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Medical Innovation: When Do Costs Outweigh Benefits?

By Sarah Williams / New York

When Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Intuitive Surgical hit the market in 1999 with its surgical robot, da Vinci, the company and many of its early adopters hailed the new technology as a revolution that would benefit patients, surgeons and the health care system as a whole. Da Vinci combines high-definition visual tools with robot-guided medical instruments that allow surgeons to do complicated procedures using a few tiny incisions. The da Vinci system, which is widely used in urologic surgeries such as the removal of prostate tumors, has been shown by Intuitive and outside researchers to reduce post-surgery complications and shorten hospital stays.

Tactical Voting: Is Defeating Modi Really A Muslim Priority?

By M H Ahssan | INNLIVE

EDITORIAL It is received wisdom (or is it assumption?) that the Muslim vote will go against the BJP in most places. This might well happen in some constituencies and states, but there are now good reasons to question the assumption that the Muslim vote will be cast en bloc to stop the Narendra Modi bandwagon in its tracks. 

To be sure, voting against Modi, even if it were to happen, does not affect the BJP’s overall prospects, especially if the anti-Modi vote is distributed among two or more parties parties, as it could happen in Uttar Pradesh. But there are now straws in the wind indicating that the Muslim vote may not be monolithic anyway. It may not even be that enthusiastic about voting solidly against Modi. 

Will Modi End Up Becoming Next Advani In BJP?

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

For those supporting or opposing the rise of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP’s Goa conclave was the event to watch for. While the most ardent of his backers hoped for his anointment as the party’s PM candidate, others, with perhaps equal  anticipation, looked forward to tear into Modi’s elevation in the party.

However, the BJP leadership did the smart thing by keeping its cadre and those opposed to the Gujarat Chief Minister pleased. With party patriarch LK Advani still not ready to bite the Modi-bait and the disenchantment of allies like JD(U) with the Gujarat CM, the party has taken a smart step to test waters.

Indian Politics - 'From Insurgency To Electoral Democracy'

By M H Ahssan | INN Live

EDITORIAL ANALYSIS  Accommodative politics, combined with political incentives, helped pave the way for the Mizo National Front to turn into a mainstream political party.

If grievance ever had legitimate reason to be translated into political rebellion, it was in Mizoram. The Mizo National Front (MNF) was an insurgent group that emerged from the Mizo National Famine Front in 1959 — a formation protesting the widespread famine caused by a regular failure of the bamboo crop due to mautam, and the failure of the Indian state to send adequate relief.

SELL YOUR STORY TO 'HYDERABAD NEWS NETWORK' (HNN)

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Sanjay Dutt - The Tragic Arc Of A Falling Star

Is it enough to have a heart of gold if your feet are made of clay? INN on a falling star who never quite gave up even as he gave in.

In a different Bombay, in September 1959, a man was pardoned for murder. The man, Lt Commander KM Nanavati, admitted to shooting his wife Sylvia’s lover, a “rich, swinging Sindhi bachelor”, three times through the chest with a revolver he had procured hours before the crime. There could be many reasons why the governor of Maharashtra pardoned Nanavati — that he was a well-connected, highly decorated officer; that he had acted in the heat of the moment; that he had committed a crime men could understand and women could forgive. There was no question that Nanavati broke the law, but an urban elite abetted by a compliant, scandal-hungry media insisted that he deserved mercy.

Unlike Nanavati, Sanjay Dutt, 53, is no upstanding naval officer. Nor can it be argued that his crime — the illegal possession of arms in a TADA-notified area — was provoked in one blind, hot moment of rage. But, like Nanavati, Sanjay Dutt seems a character out of Shakespeare or the Greek epics. He was born a blessed child, one to whom the gods had seemingly given everything. Tragic heroes though are afflicted by a fatal flaw, a faultline that brings an entire edifice down. In the end, it was himself that Sanjay Dutt could not escape.

Was this why the chairman of the Press Council, Retd Justice Markandey Katju, felt moved to invoke Nanavati as an argument for why Dutt should be pardoned? In a recent newspaper editorial, senior advocate Shanti Bhushan agreed that given the facts — that Dutt’s father was helping Muslims in a riot-affected area, that Dutt himself had received threatening phone calls — it was evident that there was “clear danger of a mob attack on Sanjay Dutt and his family”; and since “an attack by such a mob could not have been deterred except by the threat of an automatic weapon”, Dutt should be pardoned for procuring and keeping just such an automatic weapon, unlicensed or not, by his bed.

The crowd of supporters outside Sanjay Dutt’s residence at Pali Hill is growing. The A-listers hiding behind dark glasses, emerging from cars with tinted windows, agree with Katju. MPs Jaya Prada and Jaya Bachchan are calling for clemency. Mamata Banerjee believes that Dutt, who has already served 18 months of his five-year-sentence, has “suffered enough”. Somewhat inexplicably, Digvijaya Singh has described Dutt as “a great man”.

According to his apa Zaheeda, star of the ’70s, “Sanju is no Khalnayak, he is the kind-hearted, bumbling fool from Munna Bhai. He is innocent and has a heart of gold.” This is a familiar version of Dutt, the infantilised ‘Sanju baba’ forever evoking maternal responses from the women in his life. Even as one section of Bombay, still singed from the riots, sees no reason why Dutt’s fate should be any different from others convicted for their roles in the blasts, to another, he is a pitiable figure. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Dutt has lived life with his face turned towards the past. What we perceive to be a chain of events, he sees as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet”.

But there is no denying his agency in causing that catastrophe.

Dutt first met underworld don Dawood Ibrahim in 1991, when shooting for Yalgaar in Dubai. Anees Ibrahim, Dawood’s brother, a former ticket scalper, soon became a frequent visitor to Dutt’s sets. Dutt, then 31, was tall, lanky, droopy-eyed and fast turning into Bombay’s new golden boy. His debut film, Rocky, about a Rambo-like youth who sets about avenging his father’s death, had done particularly well. For Dawood, Dutt held more star appeal than his co-stars Feroze Khan and Kabir Bedi. At a time before Bollywood finance had been san itised by banks, before the government had decreed it an industry, the underworld was a source of ready capital for filmmakers. The dons, living in their gilded cages in Dubai and Malaysia, enjoyed fraternising with the stars, and flying them out for Bollywood roadshows. Most of all, they liked turning their own black money white.

On 16 January 1993, Ibrahim drove a car filled with explosives and assault rifles from Gujarat to Bombay. This car made its way to Dutt’s tin-roofed garage, where accompanied by Dutt’s friends Samir Hingora and Hanif Kandawala, a man named Abu Salem handed the actor three AK-56s, ammunition and 20 grenades, altering the trajectory of his life for ever.

