Monday, July 13, 1998
Jain omission
India is widely misrepresented as a nation of fatalists. Its people are actually incurable optimists. Despite the early warnings of the Jain Commission's interim report, they entertained the faint hope that the final report would contain something of legal value which could be the basis for prosecution. Alas, they have been let down again by Justice Jain, who held the most attractive sinecure in the country for six years and produced nothing of consequence beyond surmise, suspicions and reams of affidavits.
Cesspools of apathy
Udaipur, known as the ``lake city'' of Rajasthan, is famed for its picturesque setting. Nestled in the Aravalli hills, it has a ``lake system'' comprising five water bodies: Pichhola, Fatehsagar, Rangsagar, Swaroop Sagar and Dudh Talai, with another, Udaisagar, situated at one end of the city. Outside the main city, there are three tanks or ponds and 73 ghats.
End the zero-sum game
Nuclear ambiguity, which provided the parameters for India-Pakistan relations for the past decade and a half, allowed deterrence to function at a low level of weapons capability, at a lower level of readiness and at lower cost. By effectively declaring ourselves nuclear weapons states with sovereign rights to develop, test and deploy weapons as our security perceptions dictate, we have set up a dynamic that will inevitably lead to a race to develop the infrastructure of a second strike capability, anti-missile systems, a range of delivery options and the development of conventional capability in order to raise the nuclear threshold.
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