in those days. Some other evolutionary theorists contend that the female orgasm was adaptive as well because it helped cement the bond between the ancestral lovers. If the woman got her reward for
the act, she would crave for more, and take adequate measures to keep the guy from walking over to another lady. Anthropologist Sarah Hardy takes a different line: since the early female was worried about the survival of her infant, which she knew depended on the male who could guard it or gore it, she became promiscuous in a bid to lure as many men as possible into a 'web of paternity'. The stimulus for her bedhopping? Orgasm. The fact that lovemaking does not always lead to orgasm among women helped. A female who did not climax in the first attempt had a reason to seek another session, and with the chances that the guy would be a spent force, she could dump him and go for the next man. Through this smart dumping, the researcher says, the 'web of possible paternity' slowly expanded. That sort of jells with the findings of Masters and Johnson that women can remain in the aroused state even after achieving an orgasm; for unlike men they have the ability to be multiorgasmic. The ancient encounters are sometimes sought to be emulated by folks in the concrete jungle. Says Dr D. Narayana Reddy, 'If the woman does not get three orgasms, she thinks that she is missing something. And whom is she going to attack? The husband.' One such victim is Nandan Raghavan, thirty-seven, a manager in a private firm in Chennai. His wife, Malini, walked into Dr Reddy's clinic with the complaint that she was not enjoying her sex life because her husband could not 'last longer than ten strokes'. 'I told her we could increase it to thirty-five,' recalls Reddy, and after three months of therapy, 'I was happy with my achievement.' Malini wasn't. She told the doctor: 'If he is really interested in me, he should be able to hold on for as long as I want.' 'How long?' probed the doctor.
'A minimum of forty-five minutes to an hour,' she replied. The flustered doctor told her that even a machine would not be able to manage that. But the woman was adamant. Said she: 'All my friends tell me that their husbands are able to do it.' Sex may culminate in climax for most folks, but who says it doesn't exact a toll? STANLEY THOMAS
5 December 1999
THE MOST WANTED WOMAN
HER name is as well known in the Kashmir Valley as Indira Gandhi's is in the country. Yet, except for her immediate family members and a few women close to her, meeting her is perhaps more difficult than meeting a prime minister. News photographers have clicked her pictures and attended her press conferences, but none of them has seen her face. Wedded to Islam in its undiluted form, she lets very few people see her without her burqa. Aassiyeh Andrabi sees the hood as Allah's own way of providing her some kind of security cover. Andrabi, thirtyseven, is the founder president of Dukhtarane Millet (Daughters of the Community), an oudawed organization of radical, proPakistan women who have defied the security forces and hoisted the Pakistani flag in Srinagar every 14 August for the last eighteen years. She is the woman who has been churning up the passions of her sisters in the Valley, and at one time thrown acid on the face of women who refused to wear the burqa. Aassiyeh has remained underground or in jail for over a
Aassiyeh Andrabi, the founder president of Dukhtarane Millet, sees the burqa as Allah's way of providing some security cover
decade almost without let up and is today one of the most wanted persons as far as the security forces are concerned. Whenever she has something to say, she calls a few newspaper offices and gives out the time and venue of her press conference. The waiting reporters are either taken elsewhere or suddenly faced with a woman in a burqa who makes her statement before getting lost in a crowd of burqa-wearing women waiting outside. How do you know it is her? I asked a long-time photographer, Meraj-ud-din. 'By her voice. Everyone in the Valley knows her voice,' he said. My week-long efforts, through many channels, to meet Aassiyeh were initially met with apologetic shakes of the head since the security forces were gunning for her. After persuading some contacts, I learnt that she was bedridden, but that I, too, could hear that voice the people in the Valley knew so well. She was to ring me up at an appointed time, and speak for five minutes. That did not happen. From an intermediary I learnt that she was pregnant: the baby was due any day. When I persisted, I was told that she would ring me up late that evening. Finally, I heard the voice: 'Aassiyeh bol rahi hoon.' She promised to let me know the next morning whether I could meet her. The next time I heard the voice, it was to tell me that a woman in burqa would pick me up and take me to her. No, no male photographer could go along. There were a few women in the house. I was ushered into a wall-to-wall carpeted room with gaf-takiyas (round cushions like bolsters) strewn around. The woman who had brought me placed a blanket on my lap while I waited for Aassiyeh Andrabi. When the president of Dukhtarane Millet made her entry, it was without a burqa! Much as she would have preferred me not to see her without one, she had pregnancy-related complications, and wearing a burqa made breathing difficult. She only wore it briefly while I shot her pictures.
