The G-20 piles folly on folly

By M H Ahssan

A combination of anarchists, nutcases, attention-seekers, the grossly unemployed and assorted victims of the credit crunch have descended on the Bank of England, gathering up a tsunami of protests linked to the London summit of the Group of 20 countries - a tidal wave of civil disagreement with authority that began barely a moment after I had secured an elusive macchiato from the local Starbucks.

The barista recommended that I stayed inside the shop when they boarded it up, fearing that anti-globalization protests would be directed against all symbols of America however far removed from the world of finance. Instead, I took my coffee and walked out into the beautiful London day, waiting to be asked a cogent question on the future of capitalism. As luck would have it, most of the folks in the crowd merely wanted to find out where to score drugs, while a few did enquire about where I had managed to find the coffee.

After we were all "locked" up inside a strange pattern of streets next to the headquarters of a large German bank that shall go unnamed, it soon became clear that the kids who had asked about drugs earlier were on to something. There was much trading in cannabis, right under the watchful eye of the London police, who only cared if anyone wished to lob a stone at the nearest bank.

Before all that though, drifting along with a crowd into Threadneedle Street, home to the Bank of England, was amusing. For one thing, the whole of the Bank intersection had been taken over by protestors ranging from anti-capitalists to environmentalists. Amongst the first acts of physical damage of the day was the trampling of spring daffodils outside the Royal Exchange; I observed that those doing the trampling were carrying the "End Carbon Emissions" placards. You really couldn't make this stuff up.

It was when the force of the crowd turned me the wrong way around, towards Bank Station that I found myself confronting a motley crew calling themselves the "G20 Meltdown" and who had helpfully brought along one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. For a while, I thought the solitary horse was explained by their inability to afford all four, being idiotic communists, but as it turned out they had planned to get three other horses through other underground-railway stations. I only managed to spot one other horse during the day, and even that could well have been a mirage.

Anyway, this was a more charismatic group; which is to say that the ringleaders all looked like they had never held down a day's job in their entire lives except perhaps in one of Her Majesty's prisons. Alongside the horsemen, the group included a coalition known as "Class War" - i targets landowners and assorted capitalists.

This grouping was incredibly popular with the ranks of the unemployed: with more than 2 million jobs already lost, the UK clearly had more than sufficient supplies of people to join this group, never mind that they were protesting for a return of the status quo ante rather than an overthrow of the establishment.

All along, the crowds had been increasing to the point where the London police started applying mini-quarantine areas; the idea being to isolate any group that looked like they may actually be troublesome into a small square and disallow entry or exit. Things quickly turned nasty after that at a location that wasn't previously closed off; a branch of RBS was vandalized by protestors throwing computer screens at the glass window.

In effect that act brought up the old broken glass conundrum into sharp focus: if someone throws a brick through a window, classical economists would consider the event economically accretive: given that the homeowner would have to buy glass, pay someone to fix it and so forth. In more rigorous schools of economics (such as the Austrian) though, the act would be economically destructive: while the act of replacing the glass would increase gross domestic product, it would always substitute another act (such as the person paying for curtains or buying himself a new toaster oven). More importantly, the act of breaking the glass pane diminishes one's view of safety, thereby causing more useless, defensive spending such as buying home insurance and the like.

The reason for that moral question was the events of the next day when world leaders actually met.

April 2, 2009
Quite tired by the overnight ordeal of being trapped with a bunch of nubile 20-year olds (no, I am not making that up), I met the dawn of April 2 to the cacophony of UK newspapers blaring about the failure of the summit before it had even started. Despite having been in the main square of the protests, even I couldn't recognize the vituperative commentary being spewed by news columnists who with a single voice proclaimed a day of chaos, intrigue and whatever else caught their fancy.