This life, by the accounts of many of those closest to Dutt, was already a troubled one. His parents, actors of almost celestial fame, had met while shooting for the iconic Mother India. Nargis had fallen in love with Sunil when he rescued her from a fire that had broken out on set. In Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, a collection of letters exchanged between the two, accompanied by entries from Nargis’ diary, she confesses that her disappointing romance with Raj Kapoor had left her contemplating suicide until she met Sunil. Finally, she had found someone who made her “feel normal”. Nargis, famous for her ethereal beauty as much as her temper and razor-edged tongue, said she confessed everything about her past “shamelessly” to him because she was certain that he would never abandon her.

She was right — Sunil never abandoned her, even as she drew her last breath at the Sloan-Kettering Hospital’s cancer ward in New York several years later. He did, however, like Kapoor, demand that she not work with other male actors. If Nargis resented this, she buried those feelings once Sanjay, the eldest of their three children, was born, spending all her time pampering her son. Indeed, so much did Nargis spoil him that by the time he turned 10, Zaheeda, Nargis’ niece, says Sunil began to worry “that his son was turning into a sissy”. “We would see him in the garden, having placed Sanju on a tall branch, telling him to leap off it — ‘Mamu kya kar rahe ho? Bachcha gir jayega,’ we would scream to no avail.”

Meanwhile, Sanju baba, who had taken to smoking the ends of cigarettes his father’s friends threw around, had also begun to show signs of the generosity everyone attributes to him even now. Being driven past a group of poor boys, Dutt would start wailing, until the driver stopped and bought the boys the same beverage he was drinking. In an interview before his death, Sunil recalled how Sanjay once threw a tantrum at a wedding, insisting that his mother give away his jacket to a young beggar shivering outside the shamiana. Finally, the senior Dutt decided, as irate parents often do, that his soft-hearted son should be sent away to a boarding school where he could be toughened into a man.

One of the reasons his supporters cite while asking for pardon for Sanjay Dutt is that while the law should not privilege a celebrity, neither should it punish a person for being one. In April 1993, a report found that several MLAs and politicians were also guilty of possessing arms supplied by Dawood Ibrahim. One of these was the Shiv Sena MLA Madhukar Sarpotdar. Sharad Pawar, chief minister then as he is now, revealed that suspects interrogated for the Bombay blasts had coughed up several names but that “charges hadn’t been pressed against everyone involved”. 

The book When Bombay Burned reveals that two months before the blasts shook the city, as riots broke out in Nirmal Nagar on the night of 11 January, Sarpotdar was detained by the Army and found to have two revolvers and several other weapons in his car. Although Sarpotdar’s gun was licensed, his son’s was not; besides, they were both breaking the law by carrying weapons in a ‘notified area’ during a riot. A man named Anil Parab also accompanied Sarpotdar that night. Parab turned out to be Dawood’s main hitman. Yet, Sarpotdar, who had committed the same crime as Dutt, was never tried in a court of law.

In an email to this reporter, Suketu Mehta, the author of Maximum City and the last journalist to have written about Dutt’s childhood, excused himself from providing details about his interview with Dutt. Mehta, who currently resides in New York, suggested that a mutual friend had been angered by his depiction of Dutt in the book and it would be uncharitable to exacerbate the situation further, especially at a sensitive moment. This polite stonewalling echoes the reactions of Dutt’s immediate circle. Unsurprisingly, his sisters, his closest colleagues and friends have refused to speak to the press, some on the advice of Dutt’s lawyer Satish Manshinde, and others at their own discretion. An investigative report published in INN in March 2007 (How the Star Managed to Escape TADA), had captured Manshinde on a hidden camera, admitting that he didn’t “have an answer” should the Supreme Court ask him why his client did not deserve to be convicted under TADA.

Guarded conversations with Dutt’s dormitory mates and friends from Sanawar reveal that in boarding school at least his celebrity background was a liability. “It was like 10 of us would do something and he would be the one who got punished until he’d dislocated a shoulder,” a friend said on the condition of anonymity. “School teachers everywhere can be sadistic, but they really had it in for Sanju, as if they had to make a point of proving that they did not care who his parents were.” In Mehta’s book, a particularly grisly passage describes how Dutt was made to crawl up a gravel slope until his hands and knees bled. The next day, his bandages were torn off and he was made to repeat the exercise.

While Dutt is hardly unique in suffering corporal punishment, a form of torture school children across the country still undergo daily, one can imagine how far removed this world must have felt from the one inhabited by parents, cousins, aunts and helpers, in which he was universally adored and indulged. When he finished school, he described feeling a resentment he had not previously known. In 2007, speaking to family friend Simi Garewal on her talk show, he said, “When parents send a kid away to boarding school, he has to learn to be independent. When I came home to find that they wanted to tell me what to do, it irritated me.” Back at home; Dutt was soon hanging out with friends who took recreational drugs. What began as “a little bit of weed”, he told Mehta, turned into nine years of hell. Dutt tried “every drug in the book” but soon developed an addiction to cocaine and heroin.

Nargis chose Zaheeda — a natural confidante for Dutt because she was younger than his mother, but old enough to play a maternal role — to confront her son about his drug habit. He was still naïve enough to believe his family was unaware of his addiction because his parents had never seen drugs. But Nargis and Zaheeda had witnessed a distant uncle lose his son to addiction. “Apa would frequently say to our uncle,” Zaheeda says, “‘had this been my son, I’d have scratched his eyes out.’ When she started seeing the same signs in Sanju — he would sleep erratically, stay locked in his bathroom all the time — she felt as though she had failed.”

Zaheeda offered to take Sanjay for a drive and a treat. Sitting in an ice-cream parlour, she asked him if he was on drugs. Dutt denied it, but Zaheeda warned him, “Your mother knows. You think she cannot see it, but she knows what’s eating you up inside.” One day, Dutt woke up from a heroin binge and began looking for something to eat. Seeing him, a servant began to cry — “Baba, you have slept for two days straight. Everyone in the house has gone mad with worry.” Dutt took one look at his distorted face in the mirror and went into his father’s study. “Dad, I’m dying. You have to save me,” he said.