THE MOST WANTED WOMAN I 1 8 3
Short and cherubic, Aassiyeh smiled when I repeated Merajud-din's comment that she had been heard but not seen. 'That is true, at least since I founded Dukhtarane Millet in 1981,' she said. It was the year she graduated in biochemistry, bacteriology and diet therapy from a college in Srinagar. Till then, she was like any other girl, not overly religious, despite being from an orthodox family. She was all set to do her MSc in biochemistry at Dalhousie in Himachal Pradesh, when her brother, Dr Inayatullah Andrabi, refused to let her go far from home. She was disappointed, but gave in. Later that year she chanced upon a book, Khwadeen ki Dilon ki Baatein (Inner Feelings of Women), in the library at home. The book, compiled by Ma-il Khairabadi, had a story about an American Jew, Max Margaret, who had embraced Islam and become Mariam Jameela. It also carried a picture of Mariam Jameela behind a veil. That, says Aassiyeh, was the turning point. She was ashamed that despite being a Muslim, from a Syed family, she knew very little of Islam and the Quran, while an American Jew had converted to Islam after reading the Quran. She fought with her physician father, Syed Shahabuddin Andrabi, for letting her remain ignorant, while he himself was an Islamic scholar, and decided to study the religion on her own. The books were in Arabic, a language she did not know. She read the Quran in Urdu, while learning Arabic at Kashmir University so that she could read the original works. When she could read, she opened a part-time school in Srinagar for girls to study Islam. From the school she moved to the mosque. She collected women there and, within weeks, had persuaded women to fan out in the villages and motivate other women to learn about their religion. Realizing that teaching women to read and write was equally important, she founded Dukhtarane Millet. 'From 1981 to 1987, I visited all the districts, all the schools and colleges, talking about nothing other than the importance of Islam,' said
Aassiyeh. The government took no notice of her or her supporters. These meetings opened her eyes to the reality of dowry, women abuse and violence against women among the Muslims in the Valley. Dukhtarane Millet went beyond religion, to fight for the cause of women. They had nothing to do with politics or Pakistan when, in 1987, Aassiyeh led 150 women to meet Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah to demand reservation of seats for women in state-run buses. 'He is an ill-tempered man. He saw us in burqa, and even before we could present our demand, charged me with trying to bring about an Islamic revolution in the Valley,' recalled Aassiyeh. She told him to listen to the women first. 'We have not come to talk about Islam now . . . only to ask you to reserve six seats in every state-run bus for women. It's done everywhere.' Dr Abdullah, according to her, taunted them for talking about reservation when man had landed on the moon. 'He was simply ill-behaved, didn't listen to us, and went away. Later, we met the transport minister who said he would talk to the chief minister about it.' In April that year, her followers blackened posters of skimpilyclad women on Srinagar's walls. The burqas hid the tins of paint and brushes. The volunteers descended from all directions and made surprise strikesan 800-strong burqa-clad force moving around blackening the posters, before taking out a silent procession at the famed Lai Chowk. That April evening, the police raided Aassiyeh's house for the first time. 'Fortunately, I was not at home. They harassed my parents, and charged me with anti-national activities. I went underground for three weeks,' she said about her first brush with the police. 'They raided Dukhtarane Millet's office in Batmaloo, arrested the owner of the rented building and took away all our books.' When Aassiyeh resurfaced, her relatives were pressuring her parents to rein her in. Her firmness then turned into defiance,
THE MOST WANTED WOMAN I 1 8 5
and she let it be known that she took her own decisions. 'Our women don't even go out . . . so being alive the way I wanted to be was very difficult for my parents. I insisted that Islam did not make anyone superior or inferior, and to pin me down was unlslamic.' Her activities continued in that direction, without 'any trouble' till 1990, when a pro-independence movement caught the imagination of the people of the Valley. Dukhtarane Millet gave wholehearted moral support to the mujahideen. The organization's political stand and goal had become clear: the creation of a Muslim world under an Islamic government. Kashmir's accession with Pakistan was seen as a stepping stone towards that goal. In May that year, the government banned Dukhtarane Millet along with dozens of other antiIndia outfits supporting the secessionist movement. Assiyeh's parental home was frequently raided because her brother was the convener of the Mahaze Islamic Front. For a second time, she went into hiding. While on the run, she married Mohammad Qasim, the publicity chief of the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, and her son, Mohammad Bin Qasim, was born underground. 'It was a Caesarean birth and three days later I was heading for a meeting. When my son was six months old, my husband and I were arrested while we were returning from Delhi,' said Aassiyeh. Detained under the Terrorists and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) and the Public Safety Act, Aassiyeh was interrogated at the Jammu Interrogation Centre for two months. Later she was moved to the Central Jail, where she spent twenty months. She was released when the case against her was quashed. The Dukhtarane Millet continues to be banned, and her band of women in burqa periodically throw stones at the security forces, and highlight what they perceive to be violation of rights. At the political level, they hold pro-Pakistan demonstrations and celebrate the Pakistani Independence day.