That it had simply been a rough day made worse by the actions of the London police was of course beyond the grasp of the newspaper columnists. Those that didn't report on the "riots" focused on the state dinner: right-wing newspapers highlighted the supposed snub given by Queen Elizabeth's consort, Prince Philip, to US President Barack Obama; while other newspapers pointed to the sheer scandal of the First Lady placing her arms around the sainted monarch.

As it happened, audiovisual evidence indicated that the prince had misheard the president's remarks and made one of his characteristic gaffes, while the queen had actually initiated the extraordinary gesture by placing her arm behind the First Lady's back. Given the facts, it was clear that the prejudice of the UK media stood very much against Obama, something explained not so much by his actions since becoming president but by the simple act of supposed solidarity being shown with the extremely unpopular Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the UK. Brown is considered in the UK press as a bit of a buffoon, variously derided for being a bore and more recently for crash-burning the UK economy by his extraordinary series of borrowings during the good years for the economy; money that had been wastefully spent by the Labour government.

After the newspapers, the next chore was to actually get to the place where the G-20 meeting [1] was being held: in something called the Excel Centre in the eastern part of London. I had been warned to stick to public transport and duly complied.

Here is a slight digression for Asian readers who are used to the comfort of metropolitan train journeys within cities like Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong. If you are one such person and are asked to travel on London's tube, or underground rail, network, here is a simple one-word recommendation: Don't. Unlike the train systems in Asian cities, allegedly built or bequeathed by the British, the London tube system is a mess of delays and accidents. Inside the carriages, conditions are virtually unbearable even on a beautiful spring day, while outside in the train stations, expect to see failing escalators, overcrowding and what have you.

Anyway, my journey was interrupted along the way, and I had to finally take a cab. While expensive, the road journey did offer a stunning view of the Millennium Dome, a vanity project of former UK prime minister Tony Blair that offers a wonderful economic lesson all on its own. Initially conceived by its design rather than its purpose, the Dome was meant to represent a new generation of "cool" people that inhabited the British Isles.

It proved to be the proverbial albatross and was soon dumped by the government; eventually picked up by the private sector at a fraction of the price, the Dome was renamed the O2 (after a telecom company) and now houses the largest indoor concerts in Europe, all at a profit derived from the sheer scale of events relative to the cost of buying (not building) the place.

This object lesson in economics, along with the previous day's broken glass paradox, was completely lost on the assembled leaders in the Excel Centre. By the way, this center was another eyesore, apparently built by the British government to encourage business tourism; that it hasn't failed in the same proportion of the Millennium Dome is only because some businesses actually ended up hosting large trade shows in the venue as they fled the crowded confines of London.

The statement
As with the previous rounds of G-20 meetings, I actually did try to read the final, official statement [2] from the gathering. Unfortunately the assembled brainpower completely lost me on the fifth point:

The agreements we have reached today, to treble resources available to the IMF to US$750 billion, to support a new SDR [the special drawing rights, or currency, of the International Monetary Fund] allocation of $250 billion, to support at least $100 billion of additional lending by the MDBs [multilateral development banks], to ensure $250 billion of support for trade finance, and to use the additional resources from agreed IMF gold sales for concessional finance for the poorest countries, constitute an additional $1.1 trillion programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy. Together with the measures we have each taken nationally, this constitutes a global plan for recovery on an unprecedented scale. (Japan, the European Union and China will provide the first $250 billion of the increase in IMF rescue funds to $750 billion, with the $250 billion balance to come from as yet unidentified countries, Bloomberg reported. The G-20 said they would couple the financing moves with steps to give emerging economic powerhouses such as China, India and Brazil a greater say in how the IMF is run, the report said.)

In effect, the only tangible result of the G-20 meeting - the tripling of IMF resources - is astounding. The same people who drove the Latin American economy into dust and were responsible for widespread poverty in Asia in the aftermath of the Asian crisis; the very people who encouraged the idiotic accumulation of market-return independent foreign exchange reserves by Asian countries that subsequently caused the asset bubbles of the US and Europe; the very people who had no clue about the impending bubble burst up until the beginning of 2008, are now supposed to gather up the foresight and skills required to end an economic crisis whose only recent historic parallel was the 1929 depression in the United States; an event that took place a good 16 years before the IMF was itself created.