Sanjay was taken to Breach Candy Hospital’s detox centre in Mumbai and then sent to a rehabilitation centre in Texas. Not wishing to cheat the producers who had already invested money in his son’s debut, Sunil Dutt informed them that his son was an addict and that he would soon clean up his act to return to work. Once out of rehab, Dutt discovered that he didn’t want to return. He had struck a friendship with a cattle-rancher named Bill and invested in a longhorn cattle ranch of his own. Out in nature, living by himself, Dutt said he found a peace he had never known in Bombay. He began to construct a new life for himself: a down payment on a small flat in New York and a dream to run a steak house to rival the best in the city. Two months later, it was Sunil Dutt who went to his son with a plea.

“I didn’t want to return home, I didn’t want to do films,” Sanjay confided in an interview soon after his return, “but my father said, ‘Do it for me, do it for my name,’ and I couldn’t refuse. I promised myself I’d make some money and return to my dream.” Sanjay finished work on his debut film. Three days after Rocky was released to the world in 1981 and a new star was born, Nargis died of pancreatic cancer. In 1993, Dutt was 33. He was too old, too buffeted by grief and experience to still be called ‘baba’.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, followed by the riots of 1993 had forced India to confront the question of its religious identity once again, and in horrifyingly brutal fashion. Did being Hindu mean causing harm to Muslims? Or did it mean extending support to those who needed help? Dutt’s father, as popular a social worker and MP as he was an actor, had decided in favour of the latter. Hindu-Muslim marriages were not too unusual, particularly within the Hindi film industry. At the time of the riots, Sunil Dutt, by then a widower for a dozen years, could be found helping violence affected families in the Muslim neighbourhood of Behrampur. He had the constant support of his youngest daughter, Priya. All three children were aware that their father was growing older, frailer. Priya spent more and more time taking care of him while he took care of others.

It wasn’t just Sunil Dutt’s health that was waning. He seemed to have lost the respect of his fellow politicians. In a particularly humiliating instance, Sharad Pawar made Dutt wait for him in a lobby for over three hours. Thugs, displeased with his pro-Muslim work, had begun to threaten the Dutt family. Following an attack on his person that January, Sunil Dutt asked for extra security detail to be posted outside his house. But Sanjay thought his father might not be able to do enough to protect the family. Threatening phone calls had been made; his sisters, he was warned, were targets for kidnap and rape. It was enough to make him want to buy another gun — a fourth, unlicensed automatic weapon to add to his three licensed firearms — one that, as Shanti Bhushan believes, would be “better suited to dealing with a mob”.

Despite the immense difference in the magnitude of their crimes, an uncannily similar instinct had spurred the two men at either end of this supply chain of weapons into action. Dawood Ibrahim too was goaded by the ostensible desire to protect his sisters. Hussain Zaidi, the crime reporter and author of Black Friday, described a package Dawood had received full of red and green bangles. The tinkling glass came with a note —“jo bhai apne behno ki hifaazat na kar sake, use yeh tofha mubarak”.

On 16 January 1993, Hanif Kandawala and Sameer Hingora, proprietors of Magnum Video and Dutt’s friends, arrived at his house with a man named Abu Salem and told Dutt they would bring him new weapons. The next day, the three men returned with another companion. From their car, which they had parked in Dutt’s tin shed, they produced three AK-56 rifles, magazines and about 250 rounds, with some hand grenades. Accounts of this meeting differ among the men who were present. Hingora alleges that when they reached Dutt’s house, the actor was on the phone with Dawood’s brother, Anees. He further claims that Dutt enquired about the arms concealed in the car, showing knowledge of the plot to smuggle weapons into Bombay. Dutt’s lawyers have denied both these counts. However, INN earlier investigation unearthed that Dutt had in fact admitted to calling Anees, a confession that the CBI inexplicably decreed irrelevant, erasing the MTNL call records from Dutt’s landline to a number in Dubai.

From the safe harbour of the present, however, it’s easy to forget just how plagued Bombay was in the 1990s by gang violence, kidnapping and extortion. Film journalist Rauf Ahmed describes the atmosphere that had gripped the city as a “fear psychosis”. “You’d wake up and hear that Gulshan Kumar, whom one met at all the parties, had suddenly been shot dead outside his office. Manisha Koirala’s brother was killed. Hrithik Roshan’s father was shot at. It was all to show the royalty of Bombay who really was the boss.” That said, it couldn’t be denied that the film industry and the underworld were dancing a particularly intricate pas de deux.

Film makers mined the lives of gangsters for material. For them, Sanjay’s stories from jail — he served 18 months — of how the underworld recruits shooters from the children’s barracks were gold. As late as 2000, seven years after Dutt had first been implicated in the Mumbai bombings, shortly after he had served time and had been let out on bail, he was back in touch with gangsters. The transcripts for a drunken exchange involving, among others, Dutt, Mahesh Manjrekar and Chhota Shakeel are available online. Dutt has little to say to the gangster beyond such banalities as Govinda being a “chutiya”. Shakeel probes listlessly, “Aur kya chal raha hai?” Sanjay responds, “Bas chal raha hai bhai.” Neither wants to hang up, both star struck in their own ways.

In a section in Maximum City, Mehta describes how Sanjay, close to Abu Salem, had managed to get a friend, director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, off the extortion hook with a single phone call. In his call to Salem, Dutt had allegedly said of Chopra, “This is the one man who stood by me when I was in jail. You can’t touch him.” In a text message to INN, Chopra, who is currently in London, said he was “not qualified” to comment on the man who saved him from Abu Salem. Mehta’s description of Dutt as “brontosaurus-sized” and overly fond of “guns and muscles” and the masculine image of the Marlboro Man appears to fit in snugly with the impression from that drunken phone call: of a troubled, immature movie star playing with dangerous toys for kicks.

Amateur psychoanalysts would keep turning to Nargis’ death, in the days after what should’ve been the high point of her son’s triumphant return home, drug-free and on the verge of bona fide movie stardom. When Dutt has been down, life has rarely refrained from kicking. In 1987, nearly six years after his mother’s death, he married Richa Sharma. “It was nice to come home to someone,” he told Garewal. Two months after the birth of their daughter Trishala, Sharma was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She died in 1996 and their daughter moved to the US to live with her grandparents. Dutt had already been found guilty by then of illegal possession of arms.

Three years previously, he had been shooting in Mauritius when he heard he was going to be indicted under TADA and the Arms Act. He had asked a friend, Yusuf Nulwalla, to remove his AK-56 from his house, and Yusuf together with another friend, the steel manufacturer Kersi Adajania, saw to it that the gun was melted and thrown into the sea at Nariman Point. The police recovered the spring and some cartridges from the rocks. In the end, it was Sunil Dutt who had the moral courage to turn his son over to the police. He tipped them off about Dutt’s return from Mauritius and on 19 April, he was met at the airport by 200 commandoes.

