Rajmata's rulebook
"You can fool all of the people some of the time," Abraham Lincoln mused, "and you can fool some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Sonia Gandhi should be content if she succeeds in fooling all of India in the run-up to the general election, the cynical calculation being that it doesn't matter if voters wake up later.
NGOs can do without politics
Medha Patkar of Narmada fame has been arguing that the NGOs must contest the elections. Other NGOs have also made some experiments in this direction with, at best, lukewarm results. Now eminent jurist Rajindar Sachar has added his voice to the demand for selfless, idealist and people-rooted NGOs to come into politics and save the country from "scoundrels" that infest the political parties.
Give me a war, please
The United States has quite a few missiles to spare. Iraq has millions of people, though Saddam Hussein or other worthies of the Revolutionary Command Council will not be among them. The US has a mission in Iraq: disarm the dictator. The dictator too has a mission: invite another imperial aggression.
Crime and punishment
The death penalty for 26 people found guilty in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case was bound to provoke mixed reactions among jurists and human rights activists. An informed debate will be all to the good and the wider it ranges over the issue of capital punishment and the law which provides for it, the better.
The media and the mayhem
While covering the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991, I travelled to the border between Iraq and Jordan to a checkpost called Al-Ruwaished, where some 100,000 refugees melted in the sun while the Jordanians wondered if they should let them in. Weary, dirty, desperate and most of all hungry, the refugees waited without food and water.
This time it'll be swift action
Washington's a deadly place -- as deadly it appears, as Baghdad. If you can't understand what is happening between Iraq and Washington, here's a sample of scenarios that are kicking in. The United States will bomb Iraq because Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction in a special palace. Saddam Hussein does not like Bill Clinton who does not like Saddam Hussein who does not like....