The police rounding up a burqa-clad woman protester in Srinagar

Dukhtarane Millet appears to evoke greater response in the Valley than many other pro-independence organizations. A Srinagar-based industrialist, Shaukat Jan, says people adore them 'because of their anti-India and pro-freedom stance. They love them and support them wholeheartedly.' While Aassiyeh herself attributes the favourable response to women being more concerned, sensitive and emotional than men, constituents of the All-Party Hurriyat Conference do not exactly go ga-ga over the militant women's group. Among the public, too, there are large sections not favourably inclined towards Dukhtarane Millet. The reason is the difference in their objectives: most of the Hurriyat constituents are open about their demand for azadifreedom. Very few in the Valley are pro-Pakistan. A professor at Kashmir University, for instance, does not think Dukhtarane Millet is as important as the JKLF. 'It is not
T H E MOST WANTED WOMAN I 1 8 7
broadbased,' said the professor. 'It is an orthodox outfit representing fundamentalist ideas, pleading the cause of Islam. But the struggle of the Kashmiris is not religious, not for an Islamic government, but for freedom.' 'It is a 100 per cent ISI backed organization,' said Abdur Rasheed Dar, deputy chairman of the J&K Legislative Council, who is tipped to become a minister in the Farooq Abdullah Cabinet. 'There is nothing genuine about it, and there is a lot of resentment among Kashmiri women who have defied Dukhtarane Millet's diktats and commands. They force them to wear burqas and take them to medieval time.' Dukhtarane Millet's banned status and Aassiyeh's underground existence notwithstanding, the Director-General of Police, Gurbachan Jagat, said the outfit was a creation of the media. Said another officer who did not want to be identified: 'The image of burqaclad women demonstrating is appealing. That is all there is to them.' Most other militant outfits in the Valley and the constituents of the All-Party Hurriyat Conference may be willing to negotiate with the government for a settlement in the not-too-distant future. Dukhtarane Millet, however, is prepared to wait for a long, long time for achieving its goals. Aassiyeh says she has never touched a gun. On the contrary, she claims she has stopped women from wielding the AK-47 or lobbing grenades. Some people are willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on that, and they believe that if not gunwielding, the Daughters of the Community have been gunrunning for the militants. VIJAYA PUSHKARNA
9 J u l y 2000
LIFE IN CHAINS
VENKATESH, a fifty-eight-year-old Dalit, has not come to terms with freedom. The 15-kg iron chain that clung to his ankles for two years is gone and his lean frame has suddenly become unbearably light. 'It is a strange feeling. It is like coming out of water,' he laughs, showing his tobacco-stained teeth. His walk is measured and cautious; curiously similar to an infant taking its first steps. Ever since he can remember, Venkatesh has been crushing stones for a living. His father came to Mysore from the semiarid Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh as part of the labour force that built the Krishnaraja Sagar dam. The family settled there and worked in stone quarries in and around Mandya. Four years ago, Venkatesh began working in a stone quarry at Arakere near Srirangapatnam, the capital of Tipu Sultan, who resisted the British enslavement of India. From dawn to dusk, he crushed half a tractor-load of jelly stones for Rs 55. One day he asked his employer for a loan. Puttaswamy Gowda, the driver-turned-quarry owner, who was once a Janata Dal corporator in Mysore, readily lent him Rs 4,250. Two years
Venkatachala holds his grandson after he was released from the quarry
later, Venkatesh told the quarry's foreman, Muniyappa, that he had repaid the loan with interest and that he wanted to move to another quarry as the pay was too low at Gowda's quarry. Gowda's goons thrashed him the following day, saying he still owed money to Gowda. 'I had repaid more than Rs 10,500. But he said I still owed him more than Rs 7,000,' says Venkatesh. They took him in a jeep to a welder in Mysore city 15 km away and chained his legs. The nuts and bolts in the fetters were welded so that he would not be able to remove them. 'They chained me not for the money, but because I wanted to leave,' says Venkatesh. After Venkatesh, four other Dalits were chained-Venkatesh's son Gopal, Venkatachala, Nagaraju and Krishna. They also had owed Gowda sums ranging from Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 and the amounts somehow multiplied in the account books500 became 5000 simply by adding a zero. 'Even the cost of the chain, welding and transport was added to our loans,' says Nagaraju, who is from Krishnaraja Sagar. The chained men were kept in a shack away from their families. 'My son Gopal has not slept with his wife for two years. How can we explain our pain to others?' Venkatesh says with tears in his eyes. The children were also made to work. Many of them were sent to a nearby cement factory. 'When our children are here, how can we run away? The owner (that's what the workers call Gowda) knew that,' says Gopal's wife, Lakshmi. Whenever a labourer ran away from the quarry, the owner gave the foreman money to find the fugitive. 'Their goons would wait at liquor shops in the evening and collect information. When they found the man, they would bundle him into a jeep and take him back to the quarry,' says Devraj, a quarry worker. 'They want us to work and die here.' Krishna was beaten black and blue a week before he got freedom. The offence: he took out one of his dear possessions