When he saw his father again, Sanjay was in police custody. Sunil Dutt must have felt his back pressed to a wall when he gave Sanjay up to the police, but he still hoped his son was innocent. Had he done what the police accused him of, he asked. His son’s answer must have bewildered his already aching heart. “I have Muslim blood in my veins,” Sanjay said, “I couldn’t bear what was happening in the city.” It was a dramatic and, frankly, strange declaration. Dutt belonged to a thoroughly mixed family and his religious identity was equally mixed.

After his conviction, he was seen with his forehead daubed with a giant red tilak, his Muslim identity now in abatement. Was this tactical, an attempt to distance him self in the public eye from a dark event? Or was it a tribute to the support of the Thackerays and the Shiv Sena? (Support that has now been reversed.) It might just have been neither. Having grown up around Zaheeda’s love for Sai Baba, Dutt spent four hours each day of the 18 months he spent in jail praying to God. Which god he prayed to and what kind of deliverance he asked for is unclear. Later, he spoke of time spent befriending the sparrows, ants and rats that would appear in his 8×8 cell. He was also angry, self-recriminating. In a fit of rage, he banged his head against the bars of his cell until he had to be removed from solitary confinement for fear that he would kill himself. He could not have slept easy knowing the fates of the other accused — Zaibunissa, Manzoor, Yusuf — all tried under TADA, unlike Dutt.

Dutt has described his lowest moment as the day he was in jail and his father informed him that there was nothing more he could do to help him. Unknown to Sanjay, Sunil had prostrated himself before Balasaheb Thackeray, a man whose divisive politics he had always despised, to ask for his help in getting Sanjay out of prison. Each time Sanjay has crawled out of a hell of his own making — drugs, or prison; he has worked harder than before as if to prove each time to his father that he could take pride in his son. 

“He came back from his junkie phase with Saajan and Sadak,” says Rauf Ahmed, “he came back after the initial trial with Khalnayak, then there was Daud, Dushman, Mission Kashmir. Except for Sanju, only Amitabh Bachchan has faded so far from the limelight and been able to come back with a bang again and again.” After Mission Kashmir was screened at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mehta quoted Dutt, shortly after the President shook his hand. “I will sleep tonight like I have never slept before, India loves me,” he had nearly wept.

In the 20 years since Dutt first left prison on bail till today when he is about to return, he has been to jail thrice, been married twice, had two children, shown up for innumerable court proceedings and lost his father. In 2008, he married his present wife Manyata Dutt (then, Dilnawaz Sheikh) at a private ceremony in Goa. So private that he failed to inform his sisters that he was getting married. Rauf Ahmed, who was working on Dutt’s biography with Random House, a highly sought-after project, gave up on the book when Dutt informed him that Manyata would now be handling all his creative dealings. 

Off the record, his friends speculate about her chequered past, gossip about her political ambitions, how she convinced him to join the Samajwadi Party instead of the Congress, how she was allegedly a bar dancer. Perhaps, as Nargis felt with Sunil Dutt, Manyata feels she too has found the man who makes her feel normal, to whom she can speak “shamelessly” about her past. Dutt appeared to have found a new lease on life. He was once again a box office success and happy to let his new wife control the finances as the CEO of Sanjay Dutt Productions. At 50, he became a father again, of twins.

Now Dutt stays up nights to complete unfinished projects before he goes to prison. Trade estimates say he has about Rs 250 crore worth of projects riding on his shoulders. He is driven by the thought of a lasting legacy, a film he will be remembered for, one that might dwarf his enormous mistake. His most spectacular success, earned in recent years, came with the Munna Bhai films. In Hirani’s candy-glazed world, Dutt was Munna, the lovable ‘bhai’, unacquainted with the cruel ways of the world, solving problems with a generous dose of love, laughter and jhappis. The irony is incandescent.

Amid the emotional clamour for Dutt (or is it Munna?) to be pardoned, his old friends, the Bhatts, stay loyal but also clear-eyed. Pooja, who acted opposite Dutt and whose brother found himself bizarrely linked to David Headley, is phlegmatic. “We were shooting for Tadipaar in Mysore one day when dad came up to us and said, ‘Baby, Sanju is in big trouble.’ We laughed. It was funny because Sanju had always looked out for me and the idea of him being in ‘big trouble’ was ridiculous. But it’s been 20 years, and we’re still talking about his troubles.” Mahesh, who is inordinately fond of Dutt, has struggled to find ways to help his friend cushion the blow of the Supreme Court’s verdict. Should I fuel him with hope of pardons, he wondered, or should I help him reach deep into himself with great calm and seek atonement. Face the flaw and redeem the man. See this as time to recover his best self.

Maybe Dutt can be sustained by that knowledge too, the understanding that if this time he does not chase the easy road —the urgent interventions; the uneasy pacts — at the end of these three years he will, for the first time in a very long time, enjoy an uninterrupted view of his future.

Editorial : The Seeds Of Wrath

By NEWSCOP

Our hysteria for ready answers has become a dangerous trap. A bomb blast conspirator's explosive confession poses a challenge to us all.

In the clever calculations men make about security and State, they underestimate the power of human despair. But despair can be a deadly weapon. When you lose faith that a system will protect and play fair by you, it breeds fatal recklessness. It makes you abdicate from the rules that cement human relations. Despair can turn you from citizen to perpetrator. From the hunted to the hunter.

From 2006 to 2008, there was an escalating climate of terror in the country. With terrifying regularity, bomb blasts went off in Hyderabad, Delhi, Jaipur, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad. And finally, most brazenly, in Mumbai. But Mumbai 26/11 was different: here the killers outed themselves: like a giant game show gone horribly wrong, groups of young men in clear view of millions went about with impunity shooting people down. The enemy was visible. Tangible. They could be dealt with. With the other blasts, there was no one to pin the crime on. And as bombs kept exploding and people kept dying, fuelled by a media hungry for immediate answers and genuine citizens’ distress, a paranoia gripped the country.

Hundreds of young Muslims were arrested. And within a few days — often within a few hours — police and agencies, who had had insufficient knowledge to preempt the blasts, began to hold press conferences on how they had cracked the case. A triumphant line of deadly “masterminds” were trotted out: Safdar Nagori, Maulana Haleem, Mufti Abu Bashar, Atif Ameen. Under pressure to perform, the police hid behind short attention spans and a confusing cocktail of Islamic proper nouns. They knew that neither the media (rushing off to its latest story) nor ordinary citizens were interested in the details. No one wanted veracity. Everyone only wanted the illusion of security and ‘action taken’. The few human rights groups and media outfits who raised flags about false arrests and gaps in police logic were scorned as ‘anti-national’. Or doctrinaire liberals.