Reading that bit of the statement, I was reminded about a different bit of history from the same Britain, and pretty much from the opposite end of London. This event took place on September 30, 1938; the BBC reported then as follows:

The British prime minister has been hailed as bringing "peace to Europe" after signing a non-aggression pact with Germany. PM Neville Chamberlain arrived back in the UK today, holding an agreement signed by Adolf Hitler which stated the German leader's desire never to go to war with Britain again. The two men met at the Munich conference between Britain, Germany, Italy and France yesterday, convened to decide the future of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. Mr Chamberlain declared the accord with the Germans signalled "peace for our time", after he had read it to a jubilant crowd gathered at Heston airport in west London. The German leader stated in the agreement: "We are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe."
I have the dread feeling that the G-20 declaration from April 2, 2009, will achieve similar notoriety in years to come.

‘In Time, Everyone Will Pick Up The Gun In India’

By Ajit Sahi

Rengam, a Naxal ‘commander’, speaks to HNN from his hideout in the forests of Bijapur

What’s your role in the Communist Party of India (Maoist)?
To fight the Salwa Judum and bring back the people they have displaced. To those who went to Salwa Judum camps, we say, “Come back to your villages, homes and fields. Raise your children here.”

Why have the people gone to the Salwa Judum camps?
[When the Salwa Judum began in 2005] the Naga battalion went from village to village, burning houses, raping women, slashing people’s throats. The people ran to the camps in fear.

So why aren’t they coming back from the camps?
The Special Police Officers (SPOs) tell them, “If you go back to your villages, we’ll come and kill you.”

You should know that the government and the media portray Naxals as bloodthirsty gun-wielding insurgents with no popular legitimacy.

That’s a wrong image. The people don’t have guns in their hands. The people are in abject poverty and in terrible distress. They have nothing to eat. They have no cattle for farming.

Chhattisgarh Home Minister Nanki Ram Kanwar told HNN that the government wants to bring development to Bastar, but the Naxals don’t allow government agencies in here.
Is that so? Then why haven’t they brought development to the villages and the towns along the roads? If they aren’t able to enter deep in the forests, no one is stopping them from bringing development to the accessible parts.

What exactly is the fight between you and the government?
The people elected [local Congress leader] Mahendra Karma as an MLA. But he began terrorising them. He would be paid off by village sarpanchs [council chief] from development money. The people opposed this and cut off the money to him. In retaliation, he raised the Salwa Judum against us, filling it with young boys and giving them guns, which were used against the villagers.

The government says the Naxals have killed more than four times policemen than the police have killed Naxals.
That’s false. In Bastar alone, more innocent people than policemen have been killed.

When I spoke to Varavara Rao, seen as an overground Naxal ideologue, he justified killings, calling it revolutionary violence. Do you to agree?
If the government doesn’t understand [what we want], then we have no option but to take to the gun. The people are totally ready to bring the Revolution.

Do you think you can defeat the Indian state with the gun?
We will win, because millions are poor and they are ready [for the Revolution].

One can appreciate the need for a revolution to bring relief to the poor. But those who picked up the gun in Punjab, Kashmir and the northeast were brutally put down. How can you win against the state?
If the people buckle under, then it would be the fault of the leadership and point to a lack of preparedness by the people.

The Chhattisgarh Government says the state’s natural natural resources should be harnessed for India’s benefit. What do you say?
The government should first answer for the Bailadila hills. When it began mining the iron ore there, it had promised to employ the locals. Did that happen? No. The iron ore is shipped from Bailadila to Vishakhapatnam, from where it is sent to Japan. The locals go far and wide for livelihood. Because of that experience, people elsewhere refuse to part with their lands.