L I F E IN CHAINS | 1 9 1
a pair of trousersand wrapped it around his waist. 'We could not wear even knickers or underwear because of the chain. I just wrapped the pants to cover myself because I was washing the lungi,' says Krishna. Muniyappa saw it and reported it. The goons suspended Krishna from a tree and beat him till his toenail broke and blood oozed out. Mercifully, his wife and children were not around to see the torture and humiliation. He had sent them away to his mother's house near Mysore, a week after he had started working for Gowda. Ask any woman about life in the quarry, hushed tones and silence prevail. Krishna's relatives, Rajamma and Ankamma, however, admit that women were put to unspeakable difficulties. Recently, there was a death in the quarry: a woman called Kamalamma died in a fire. It was apparently a case of selfimmolation. Even her family does not want to talk about the death, but there are stories of molestation and rape in the quarry. The twenty-three families (twenty-five men, thirty women and thirty children) at the quarry lived in a perpetual shadow of fear. Even the women and children were beaten up if they spoke against the quarry owner. The goons broke Venkatesh's wife Venkatalakshmamma's hand for abusing one of them. The goons followed the women whenever they went to buy food, making sure that they did not talk to anyone. The labourers were not even allowed to talk to the lorry drivers who came to collect the jelly stones. It was, therefore, a minor miracle that activists of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha could discover the chained men in the quarry during a civic election campaign in June. One Sangha activist, Lokesh, barged into a hut in the quarry to distribute pamphlets, despite resistance from the goons, and found Venkatesh in chains. Venkatesh told Lokesh that he was
Krishna, Nagaraju, Venkatesh and Venkatachala are freed by the Sangha activists
from Kadathanala village near Pandavapura in Mandya district. 'I asked him to tell Nanjunde Gowda about my condition,' Venkatesh says. Nanjunde Gowda, a Sangha leader, is popular in these parts. Alerted on the eve of elections, Nanjunde Gowda planned a rescue operation with the help of a lawyer, K.R. Keshava Murthy, a former Sangha activist. In a dramatic move, sixty Sangha activists accompanied by journalists broke through the main gate of the quarry during lunch hour on 21 June. They rescued four shackled men from a hut and Gopal from his work site. During the rescue operation, Gowda's son, Arun Kumar, threatened to blast the activists with dynamite. A minor skirmish ensued, and the goons manhandled Nethra Raju, who was videographing the event. 'We knew that the local police were hand in glove with the quarry owner. He used to bribe them
L I F E IN CHAINS | 1 9 3
and we could not trust them. So, we called Deputy Superintendent G. Nagappa of Srirangapatnam,' says Nanjunde Gowda. Nagappa's response was far from encouraging, says Murthy. ['I am not prepared to say anything,' Nagappa told The Week. 'All details will be given in the court.'] Even as the police looked on, Arun Kumar called his uncles on his mobile phone, asking them to move the remaining labourers and their families to another location. The Sangha activists quickly thwarted the attempt. It was only in the evening, when the activists informed Minister M. Shivanna about the chaining, that the enormity of the matter dawned on the police. By then, Sangha activists had started a dharna before the Srirangapatnam police station for the arrest of Puttaswamy Gowda, who had vanished. They were also angry that the police had removed the chains before the five men could be produced before a magistrate. Nanjunde Gowda believes that the police knew about the existence of bonded labour in Arakere. 'When Kamalamma committed suicide last week, the police went there to make an inquest. They must have certainly seen the chained men,' he says. The Minister of State for Social Welfare, Baburao Chavan, feels that the police may not have been aware of it. 'The chained men were locked up in a room when the police went there,' he says. Chavan, however, admits the failure of labour and revenue officials to report the plight of the workers. Even though Mandya is Chief Minister S.M. Krishna's constituency, he did not visit the victims. The man he deputed, Home Minister Mallikarjuna Kharge, did not go to the Nimishamba Temple where they were temporarily put up. Instead, he asked the five chained men to meet him at the inspection bungalow. 'Being a Dalit himself, he should have shown some concern,' says a Sangha activist. Two days after the labourers were freed from their chained
existence, their former 'owner' was sighted again in Mandya. As Puttaswamy Gowda surrendered before the district court, there was a glint of hope that the metal that he had used so cruelly would finally be clamped around his wrists. SOORYA PRAKASH
LIFE IN CHAINS | 195
Baljinder, married to an NRI, hugs her mother
4 February 2 0 0 1
HOLIDAY WIVES