The larger point was missed. It is no one’s case that those who plant bombs should go unpunished. Those of us raising flags had only two simple arguments to make. One, take the long route, catch the genuine culprits, remain constitutional: that is the only way to be really secure. Two: do not make false arrests and breed fresh despair, triggering new cycles of hate and revenge. If you corrupt a system entirely, people will abdicate from it. And black despair can be a deadly weapon.

This week, HNN cover story braids all these themes together and teases out their giant implications. The story is about a young man, Muslim, no more than 22, caught in a terrible dilemma. He is a star witness in the Gujarat police’s case. Based on his statement, dozens of men are locked in jail. Except, this young man’s statement is a lie. He was coerced by the police into becoming their witness in exchange for his own freedom. He has remained silent for a year, sick with himself, but free. Tracked to his house by HNN's Editor in Chief M H Ahssan, he breaks down. Ahssan is accompanied by a young woman. The woman’s husband — an innocent man — is in jail because of this witness. Confronted by her and the child, rocked by remorse and a sudden desire for atonement — in an almost cinematic moment — the man tells his real story.

One could dismiss his account as another false turnaround, except in telling the story — like some protagonist in a classic Greek play — the young man implicates himself. He is no ordinary witness. He is self-confessedly a member of the July 2008 bomb blast conspiracy. Conscience-struck, he stopped short of planting the bombs when he realized the targets would not be Hindu zealots like the RSS and VHP but ordinary bystanders. But he knows and names who his real co-conspirators were. To free the innocent men in jail, he must now bear the cross himself. It is not enough that he shrank back from the abyss and backed out of the conspiracy. As he says to Rana, by speaking out, he is consciously setting himself up for reprisal from the police.

So how is the police and State going to react to this man’s confession?

At a specific level, his story blows big holes in the police’s case in Gujarat, exposing a damning lie and injustice. At a profounder level, it is a parable for what is happening beneath the skin of our democracy in countless other places. It raises questions about media, prejudice, policing and the due process of law. Most of all, it raises the question: in a just democracy, how should we deal with those who assault us?

Of the many strands in this story, there is first the one about nailing true culpability. It is obvious from this witness’ account that all the wrong men are in jail and the police know it. Take Abu Bashar, for example. The media and police jointly touted him as one of their deadly ‘masterminds’. But the witness says he is far from that. The Abu Bashar he paints is a gentle and religious man, so opposed to violence, the mentors of the conspiracy specifically advised the witness and his friends to keep him in the dark. The police know this, yet Bashar continues to languish in jail.

There are other troubling details. The witness speaks of torture and the police’s double-crossing tactics to extract false statements. Set aside polite questions about human rights. What about the holy grail: national security? According to the witness, the real conspirators — Subhan Qureishi, Alamzeb and Qayamuddin — are still on the run. What is one to make of this willful official charade? Lock innocent men in jail, let the guilty roam free. What is this society we are creating, where we are in such a hurry to get answers to difficult questions, we’d rather get false answers than none, even if it means innocent men must pay?

Another profound issue this story raises is one of causality. The witness cites all the big faultlines — Gujarat 2002, false arrests, tortures — as reasons why he and his friends were drawn into the conspiracy. And, indeed, it would be myopic to treat these bitter young men as merely hard criminals. Yet, the argument of causality is a tricky rope. Gujarat 2002 cannot justify bomb blasts of 2006 – 2008. By that logic, extremist Hindus would also be right in marshalling their own epic justifications: Hindu pilgrims burnt alive in a train, Kashmiri Pandits chased out of a valley, organised Christian conversions, a Hindu swami murdered in his ashram. Be they real or imagined wounds, causality can never be a justification for violence. But in a society overtaken by greater and greater hysteria, all causalities must be recognised and addressed. No military might can break the lethal chain of action and reaction. Redressal for grievances stands a better chance.

Finally, this is an intimation of our easy and extreme prejudices. Until a few months ago, whipped on by an unthinking media, India was being lured into demonising 250 million of its citizens. For many years, SIMI — a politically strident Islamic student organization — was a convenient scapegoat for the police. By a sleight of hand, the bad aura around SIMI was projected onto Indian Muslims at large. Last year, HNN published an exhaustive investigative story that proved many SIMI members or ex-members jailed by the police were actually innocent men, wielding nothing more dangerous than strong political views. At no point did HNN vouch for SIMI as an organisation, but by flagging individual miscarriages of justice it broke the easy consensus on SIMI. But by then, another pet poltergeist had been conjured by the police and media: the Indian Mujahideen. (At a press conference in Gujarat, with almost laughable cynicism, DG Police, PC Pande told waiting media, “If you remove S and I from SIMI, you have IM: Indian Mujahideen.” For him, that clinched the truth.)

Now, in an eerie corroboration of HNN earlier story, the witness strongly asserts that no SIMI members were involved in the conspiracy. In fact, their mentors – “outsiders” he calls them, “shadowy men, clean shaven who spoke English and smoked a lot” told him and his mates to stay away from SIMI members because they would scuttle the plan to plant the bombs. Who were these “outsiders” — calm, anonymous, out of frame — and why is the police not working overtime to track them down? How many veils of prejudice and illusion do we as Indians voluntarily live behind?

This man’s story is a challenge to us all. How is he to be dealt with? One route — the familiar one — would be for the police to kill him extra-judicially because he has exposed them. But here is a man, bewildered, wounded, tempted into violence. He was brought to the brink but had the courage to pull back. Now, he has the courage to undo another wrong and expose mighty forces at grave danger to himself. Clearly, like hundreds of others, he has both wronged and been wronged. How should a mature society react to such a conundrum?

'Andhra Pradesh Assembly On The Horns Of A Dilemma!'

By M H Ahssan | INN Live

EDITORIAL If any more evidence is needed to prove that the regional divide in Andhra Pradesh is complete and irreversible, it is the latest episode which forced the Congress legislators from Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema to propose the names of rebel candidates in the biennial elections to the Rajya Sabha. The Bill which is responsible for the ruckus in legislatures is only a formality. 

The bifurcation would be formalising the emotional division that has taken place over a period of time.  What we have been witnessing in the Assembly and the Council throughout February was the manifestation of a prolonged disconnect and disharmony that had set in the lives of Telugu-speaking people. The root cause for the malady is mutual distrust and lack of the spirit of accommodation.

Editorial: No work and no play ...