A Jungle Warfare School has come up in Chhattisgarh where military officers are training SPOs to take you on. By contrast, you live in the forests and know little else. Do you fear they will finish you?
After all the training, they’re still humans, right? The Naga battalion had similarly been trained. The people fought and defeated them.

In the name of the people you kill policemen. Why?
The police are also poor; they are Adivasi boys and girls. But they take up the gun for the government and oppress the people. That’s why we kill them.

Would you respond if the government calls you for talks?
We have seen in Andhra Pradesh that the government deceived us in the names of talks. It cannot be trusted. We won’t meet it.

Why do you say that Salwa Judum was set up to protect the projects of the Tatas and Essar in Chhattisgarh?
How will the Tatas work here without police protection?

If the government winds up Salwa Judum, would you stop police killings?
Whether or not we stop killing the police is for later. The government must first let the people in the Salwa Judum camps go back to their villages. We killed them because they terrorised people, destroyed crops, and stole Rs 1 lakh from villages.

Dantewada SP Rahul Sharma says that the government will finish you off.
How does it matter what Rahul Sharma says? Can he come in here?

Gandhi won freedom by nonviolence. Bhagat Singh picked up the gun.
Bhagat Singh chose the right path. He was a revolutionary from childhood and had a great fervour to fight on behalf of the people. It was because Gandhi refused to take a stand that Bhagat was hanged.

The Taliban have picked up the gun.
Pakistan’s is a religious strife. Our struggle is class conflict.

If you have the people’s support, then why don’t you fight elections?
We don’t believe in elections. For so many years politicians have won elections. Did they bring any freedom to the people?

But you aren’t those politicians.
Once we sit on the chair, we will become like those politicians.

But when the Revolution comes, you will have to sit on the chair, right?
But that will be the people’s government.

Mao won in China with the gun. Will Indians really pick up the gun?
They will. It might take years. But everyone will pick up the gun in India.

Do you oppose schools and hospitals?
We are fine with schools. But the government builds a school block and uses it for the police. So the people don’t want schools. We want hospitals, too.

And electricity?
We don’t need electricity. We’ve never had it. The wood in the forest is good enough.

Development is seen as roads, electricity, jobs. How about you?
But electricity is not free. And the people don’t have money to pay.

Would you agree to an autonomous administrative unit?
No, we won’t accept any such thing.

Is Bastar a part of India?
Bastar has no connection with India.

Do you want independence for Bastar?
Not just Bastar. Slowly, all of India will become independent.

Is India free or subjugated — ghulam?
Ghulam

Bloodsport In The Jungles

By Ajit Sahi

They screamed and waved their guns as they set the granary on fire,” says Sanni, a tribal woman in south Chhattisgarh, standing by the burnt-out heap that was her harvest until two nights ago. “My son ran away and isn’t back.” He was lucky. The attackers took away two other villagers. No, says Sanni, the attackers weren’t Naxals, the Maoist rebels who have waged an armed rebellion for three decades. “They were from Salwa Judum,” she says.

Ten weeks after the police and members of the Salwa Judum, a controversial police-backed militia, killed 19 people early January in the forests of the neighboring Dantewada district, NGOs have reported a spurt in such attacks at places in south Chhattisgarh. Sanni’s village is in Bijapur district, which was carved out of Dantewada last August. Her village is located 5km north of the Indravati, one of the three big rivers in the region. The two districts together have thickly forested plains and hills across an area in excess of 15,000 sq km. They are also the parts of India most heavily affected by the Naxals.

This is decidedly ghost country. As we cross the river where it is thigh-deep to enter what is referred to on both sides as the ‘war zone’, village upon village appears abandoned. “For fear of the Salwa Judum,” explains one of our fixers. They are accompanying us to a meeting with a Naxal leader, Rengam, whose “jurisdiction”, as a leader of the underground Communist Party of India (Maoist), it is claimed, covers about 75 to 100 villages.