EIGHT years ago, the world seemed to lie at Baljinder Kaur's feet. The beautiful, articulate twenty-one-year-old youngster of Phillaur in Punjab had just taken her BEd degree. She could now opt for a master's degree, or marriage to a boy from America. As things turned out, the decision was made for her. At Baljinder's best friend's wedding, her parents learnt that a boy from the US was on the lookout for a bride. Weeks later, on 14 January 1993, Baljinder married Narinder Singh Thandi, a bus driver for a firm in Sacramento, California. When he left after two months, he promised to send for his wife soon. For a while, the telephone at his parents' home in Panjdera, where Baljinder lived, trilled to keep the marriage alive. When she told Narinder that she was pregnant, he urged her to have an abortion. He would have to file more papers to bring a child to the US, he explained. 'It is better that our child is born an American citizen,' he said. In December Narinder was back in Panjdera on a threemonth vacation. Baljinder was soon in the family way, but once
again Narinder's arguments led to an abortion. As the vacation drew to a close, he told Baljinder to stay with her parents, as she would receive her immigration papers there. Six months passed. There were calls and letters, but not that promised air ticket to the US. And then, even the calls stopped; Baljinder's frantic ones went unanswered. When she finally managed to get Narinder, he told her that he was filing for divorce. 'I won't have you here in any circumstances,' he said. The line snapped. 'I married an NRI and ruined my life,' is Baljinder's refrain today. The words sum up the lives of many women living in the districts of Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala and Nawanshahar, which comprise the prosperous Bist Doaba region. Two to six weeks are all it takes. The craving for an affluent lifestyle abroad leads many a parent in these parts to search for a suitable NRI for their daughter. A hasty engagement and wedding follow. The men soon fly back and the wives are left holding the wedding album and marriage certificate. Soon the letters stop and there are no more phone calls. When the frantic young women dial a number noted carefully on a much-thumbed page, it is to hear a recorded message. Some like Baljinder have had their husbands come down for a visit or two. But there are others like Paramjit Kaur who have not seen a second time the men they marry. Tarsem Lai, forty-five, was in Dubai when Paramjit, twentyone, married him and left Phillaur town for her in-laws' home at Mehatpur village in Jalandhar district. Three days after the wedding, Tarsem announced that he was leaving. Though there were no promises that he would send for her later, it was understood that Paramjit would stay in Mehatpur and Tarsem would send money for her upkeep. 'But his attitude, as well as that of my in-laws, changed three months later. They would not let me visit my parents. And my brothers-in-law started sexually exploiting me,' says Paramjit. When she told Tarsem, he accused her of lying. His last call ended after an argument.
Kamala, married to an NRI, looks at the court papers

Paramjit returned to her parents. Her mother-in-law visited her once, but was vague about Tarsem's whereabouts. Like countless men of the Doaba area, Tarsem, too, would most probably have paid touts and travel agents lakhs of rupees to go overseas and remained in hiding for want of valid travel documents and work permits. Meanwhile, life goes on for Paramjit who helps out at a local beauty parlour. Her father, a labourer, and her mother, a maid, are asking her to file for divorce and remarry quickly. While Baljinder and Paramjit never set foot on foreign soil, Kamala, twenty-five, lived with her husband in England for seven years before she was sent back. For the first two months of her marriage to Dharmender Kumar, everything went off well. Then one day he brought his fair-skinned wife and their two children home. Kamala's mother-in-law made light of it, saying they were his friend's children. Kamala's position by now
H O L I D A Y WIVES | 1 9 9
was no better than a maid's. 'I did all the work and was treated like a servant,' she recalls. A knock on the door one day brought Kamala face to face with the law. Accused of overstaying in the UK, she was jailed and threatened with deportation. Dharmender quickly packed her off to Jalandhar. Although her stunned father, Dass Ram, took up the issue with her in-laws, they had no answers and subsequently they fled the region. Dass Ram is determined to get Kamala married again. But this time he will scout for an NRI through his relatives abroad. Almost every family in the region can name a relative who married an NRI but was left high and dry, their husbands in all likelihood moving on to the next conquest. Jaswinder Kaur of Paddebet village in Kapurthala district believes her son-in-law, Jarnail Singh, an NRI from Holland, has married at least four times and has two children. Unfortunately, she discovered it too late, and that too the hard way. She caught him tying the knot with another girl despite being married to her daughter, Amarjeet. Amarjeet was eighteen when Jaswinder took her to a hotel in Kapurthala where Jarnail Singh was vetting prospective brides. He approved of Amarjeet. His cousin, Bhajan Singh, then posted as a Punjab Police security officer in Kapurthala, vouched for Jarnail Singh's character. Delighted, Jaswinder agreed to their demand for an immediate engagement. She rushed to the bank for money. 'When I returned an hour later, Bhajan Singh had already had the pheras (the wedding rituals) done. The wedding was over! And they took her to the police officer's house,' says Jaswinder, whose husband has been working in Dubai since 1978. Promises, phone calls from Holland and a two-month visit to Punjab a year after the wedding followed. 'Whenever we asked about Amarjeet's travel to Holland, he would say that her papers were incomplete,' recalls Jaswinder. 'He often got drunk