By M H Ahssan

All work and no play has made Indians among the dullest people on Earth with whom to have a conversation, while no work and all play has pushed Americans to the most terrifying economic crisis of our time. What then do we do about countries that neither work nor play, as Pakistan seems in the danger of becoming, if one were to go by the most recent terrorist outrage?

Granted that both parts of the first statement are more than a trifle exaggerated, it is likely that readers will sympathize with the view on a broader scale. Any conversation with an Indian inevitably leads to politics, religion - or worse, Bollywood. If Indians manage at all to make any observations about sports, expect to talk about cricket, that ancient English game invented for people to play on lazy summer afternoons after a large beer-laden lunch. Generally one dreads these conversations if one has nothing to say about the most recent Intel chip, and especially if you have not a clue what a quad-core chip is.

Having conversations with Americans is generally a pleasure if for nothing else because serious topics such as religion and geopolitics are almost never broached; but most folks from Asia are usually left wondering how Americans manage to follow such a dizzying array of sports. Usually the next observation is along the lines of why do people with such strong sporting passions fail so miserably in their jobs?

All these though pale in comparison to the dangers of the third bunch of people who are progressively denied, as a religious tool, access to entertainment, eventually culminating in stunted social development that creates its own cycle of poverty. Afghanistan is the foremost example of this in the Islamic world.

After the Taliban takeover of the country in the early 1990s, sporting activities were progressively banned (perhaps that should be "regressively") or else merged with the ruling party's socio-economic ethic, which led to the chilling images filmed secretly by a British television channel that showed a veiled woman being stoned to death in the middle of a football pitch watched by some 30,000 spectators.

Americans have half-time entertainment too during their football games, although it takes more than a simple leap of imagination from having a couple of nubile, half-naked singers performing the latest pop hits to a crowd stoning a woman to death. To ensure full attention, the Taliban also suspended the actual football games on the pitch; perhaps they were worried about safety of players encountering difficulties playing football on a pitch littered with stones and pools of blood.

Given that the perpetrators of the most recent outrage in Pakistan this week involving the attacks on a visiting Sri Lankan cricket team had similar motivations, the question does arise if the first shots have been fired in the ultimate Talibanization of the country; a scenario that I have explained more than once on these pages.

Sporting prestige
Harking back to George Clemenceau's quote that war is too important to be left to generals, sport has become a new focus in a world where full-scale bilateral conflicts have been replaced with guerrilla warfare and random attacks on civilians.

Beginning in 776 BC, the Greeks certainly knew the importance of sports as the various city-states vied for honors in the Olympic games. The reputation of many a nation was forged not so much in the theatres of war as the sandpits of Olympia. The Roman emperor Nero took the games seriously enough to bribe officials for the express purpose of disqualifying all other competitors in his category.

The echoes of Nero were to ring 2,000 years later, when Hitler staged Aryan superiority Olympics in Berlin, only to be upstaged by the black American athlete Jesse Owens' triumphs on the field, as his pet-architect Albert Speer was to recall: "Each of the German victories, and there were a surprising number of these, made him happy, but he was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games. Hitler was also jolted by the jubilation of the Berliners when the French team filed solemnly into the Olympic Stadium ... If I am correctly interpreting Hitler's expression at the time, he was more disturbed than pleased by the Berliners' cheers."
Following from Adolf Hitler, various communist countries quickly adopted sports as a matter of national prestige starting with the Soviet Union [5], a focus not lost on its acolytes in the rest of the Warsaw Pact as well as others including China and Cuba.

All this while other countries, including the United States and those in Western Europe, broadened the commercial appeal of sports; the 1951 live telecast of a college football game in the US opened the doors for sportsmen to become idolized and increasingly successful in the financial sense. In turn, this attracted more participants to sports; a self-feeding frenzy that soon produced better sports as events became much more competitive.

Between communist pride and Western commercial interests, the frenzy in sports also led sportsmen to cheat, resorting to steroids and banned drugs with a view to performance enhancement. In communist countries, the penalty for getting caught was nothing more than a slap on the wrist, the ongoing damage to bodies was another matter altogether being the subject of basic denial. Meanwhile in the West, commercially induced cheating produced a mini-boom in demand for chemistry graduates albeit in areas far removed from their usual spots in foul-smelling school labs.

The reason any of this became relevant in the rest of the world is of course the effect that cheating had on the aspirations of the young as well as the social commentary that inevitably followed. Sportsmen who cheated lost their fan following (at least in the past they did) but also elicited broader comparisons going back to their social or ethnic groups; in some cases it became the subject of national scandals.

Virtuous non-participation
With all this cheating going on, many countries and societies have fallen by the wayside of modern sports. I wrote in the previously cited article [5] about the poor record of Indian sportsmen, concluding that the lack of economic incentives explained their lack of participation not to mention excellence. About the only sport that Indians seem to be any good in is cricket, and herein lies the rub for the most recent terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Indian cricketers are paid substantially more than those in any other nation playing the sport; more importantly they are also reportedly in the top echelons of the country's own population when it comes to oversized pay. This puts them in the same category as American baseball and football stars, not to mention the ubiquitous basketball legends of the Michael Jordan variety.

All that wealth in an Asian sport clearly attracts attention, of the type that Islamic terrorists revel in. Far from an ideological conflict involving sports per se (although enough Wahhabi scholarship holds that sports activities are frowned upon) the issue is more subtle, involving the attention span of a people used to diversions.

In any poor country, the general time allocated to sports, leisure or entertainment activities is relatively small, which means that avid spectators are unlikely to also care about more serious topics such as religion and politics. That fear of marginalization, more than any specific political agenda, justifies the attention of Islamic terrorists who would like nothing more than keeping their support pipelines thick and strong with embedded national outrage.

In contrast, a people inured to the ups and downs of sports are unlikely to support extremism in its many forms. Good sportspeople respect their competitors, as do good spectators however fervent their support for the home team may be. People without much interest in sports - playing or watching - are more likely to indulge in violence: although ironically that observation reverses when we discuss peoples rather than the propensity of specific individuals to violence [6].

This then is the actual battleground. As Pakistanis suffer further damage on their economy due to the economic crisis, their sporting aspirations are also being dented, in turn pushing more young people into the path of the fundamentalists to recruit, train and utilize as cannon fodder.

Insight: Are Hindutva Hawks Giving Hinduism A Bad Name?

By Prakriti Shah / Delhi

Of the several identifiers Indians fall back upon to define themselves  language, caste and religion are the foremost. While  these aspects of the Indian social identity have had some association with political wrestling matches and consequent violence, religion holds the distinction of riling the most number of people in most number of ways in our country.