The Naxal superstructure is said to resemble a batch of concentric circles: the innermost being the most powerful leadership, located in the remotest forests, forever on the move. The ‘zone’, ‘area’ and ‘range’ commanders people the middle: the levels of the classic pyramid management structure. These are reportedly the backbone: the hands-on, day-to-day direct leaders of the cadres, leading assaults and tracking the goings-on in the villages on their watch. The outermost circles comprise the ‘sympathisers’, who do not wear uniforms, freely interface with the “outside world” on the basis of their identity of the average villagers, but are the “eyes and ears”, the runners for the “brothers” inside. When police claim they have killed or arrested Naxals, it is believed they are mostly these outermost cadres. Of course, the Naxals claim that the police arrest or kill only the innocent people.

After walking three hours with the “sympathisers”, we were made to rest another two, and then handed over to a new group whose members, though not in uniform, wore shoes (the average tribal walks barefoot), carried a radio transistor, and held sharp, curved knives. Two of the five had guns under their arms. It was only at 6pm, 10 hours after we started walking, that we reached a village where a group of 20, led by Rengam, was waiting for us. As we later returned to our base station that night, walking back the 20km through the dark jungles, a fixer laughed, “Neither the Naxals nor the Salwa Judum would believe that you outsiders were boldly walking here this late.”

Two days later, a day after Holi, we got word that another set of Naxals was waiting to meet us elsewhere in the Dantewada district. As this was an outlying area with a far greater chance of the police, the paramilitary and the Salwa Judum turning up, a much stricter “sanitising” procedure was employed before we could be face to face with Kunjam, another Naxal leader (See interview). Here, the mystery of the transistor was solved. As it was abruptly switched on and a Hindi film song pierced the stillness, the Naxal leader appeared in two minutes. It was a signal for him.

CONGRESS CAN ONLY WATCH FRONTMEN

By M H Ahssan

Bhubaneswar meeting part of an effort to make a cohesive anti-Cong, anti-BJP alliance; Lucknow meeting of Lalu, Mulayam & Paswan aimed at arresting revival of GOP in cowbelt.

Alate cut may be a good shot to play in cricket but not in politics. Sensible politics is all about anticipating danger and tackling it early. The Congress seems to have missed this key principle while deciding to go it alone in politically-crucial states and downgrading its ties with allies such as NCP.

There was some recognition in the Congress of the fallout of its adventurism. On the eve of two important events — one in Bhubaneswar and the other in Lucknow — home minister P Chidambaram, who was fielded as a party spokesman on Thursday, said it would be better if NCP chief Sharad Pawar did not share the dais with “parties opposed to the Congress.”

While the Bhubaneswar meeting is part of an effort to make a cohesive anti-Congress, anti-BJP alliance out of the odd parties, the Lucknow meeting of Yadav chieftains Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh and Mr Ram Vilas Paswan is aimed at fashioning a strategy to arrest the revival of the Congress in the cowbelt.

The Congress leadership has been using varied expressions to explain the sudden loss of alliance quotient. Pranab Mukherjee has been describing the decision of railway minister Lalu Yadav to disband the UPA in Bihar as shocking and Congress leaders are training the gun on Mulayam Singh for the rupture in the ‘secular’ alliance in Uttar Pradesh. Implicit in them is a realisation that election prospects of the Congress are getting cloudy.

Mr Pawar on Thursday attempted to create the right atmospherics for a giving shape to the Third Front by praising the contribution of the Left in the four-andhalf years that it had backed the Manmohan Singh government. “But for their support, many of the key policy initiatives of the UPA government would not have been possible,” Mr Pawar said.

The partners cannot be faulted for charting independent course as the trigger for the current crisis came from the Congress’ end. The decision to go it alone was ratified by CWC after the leadership was pushed into a make believe world by durbari politicians. The argument was that a contest without the baggage of Yadavs and Pawars will give the party an opportunity to reinvent itself and regain public confidence.