and beat her up with hockey sticks, and threatened to beat me when I intervened.' A year later, Jarnail Singh flew down again, but this time didn't bother to visit Amarjeet. 'Then one day, I heard he was getting married,' says Jaswinder. The news brought together fifty people from Kapurthala and along with a police raid team, they landed at Bhajan Singh's house. Although Bhajan Singh got the crowd to disperse by agreeing to bring Jarnail Singh to the police station, he reached the station alone. Jaswinder was determined to bring the man to book. She toured the police stations, the village panchayat and the courts and was finally offered an 'out-of-court settlement' under which Jarnail Singh would pay Rs 50,000. 'I did not take the money,' says Jaswinder. 'Since he was married, I too, got my daughter married. She is now in Amritsar,' she says. She brings out newspaper clippings, engagement-cumwedding photographs and the fake passport on which Jarnail Singh had travelled out of India. 'He travelled on the passport of a dead man, Dilbagh Singh, and in Holland he is known by that name,' she says. 'I must have been crazy to have sought an overseas match for my daughter.' The near-obsessive desire to cross the seven seas is decades old in this fertile Doaba area, between the Sutlej and Beas rivers, which has sent 70 lakh people abroad. The present population of the Doaba region is 41.25 lakh according to director, Census Operations, Punjab. If young menlike those who drowned off Greece in 1996 in the infamous Malta boat tragedywalk into the death trap of jobs in a promised land, girls take the marriage route. In the process, they fall prey to NRI men who come to India, have a fling and fly back. 'Till a few years ago, before the scrutiny of papers became stringent, women would claim to be the wives of their own brothers just to go and settle abroad,' says
H O L I D A Y WIVES | 2 0 1
Pravin Bhandari, who runs a marriage bureau and heads Shadiram Jagannarh Travel Agenrs at Phillaur. The matrimonial columns of most newspapers, which give separate, country-wise listings of brides and grooms cater to this craze. Smaller publications brought out here and in the UK, the US and Canada display ads of marriage bureaus which boast that they arrange videshi rishtey (alliances abroad). 'Everybody coming to me says "find an NRI match, I'll pay you 5,000 dollars",' says Bhandari. Mostly belonging to the middle class, they have no other conditions. 'I just put the two parties in touch, and tell them that I don't know either of the parties well and so cannot guarantee anything.' According to him, 50 per cent of these brides get taken for a ride. But it's a two-way game. 'Most people know from the very outset that they are entering a risky situation,' says Bhandari. 'Many men plainly say that they will just take the girls out. They don't promise any emotional support, or care to sustain a wedding. But the girl's parents keep hoping that things will work out. They feel cheated later.' Despite countless such cases in every village, there has been no collective protest. An odd case of a woman being harassed abroad does make headlines in the Punjabi dailies, leading to a couple of activists holding up banners. They ask the government to take up the matter. The chief minister says he will look into it, but nothing happens. The tales of sorrow do nothing to dampen the desire among both men and women to reach foreign shores. Jaswinder Kaur, whose daughter's wedding to Jarnail Singh turned into a nightmare, now painfully listens to her fourteen-year-old son Sukhdev's dreams of going to the US. 'We have five shops and would like him to stay here and look after them. All these years, my husband has been away and now my son wants to go too.' There are also instances of NRI women marrying a man back home and taking him abroad after he finds a 'bride' for her brother abroad.
Most NRI weddings take place quietly and quickly. 'No one talks about a wedding in the offing as they are afraid somebody will grab the groom,' says Jai Singh, a member of the People's Vigilance Committee, a Phillaur-based NGO. Says Baljinder's mother, Amarjeet Kaur: 'Our people are so crazy to find an NRI groom that even if a foreign dog comes here, people will run after it to fix a match for their daughters. Men with jet black beards and hair, but wrinkled faces, marry girls young enough to be their granddaughters.' Her eldest son, Hira Singh, the sarpanch of Phillaur, is equally bitter in his comments: 'All these guys coming from America and Canada to get married to girls from here should be lined up on GT road and gunned down.' But while Amarjeet rues the loss of Rs 6 lakh spent on Baljinder's wedding, her daughter justifies the strong desire which led to her sad plight. 'I thought if by marrying an NRI, I could help one of my brothers settle in the US, the whole family would prosper. There are many families in every village who have built palatial houses, bought cars and colour TVs after one son moved off to America. Is it a crime or sin to dream that way?' Nothing perhaps can be done, as Phagwara-born Ujjal Singh Dosanjh, now the premier of the British Columbia province of Canada, said in Chandigarh a couple of weeks ago. He narrated the story of a woman who came to see him to present her case against a Canada-based Sikh whom she married twenty years earlier. 'I asked her whether he had written to her. She said "no". I asked her whether he had sent her money. Her reply was again a "no". Then I asked her why was she fooling herself. Why was she nursing illusions of joining him, or thinking of herself as his wife?' Dosanjh said that such cases being personal relationships, the law had a very limited role to play. A recent Punjabi comedy cassette pokes fun at women who dreamt of marrying NRIs. The spoof speaks of a village not far