Religion today is a sharp knife that slices through the country’s educated classes dividing them into to either pro-Hindu or anti-Hindu. The social media version of the debate is often abrasive, offensive, ill-informed or just a bitter verbal boxing match with the parties zealously trying to be the most vengeful, mistaking that to be a moral triumph. Within this context, the concept of secularism has been reduced to Congress’ vote bank politics in India.

Editorial: What 2013 Results Mean For Poll 2014 Scenario?

By M H Ahssan | INN Live

The results of the 2013 assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are out but those looking for clear pointers towards how the next general election will play out are likely to be left scratching their heads.

The Bharatiya Janata Party turned in a spectacular performance in Rajasthan and wrested the state from the Congress. It has retained Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, the latter with a significant increase in its seat share. But in Delhi, the BJP failed to properly ride the wave of anti-Congress sentiment, yielding crucial political space to the Aam Aadmi Party and falling short of a clear-cut majority.

EDITORIAL: Trouble On The LoC

The need of the hour is a multilevel engagement between India and Pakistan

The gravity of the two incidents that took place along the Line of Control earlier this week must neither be seen as a localised affair of trivial significance nor blown out of proportion as a prelude to a major escalation of tensions between the two countries. True to form, both sides have given contradictory versions of what happened on January 6 – when a Pakistani soldier was killed during an alleged Indian raid on a Pakistani army post in the Uri sector – and on January 8 – when two Indian soldiers were killed and two others injured as Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged fire at an Indian army post located near Mendhar on the Indian side of the LoC. Such incidents do occur every now and then but both sides take care not to allow matters to spin out of control. 
    
That would have been the case this time too except that the incident at Mendhar had a macabre twist to it: the body of one of the Indian soldiers killed had been decapitated. The Pakistanis have of course promptly denied that this was their handiwork. But their troops and the terrorists some elements of the Pakistani establishment support have committed similar gruesome acts in the past. Provocations of this nature naturally inflame Indian public opinion. The defence ministry has, quite appropriately, condemned the latest violation of the ceasefire line. But the need of the hour is clearly to go beyond the blame game to explore ways and means to avoid such incidents in the future. 
    
In this regard, it is imperative for both to engage with one another at various levels: political and diplomatic, military and intelligence. At present, a hotline exists between the DGMOs of the two countries. But that is clearly not enough. A wider dialogue can, at the very least, check avoidable misunderstandings. It could of course achieve much more. New Delhi would surely want to know, for example, if the much-advertised shift in the Pakistani army’s strategic thinking – one that focusses on internal threats to that country’s security and not on India – is for real. A litmus test would be the swift conviction of alleged plotters of the terror attacks in Mumbai. 
    
Meanwhile, exchange visits by scholars and artistes, businessmen and pilgrims can help create, as the Aman Ki Asha experience attests, an atmosphere that is conducive to the resolution of some of the less intractable issues bedevilling India-Pakistan ties and, in the bargain, expand the peace constituency in both countries.

Defiant Bharti On AAP: First Sign Of Political Suicide?

By Newscop | INN Live

Somnath Bharti has every reason to be a worried man. His midnight shenanigans in Khirki extension, when he led a mob into the home of four Ugandan women, accusing them of being part of a 'drugs and sex' racket and then barging into a police station demanding their arrest without a warrant, have caused outrage across the spectrum, uniting disparate elements who usually agree to disagree on everything. 

Is Regulating Social Media Campaigns Overreach To ECI?

By Saurav Datta (Guest Writer)

Robust scepticism, that indispensable tool for informed, intelligent navigation through a world increasingly embracing polarisation, remains conspicuous by its absence in the current political discourse in India. The tidal wave of unstinted, blind support is emblematic of not only political parties and their ideologies, but also characterises the polity’s susceptibility to fads. This susceptibility gets manifested into gigantic follies when policy prescriptions and elaborate political strategies are drawn up on the basis of supposed trends which are mostly nothing but hot air.

Congress Will Stand Exposed If Withdraws Support To AAP

By Kajol Singh | INN Live

As the Aam Aadmi Party was preparing to from the government, the Congress has dropped a bomb, with sources saying that the party may withdraw support to the AAP. Congress leader Janardan Dwivedi said there were differences of opinion within the Congress about supporting AAP, and the party was seriously considering withdrawing support.

While the AAP had never wanted support from the party, it decided to take support after Congress said the support was 'unconditional'. However, the Congress had later denied offering unconditional support. So, will it work against the grand old party's interest if it withdraws support? 

NaMo, A Model Of Ruthlessly Ambitious 'King Aurangzeb'

By Zamir Kamil | Delhi

Who could imagine that Aurangzeb and Narendra Modi would have some things in common? But life surprises. To begin with, both are Gujaratis at least by birth. Aurangzeb was born in the town of Dahod, 200 km from Ahmedabad. Modi's birthplace is Vadnagar, 100-odd km away. Aurangzeb loved the town of his birth and three years before his death, instructed his son, the governor of Gujarat, to take special care of it.

Editorial: Will it be different this time?

By M H Ahssan

Should we believe the promises politicians make to us this time around? Whatever it is you want the government to do about terrorism, begin by asking who will do it, and how.

The terrorist attacks on Mumbai, resulting in tragic loss of lives among innocents and bravehearts, have thrown up some very predictable emotions. There is an outpouring of determination among some sections of the public that terrorism shall be defeated at all costs. There is despair at continuing government indifference. There is opportunism among opposition parties to point fingers at an evidently failing government. There is worry that our security agencies are just not up to the job of defending this country pre-emptively. There are also 'solutions' being proposed by analytical Indians outside the government -- from common citizens to corporates to retired officials and more. And, there is also rising anger at Muslims.

If India remains true to its model so far, a few days from now these emotions will be diluted, and on the way to being forgotten along with many others. But, we hear, there is some reason to think that this time, 'things will be different'.

The argument goes thus: Too many people got to witness this terrorism live, in ways that were simply not possible in earlier attacks. They were, in some sense, witness to the heroism and martyrdom of those who served, and equally to the absenteeism and opportunism of those who hid. This high 'involvement' (if one can use such a word to describe bystanders, that too on television, computer and mobile screens) is what makes 26/11 different, say some of our opinion-makers. For the first time, India had a chance to look deep inside itself, and really see how unprepared we are to face down such challenges. And therefore we will react.

Perhaps. But that's easier said than done.

Intelligence without systems
Our systems of governance, especially the way we find, staff and train positions within government are so broken that it would be wishful to believe that we can construct a rapid and robust response to terror in the way that some Western countries have done during the last decade.