UPA partners, who are wary of any interventions into the space occupied by them in their respective areas of influence, read the signals correctly. These regional players already have strong challengers like Mayawati and Nitish Kumar and any attempt of Congress to stage a comeback can be only at the cost of their interests.
That the Congress is trapped in Delhi is evident from its post-UPA disintegration campaign strategy. At the meetings addressed by Rahul Gandhi in Bihar on Wednesday, he concentrated his attack on NDA. The electorate can naturally turn around and ask if the purpose was only to defeat NDA, what was the reason for fighting solo in Bihar.

The Congress is obviously hoping that the anti-BJP glue that was binding UPA partners for the past five years will regain its effectiveness after polls. But that can happen only if Congress has the necessary numbers to be the kingpin of a politically-viable coalition. As of now, prospects of parties like SP submitting itself to the Congress’ wishes look quite bleak. Rhetorical skirmishes between Congress and its partners can only intensify in the days to come.
The lack of a script can prove to be costly for Congress. For, elections are won not by dragging the nation through partisan politics or sweet rhetoric. In the changed circumstances, power will remain distant if a party lacks geographical spread or powerful allies.

Editorial: Changing Landscape

By M H Ahssan

Will the economic crisis affect the elections? Some sections of the electorate are in distress. They will vote in anger. However, the actual number of crisis victims is relatively small. They will affect outcomes mainly in some urban constituencies, hurting the BJP in some places like Surat and the Congress elsewhere. Hence, their net effect on electoral outcomes will be limited.

For the rest of the electorate, things are not too bad. Though the global economy is shrinking, India is still growing at over 6 per cent and inflation is very low. If anything, that should help the incumbent UPA government. However, the electoral value of economic performance is asymmetric in India. Incumbent governments are punished when economic conditions are bad, but electoral outcomes depend on other factors when there is low inflation and reasonable growth.

Typically, these other factors are driven by the divisive politics of identity. Parties have allocated seats based on the arithmetic of caste, religion and ethnicity, along with the candidate’s access to resources and muscle power in some cases. With neither the Congress nor the BJP likely to win a majority on its own, alliances will ultimately determine who will rule the country. However, the BJD has abandoned the BJP, and the latter is having a hard time attracting new partners. The Congress is having problems of its own. The Yadavs have dumped it and formed a separate coalition within the UPA. The pre-election alliance strategies of both the NDA and UPA having collapsed, a patchwork ruling coalition will emerge post-elections, based on electoral performance. Meanwhile, Mayawati and Jayalalithaa are competing to lead the Third Front.

Underlying this messy terrain, there are emerging symptoms of remarkable tectonic shifts that could permanently change the landscape of Indian democracy — if not in this election, then certainly by the next in 2014. The most important is the rise of regional parties. The era of coalition governments reflects the growing dependence of national parties like the Congress and the BJP, in their bid for power, on the vote banks of regional parties.

The Akalis in Punjab, Samajwadi Party in UP and the RJD, LJP or JD(U) in Bihar are all regional parties. Though the BSP now presents itself as a national party, its main base is still UP. Nor is this a specifically north Indian phenomenon. Politics in Assam, Orissa, Andhra, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu etc is now driven by regional parties. Even the CPM draws its strength not from its politburo members but from its regional political bases in Kerala,
Tripura and West Bengal.

One consequence is the emergence of regional factors and issues as drivers of national political trends. There is an interesting tension between centralised control of economic power on one hand, through the finance ministry, RBI, Planning Commission and central ministries, and increasing regional dispersal of political power on the other, a tension that the 13th Finance Commission may need to address.