H O L I D A Y WIVES | 203
away from Phagwara, where a solitary house has been given a number1/3. The significance: the house belongs to the twentyyear-old third wife of a sixty-year-old NRI. And true to form, he isn't around. VIJAYA PUSHKARNA
7 J u l y 2002
GODHRA CARNAGE
IT was nothing unusual for Rajendrarao Raghunathrao Jadhav, forty-eight, an engine driver with the Ratlam railway division, Madhya Pradesh. Around 3.30 a.m. on 27 February, he was woken up by the ring of the telephone. The driver of the Sabarmati Express on the Ratlam-Baroda section had not reported for duty and Jadhav had to rush. The train was already running behind schedule. The train left Ratlam at 4.50 a.m. with Jadhav taking charge along with the assistant driver, Mukesh Pachauri, and the guard, S.N. Verma. It arrived at Godhra railway station platform No. 1 at 7.40 a.m. Five minutes after the train began chugging out of Godhra, somebody pulled the chain. Only four or five coaches had moved out of the platform. The assistant driver attended to the chain pulling which occurred in four coaches, and the train resumed its journey. But when the engine reached the Godhra A-cabin, Jadhav felt the vacuum drop. The train ground to an abrupt halt.
A mob surrounded the train and pelted stones at the engine. ' Utaro to kapi nakhish (If you get down, we will cut you to pieces),' threatened the men armed with sharp weapons and sticks. The nearly 1,000-strong mob came from the direction of a mosque, visible beyond the trees and bushes along the railway tracks. The mob rained stones on the train and set on fire coach S6, killing fifty-nine people, recalled Jadhav in his statement recorded in three parts on 27 February, 3 March and 16 April. Jadhav is the main complainant in the interim charge-sheet on the infamous Godhra carnage which triggered off the worst-ever backlash against Muslims in Gujarat. About 1,000 lives were lost in the ensuing communal riots. However, four months after the incident, investigators are still looking for vital clues. They have dismissed the theory that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was behind the incident. During his recent visit to Gujarat, Union Home Minister L.K. Advani said the Godhra incident was not a pre-planned terrorist act, only a pre-planned move to create disturbance. The Week is privy to vital documents in the charge-sheet which throw some light on the 'pre-planned move'. Most interesting are the findings of forensic experts based on an onthe-spot inspection and reconstruction of the incident. 'Considering the time factor (hardly 45 minutes after the train left Godhra station), intensity of fire and the damage it caused to material objects, around 60 litres of highly inflammable liquid was used to burn coach S6,' states the report by Dr M.S. Dahiya, assistant director at the Ahmedabad-based forensic science laboratory. Dr Dahiya, who, along with a scientific officer, M.N. Joshi, re-enacted the incident with a railway coach at the spot of the crime, however, concludes that no inflammable liquid was thrown from outside into coach S6. Nor was there any possibility
of it being splashed inside from the doors. The height of the coach windows from ground level at the crime spot was found to be 7 feet, which made throwing of inflammable liquid using a bucket or jerrycan next to impossible. The experts tried this from a 3-foot elevation, some 14 feet away from where the coach was burnt. Hardly 10-15 per cent of the water used for the purpose got inside the coach, the rest spilled over to the tracks. 'Under such circumstances, coach S6 should have caught fire from outside, the fire engulfing it from below, with the inflammable liquid pooled around the tracks. But the inspection of the tracks and burning pattern on the exterior of coach S6 which had no burn marks below the window levelconfirm that the inflammable liquid did not come from outside.' The experts also poured nearly 60 litres of water inside the coach and found none of it spilling over from the open door or reaching the toilets. The report finally concludes that to burn the coach, in the 27 February pattern, 60 litres of inflammable liquid had to be splattered inside the coach using a big container from the passage adjoining seat No. 72. Who did it? Only further investigations will tell. The inspection report confirms heavy stone pelting on the burnt coach from the southern side of the tracks. Stones were also found scattered inside the coach. The windowpanes on one side had been shattered by stones while those on the northern side had melted in the fire. Three doors of the coach were open at the time of the incident. This again is at variance with the initial statement that all doors had been bolted from inside. All windows were closed. There was no attempt to break the window grills from outside. They had been broken from inside or had melted in the fire. The burning pattern inside the coach, its spread, intensity and effect on the floor, described as 'alligatoring' pattern, indicate
GODHRA CARNAGE | 2 0 7