Without systematic response mechanisms, intelligence can only be of limited value. Indeed, in the current case itself, 24 hours after the seige ended, the clearest evidence emerged that the Mumbai attacks could have been foiled by Indian security forces. ATS chief Hemant Karkare, who was killed in the seige had reportedly already warned city hotels that an attack was likely - in part because intelligence reports had recorded a reconnaissance operation of the hotels to be targeted. Even though some security arrangements at the Oberoi and Taj had been tightened recently, one report in The Hindu revealed security was lifted on complaints of 'inconveniences'. Mumbai Police have also been quoted as saying they were already stretched and did not have the specialised man-power to provide the security needed to hotels to defend against an attack.

Here's worse. RAW had reportedly intercepted a satellite phone call on 18 November indicating that planned movement along the sea route from Karachi to Mumbai. RAW had alerted the Indian Coast Guard and the Navy. And even as they mounted a search in the seas between Karachi and Mumbai, the terrorists, apparently noticing this, had hijacked an Indian fishing vessel, dumping their own boat. It isn't clear why the failure to find the vessel did not result in Indian authorities assuming that terrorists could still have landed in on the coast.

All of this indicates one thing. This siege and it's protracted 60-hour battle was not the result of a substantial failure of intelligence itself. It is the failure of governmental-response to knowledge of threats and continuing evidence of a casual attitude within state-governments in the handling of threats. One law enforcement official has been quoted in the DNA, without being named, that there are no methods to grade and prioritise action on threat advisories received from intelligence agencies. And since local officials receive such advisories regularly, they do not have a way to determine which ones to act on.

In India, most public systems tend to break down at the local level, even if 'national' systems are relatively well-run by otherwise competent officials. The first line of counter-attack against a terror strike, as we saw in Mumbai in first few hours of 26 November, was a weak, stretched, and unprepared local police force. By the time the NSG landed, 10 hours of precious time had be lost. Central governments have not bothered to work with state governments to setup elite tactical squads that can be rapidly mounted and deployed to prevent attacks, especially with evidence of something imminent.

In intelligence itself, there is more work to do. By the government's own account, we need to improve our intelligence gathering and this is not one of those things that can be done in weeks. We need to develop technological sophistication to gather, understand, grade and manage mountains of data - an exercise that has barely begun in most state governments. Don't forget that state governments, not the Centre, must carry much of the load for whatever is promised now.

Election promises won't work too
Another answer to the question 'why will it be different this time?' has been making the rounds: any government that does not act even in the face of such grave provocation and danger to its citizens will surely lose votes.

This 'votes will be lost' theory is a cruel joke constructed by our chattering class, mostly upon itself. It is the promised vengeance of a lot of people who don't themselves vote, but claim to understand the motivations and biases that bring others to the voting booth every few years. Pause for a minute and think through all the things that need to be done now, and imagine the various points along the way where governments could falter or - as is more likely - lose interest.

Even without the much-needed comprehensive reform to the police force, here's a small sample of the things needed - pass tougher laws, post elite forces such as the NSG in major cities, locate state government decision-making in acting on terror warnings in a single office that is held accountable and has to explain each warning that is ignored, bring in skilled persons at market pay into the departments, remove cronyism in career management within government, and assess progress using independent bodies.

The actual development of pre-emption and response strategies, and the ability to train and deploy forces repeatedly and reliably is the real work. Much of that is yet to be done, despite the continuing terror strikes of the past few years. As we write this, analyses and comparisons are already emerging about how the J&K police had to create a counter-force to pushback on Fidayeen attacks, with some success. Still, anyone who has seen the inside of our state governments -- both people and processes -- would know the huge gulf we have to cross to thwart - not just put down once the firing has begun - acts of terrorism.

Still, let us say on some of these matters, politicians, sensing the mood in the country, make promises. You tell me - how much of this change will happen merely because the UPA-Congress government today promises to do something, or the BJP promises something different?

Momentary seriousness or real change?
Fighting terrorism with a strong hand has become a necessary response to the reality of our lives. But actually doing so will take time, and great diligence.

Secure cities are not merely about keeping terrorists down, although that is hard enough. They're also about keep citizens moving up - socially, economically, culturally. Socio-economic divides and tensions in India are such that pools of exploitable minds are everywhere, with the evidence of their disenfranchisement all around them. It will require building bridges across communities, strengthening roles within government, and most importantly, subjecting public promises to real accountability.

However, the political system we have neither promotes nor rewards such work. Ask yourself this? When was the last time in any public meeting government officials (bureaucrats and politicians alike) were made to admit to failures that were avoidable, to explain why they failed and were not allowed to get away with a 'Chaltha hai?' or a 'We are looking into it' or a 'We have appointed an inquiry committee'?

Given that, what should we reasonably believe? That we are about to show the gravitas to invest in this? That the public will reward statesmanly promises with the coming months with faithfulness at the voting booth? No. Neither the current spurts of seriousness amidst citizens nor statesmanship amongst politicians will do.

Patriotism, nationalism and determination -- which are now at a visible high in the country after 26/11, and rightfully so -- will only take us so far. If you're looking for signs of real change in government, keep an eye on processes, not events and pronouncements. Look for accountability on responding to terror vested in one office or even one person, as opposed to being fragmented. Whatever it is you want the government to do to the terrorists, begin by asking who will do it, and how. And keep telling yourself that we can never have great success in isolated areas.

Srinivasan To Dalmiya: BCCI Done Nothing To 'Fix The Rot'

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

At Sunday’s meeting of the BCCI in Chennai, when it seemed that N Srinivasan would have to bow to the inevitable and resign as board president, he pulled out the oldest trick in the book: a pose of injured innocence. “I have been under terrible pressure,” Srinivasan evidently told the meeting, which had been convened in the context of allegations that his son-in-law and Chennai Super Kings principal Gurunath Meiyappan had been involved in the betting and spot-fixing scandal that has enveloped the IPL.

Makeover Experts 'Mirrors Salons', In A Class Of Its Own!

From 3Marks PR Services, Hyderabad

Celeb stylist Vipul Chudasama and Dr.Vijayalakshmi Goodapati, Owner of Mirrors Salons and Academy are coming together to give Hyderabad a glam and glitz makeover. 

According to a press statement, Vipul Chudasama will be available at Mirrors from today onwards. This is a remarkable opportunity for the style-conscious Hyderabadis who travel all the way to Mumbai, London Paris or New York for that perfect haircut-they just have to walk into 'Mirrors Salons' at Jubilee Hills and Madhapur in Hyderabad and get a makeover befitting a Hollywood star. Get ready to become the cynosure of all eyes!