Another consequence is the arrival of regional party leaders on the national stage. Unlike regional Congress bosses, always loyal to the ‘high command’, these regional leaders are people with political bases and ambitions of their own. Many of these new leaders are not the children of erstwhile royalty or scions of great political families. They have risen from the ‘aam aadmi’ ranks and honed their survival skills in the rough and tumble of politics from below. Scions of political families, raised in the belief that they were born to rule, may one day find themselves rudely pushed aside if the courtiers strategising for them fail to come to terms with these new realities. Sooner rather than later, ‘people like us’ in India may find that they are being ruled by ‘people like them’ from Bharat.

Another remarkable trend, though less visible, is the emergence of a new politics of performance challenging the old divisive politics of identity. In many conversations in the fields and mandi towns of Bharat, i have heard it said, ‘Is bar jo kaam karega usi ko vote milega’ — this time those who do the work will get the votes. I had not attached much significance to these remarks until a recent survey commissioned by the Times of India picked up exactly the same sentiment, though presumably from an urban sample in this case.

Initiatives launched by eminent persons in favour of elections for good governance, such as Messrs N R Narayana Murthy, E Sreedharan and others or Bimal Jalan and his associates, also reflect that sentiment. Perhaps below the surface there is a building voter revolt against the divisive politics of identity, vote buying and muscle power. It could fizzle out and come to nothing in the absence of a principal agent to nurture and channel this potentially earth-shaking force.

But, if properly channelled, such sentiments could gather momentum leading to a cathartic cleansing of Indian politics. Will it make a difference in these elections or perhaps in the next one? Much depends on the media. It has tremendous power that it can deploy to lead that cleansing process, especially television and the Indian language press that have the widest reach. Can we hope that the fourth estate will rise to play its historic role in changing the landscape of Indian politics? We shall just have to wait and see.

Heart cells can regenerate, discovers Indian doc

By M H Ahssan

A broken heart can mend itself, literally. In a discovery that opens up possibilities of helping people with serious cardiac ailments, an international team of researchers that included a Canadian-born Indian neurosurgeon has found that the heart can regenerate itself.

Scientists hitherto believed that the heart never regenerates. “We have shown for the first time that the heart is capable of regeneration,” Dr Ratan Bhardwaj — who gave primary inputs for the research under lab supervision of Jonas Frisen at Stockholm’s Nobel Medical Research Institute — told TOI just after the research paper was published in the prestigious journal, Science.

Bhardwaj, now at the University of Toronto, said the cells that regenerate, called cardiomyocytes, comprise 20% of the total heart tissue. They are also responsible for the crucial pumping action. Calling the finding a “myth breaker and a paradigm shifter in science,” Bhardwaj said it opens doors to future stem cell therapeutics and regenerative strategies. “It would be great if researchers could understand this mechanism and possibly devise a pill to boost the regeneration of the organ especially after a heart attack or chronic heart failure,” he said.

The 35-year-old doctor said, “You are actually having your own body heal itself. It’s akin to the skin healing after a cut or the bones joining after a fracture. So wouldn’t it be great to find a way to heal your heart when it literally breaks, or fails? That’s the beauty of this experiment.” The research used carbon dating to track DNA molecules within heart cells to show that new cells were being produced. “For the first time, we were able to see and show that the heart actually is continuously making and replenishing new heart cells.”

Radio carbon dating is a technique used to determine the age of anything from the bust of the Mohenjodaro Priest to that of Queen Nefertiti. “But the body uses the same isotope, Carbon-14, in a very different way,” Bhardwaj explained.

During the Cold War, the nuketesting released huge amounts of radioactive C-14 in the atmosphere. This got mixed up with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that plants used up in photosynthesis. “Humans and animals ate the plants; so the C-14 went into our system. Could this somehow be tracked, we wondered? With that leap of logic, we zeroed in on the DNA molecule which ought to be fixed from the time when the cell was made, barring very negligible amounts of turnover, so if one could carbon date the DNA from a specific set of cells, one could find out how old that cell was,” Bhardwaj said.