that the fire spread rapidly, burning 80 per cent of the coach. There was no evidence of acid-like, quick burning liquid being used, according to the report. The engine driver's statement does not throw light on the way the coach was set afire after the train was stopped at the Godhra A-cabin. Neither is it clear on the events which took place after the first chain pulling. Panchmahal's District Superintendent of Police, Raju Bhargava, had received a message around 8.10 a.m. that the Sabarmati Express, in which kar sevaks were travelling, had been stopped at Godhra railway station and stoned by people from the Signal Falia area, adjoining the railway tracks. When he reached the station, he learnt that the train had departed, but was stopped again near Godhra A-cabin. One coach had been set on fire. On reaching the spot, he found the coach on fire and many passengers on the tracks. The mob had dispersed but the kar sevaks who got down from the train appeared furious. A large number of people, apparently from Signal Falia, had gathered after the Railway Protection Force and Gujarat Railway Police opened fire to disperse the mob. In his eyewitness account, Bhargava further recalls having met Mohammed Hussein Kalota and Haji Bilal, now prime accused in the case, near the scene of the crime. Bilal's appearance, the officer felt, could further incite the angry kar sevaks. Kalota was promptly asked to take Bilal away from the spot. Haji Bilal Ismail Sujela was later pronounced the prime suspect behind the train carnage and arrested on 16 March from a Godhra slum. An Independent member of the Godhra municipality and chairman of its planning committee, Bilal has a criminal record with at least ten cases against him. The slightly built, bearded man was once a pickpocket and also ran a ring of gambling dens in Godhra, according to the railway police
records. The police also arrested Kalota, former president of Godhra municipality, and fifty-one other local Muslims, a majority of them from the Signal Falia ghetto. Bilal and Kalota subscribed to the Tablighi Jamaat doctrine that focuses on Islamic identity and culture. The doctrine promotes the agenda of terrorist groups like Harkat-ul-Jihad-iIslami (Huji). Two preachers from north India are said to have spread the Tablighi Jamaat doctrine through a network of seminaries in Godhra. Interestingly, in the charge-sheet, Hashim Firdaus Reza from Patna and Anwar Abdul Rashid Ansari from Uttar Pradesh, have been reported 'released under section 169 of CrPC'. Some passengers, listed as witnesses in the charge-sheet, spoke about the rowdy behaviour of the kar sevaks. 'We were forced to sleep on the passages despite having valid reservations,' stated a passenger. The evidence provided by Sajjanlal Mohanlal Raniwal, the ticket examiner on Sabarmati Express, mentions how he was stopped from entering the coaches by activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, who had forcibly occupied the reserved seats. Raniwal was forced to spend the night in the guard's coach. Raniwal witnessed an altercation between kar sevaks from coach S6 and some others on the Godhra platform before the train left the station. But none of the statements mentions what exactly happened on platform No. 1 during the train's fiveminute halt, widely reported as an altercation between kar sevaks and Muslim vendors from Signal Falia. Nor do the documents throw any light on what took place after the chain pulling and how long the train was detained before it finally left platform No. 1. The assistant driver reported to the engine driver that the alarm chain had been pulled in four coaches but he did not
GODHRA CARNAGE | 209
know who had done it. Advocate Yusuf Charkha, who is representing Bilal and Kalota, says the charge-sheet is silent on important events preceding the actual burning of coach S6. There are no details on the altercation between the kar sevaks and Muslim vendors on the platform. The kar sevaks refused to pay for the tea and abused the vendors. A few minutes after the train moved, the alarm chain was pulled, and a few hundred Muslims gathered at the station and started pelting stones at the kar sevaks, who also retaliated. Timely intervention by the railway police prevented further untoward incidents and the train left after a few minutes. Hardly a kilometre from the station, it was stopped by an armed mob. Someone had pulled the vacuum pipe. 'Those arrested are not the real culprits,' says Charkha. 'As the DSP's statement indicates, many from Signal Falia had gathered as onlookers when the coach burnt. The real culprits had escaped even before the police arrived on the scene of the crime.' Gujarat Home Minister Gordhanbhai Zadaphia refused to comment on the charge-sheet or the progress of investigation. Top officers of the state crime investigation department said the 'grey areas' existed because the interim charge-sheet had to be filed within ninety days of the incident. Further investigations were on. Girish Patel, a leading lawyer in the Gujarat High Court and prominent human rights activist, said: 'If there is any incident that requires an independent and thorough investigation, it is the Godhra train carnage.' He is critical of politicians like Zadaphia, who made public statements within hours of the tragedy supporting the VHPBajrang Dal theory that the train carnage was a 'manifestation of Islamic fundamentalism' and part of an ISI conspiracy. The charge-sheet has been filed against ninety-eight accused,
fifty-four of whom have been arrested (all except one from Godhra) and sent up for trial. The charge-sheet is voluminous, with 1,300 pages, and as investigations proceed, additional pages will be added, which may throw more light on what actually happened inside coach S6 on that fateful morning. ANOSH MALEKAR
GODHRA CARNAGE | 2 1 1

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