Chinese mobiles to go dead in India soon

By M H Ahssan

Security Concerns Make Dept Of Telecom Write To All Cellular Operators To Block Services

Mobile handsets made in China that have flooded the grey market are to be phased out within the next 10 days. These handsets are seen as a security threat, prompting the move against them.

The department of telecommunication (DoT) has sent a communication to Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) asking them to block services to handsets that have a 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. It is only the Chinese cellphones that have these 15 digit numbers. Other handsets come with 16-digit IMEIs.

The problem arises because on service providers’ computers, the Chinese handsets show up as having an endless list of digits as their IMEI number. Due to this, these handsets cannot be traced using their IMEI numbers. Also, it has been found that usually over 1,000 of these handsets share a single IMEI number. This has posed a big problem for the police. Whenever criminals changed their mobile numbers or in cases of mobile phone thefts, police used to track them through the IMEI numbers. These phones m a ke that virt u a l ly impossible.

Recently, the COAI made a representation to the government explaining the problem. The DoT, which took the issue seriously, issued direction to the COAI to stop mobile phone services to persons having Chinese mobile phone handsets. Already, some of these customers are receiving SMS from the mobile operators asking them to change the handset. Otherwise the service to their mobile phone would be disconnected.

Sources in a private mobile service provider said that they had received the communication a week ago. “It is a sensitive issue and we cannot make a hue and cry out of it. In some cases, where we find our customer using Chinese made handsets, we are calling them up and telling them. In some cases, SMS is being sent. In any case, within a week, we are planning to block services to the customers using Chinese mobile phone handsets,’’ he added.

China-made handsets are particularly popular with underworld operators and terrorists who were quick to take advantage of their IMEI problem. Concurrently cellular operators began to feel the heat. Whenever the police wanted to track some criminals who used mobile phones, the address proof was found to be fake. While tracking the criminals through IMEI numbers, the operators stumbled on multiple numbers being used at the same time,leading to security risks. Hence, the decision to cut service to such phones.

Parties vie for minority votes in Hyderabad

By M H Ahssan

To win over nearly 60 lakh Muslim voters, eight major political parties in the state have created a sort of record this election by fielding community candidates from 41 assembly and 11 parliamentary constituencies.

Topping the list in allotting the largest number of assembly seats to Muslims is the Congress that has provided 12 berths to them. However, it has fielded only one candidate for Lok Sabha - Kasim Khan from Hindupur.

Prajarajyam has scored over Congress in putting up five minority candidates for Lok Sabha seats. But it has only 10 candidates for the assembly.

Khaleel Basha, vice president, minority affairs of Prajarajyam told TOI: “We still have to come up with one more list. Wait and watch for some more Muslim candidates from our party “.

A senior Congress leader said that the party had planned to give five more assembly seats to Muslims from constituencies like Kurnool, Mahboobnagar and Anantpur. But our plan couldn’t fructify. We had allotted the Zaheerabad Lok Sabha seat to Minister Fareeduddin but he shifted his base at the last minute to Ambarpet assembly segment. “That is the reason we have only Muslim candidates for Lok Sabha,” the leaders said.

Telugu Desam has fielded two candidates for Lok Sabha : Zahid Ali Khan from Hyderabad and N Md Farooq from Nandyal besides nine for assembly. A TDP source revealed: “We could not work out more numbers in the Muslim community because of the Grand Alliance. Had the TDP gone alone, you could have seen more aspirants from the community being selected”.

As expected MIM has fielded all its five sitting MLAs and added two more : Virasat Rasool Khan from Nampally and Ahmed Balala from Malakpet. The party president Asaduddin Owaisi is in the fray, as in the past election, from Hyderabad Lok Sabha seat.

But TRS that has continually made tall promises to Muslims has disappointed them. It has fielded merely four Muslim candidates for the assembly. However, of its total nine Lok Sabha candidates two are Muslims : Syed Yousuf Ali from Zaheerabad and Mohammed Mahmood Ali, Secunderabad.