New Delhi’s cocktail circuit is convulsed by the Indian government’s refusal to grant a ticketless entry to would-be Rohingya asylum seekers. Votaries from the ranks of the great and good are out in force as special pleaders. Some have appealed to the Supreme Court of India, arguing that the decision was a violation of Rohingya human rights, others have chosen to air their case in hospitable sections of the Indian media. One such person is Radha Kumar, who, in the Hindu newspaper, draws attention to American advocates of easier entry into the United States to counter the Trump Administration’s travel ban on people from designated countries, most Muslim, because they posed a threat to national security. The US Supreme Court, to the best of one’s knowledge, has not ruled against the government, so the ban stays.
Ms Kumar’s citing of the American justice system as an anchor for the rule of law must cause a measure of amusement to monitors of international affairs. Most have taken note of police brutality in America’s inner cities, where members of the black community are frequent victims of arbitrary arrest and detention and prone, thereafter, to lose their lives in suspicious circumstances. Young black children in public parks have been gunned for no justifiable cause. One 12 year innocent, playing in a park, was shot for a playful gesture with a toy pistol.
When such cases come to court, all-white juries are prone to dismiss the charges and free the suspects. These decisions commonly lead to rioting and arson; surely Ms Kumar in the solitude of her sumptuous New Delhi mansion watches TV and reads a newspaper or two reporting such unsavoury events. Instead of indulging in empty pieties on the Balkans in the 1990s and specious observations on Indian policy vis-à-vis the neighbourhood, why not engage with truth for a change?
The Indian government has passed a law permitting Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians fleeing oppression and violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh the right to enter India and seek asylum. This automatic right is not granted to Muslims, but exceptions are made, a notable case being that of Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi writer who now resides in India.
Jihadi terrorism is now a tragic fact of life. Mumbai suffered horribly in March 1993 and again in November 2008 from the depredations of crazed jihadfi killers wedded to the doctrine of a holy war against all infidels. This has also been the American and European experience. German Chancellor Angela Merkil has paid severely for her indulgence in letting in a tide of displaced humanity from the Greater Middle East and North Africa Violence against German women has risen exponentially. As a result the Alternative Germany party’s performance in the recent national polls has produced 274 MPs in the 703-seat Bundestag. Ms Merkel appears to have awoken to the unpleasant reality much too late, shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted.
Let us now turn to the utterances of US Senator Bob Coker, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at its hearings to confirm the appointment of the country’s new envoy to India. Senator Coker expressed concern at rising religious intolerance in India and the oppression of minorities in the country. He pointed the Indian government’s refusal to give foreign NGOs a blank cheque to enter India.
Experience in India and elsewhere has long shown that some NGOs enter with subversive intent, that they have been proven instruments of regime change. A decade and more ago a rural agitation of some strength broke out in Tamil Nadu in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant being built near Chennai with Russian technology and assistance. Southern India faced a crippling shortfall in power and this was impeding industrial development.
Then Indian prime minister, the eminently decent Manmohan Singh stated publicly that the Kundakulam project was being derailed with foreign money routed through London. A German member of an NGO was expelled from India. The project has been running smoothly ever since, and the southern grid supplies every regional State with all the power it needs for development.
Finally, US Defence Secretary James Mathis was recently in India, hoping to persuade the government to send an Indian Army contingent to Afghanistan to aid the US military quell the jihadi insurgency in the country. His plea was turned down by India’s new woman Defence Minister Nirmala Sitaraman. Economic aid, yes, but no Indian boots on the ground, she said. When Secretary Mathis criticized Pakistan for not doing enough to curb terrorism, she responded by telling him that since Islamabad was his next port of call, he should translate his words into actionable deeds. Sanctions against Pakistan not Iran would make sense.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s former president, Hamid Karzai, speaking to the Hindu newspaper, warned that ‘India should not fall for US designs,’ and maintain an independent position’. Caveat Emptor!
Creative face of America
The recent tragedy at Las Vegas in which a lone gunman killed 58 innocent citizens, and injured many more, is the enduring curse of the all powerful American gun lobby; its twin, the military industrial complex is a continuing blight on the country’s foreign and defence policies. Yet there exists cheek by jowl the creative cutting edge science and technology, where new frontiers of knowledge are crossed and human experience enriched.
American Nobel laureates in Physics, Chemistry and Medicine are a reminder of the country’s true strength, which vainglory and political posturing should not obscure American strengths that are humanity’s blessing.
In this short space of reflection, it is difficult to take in the scale of Albert Einstein’s phenomenal brain. It was his General Theory of Relativity that predicted the existence of gravitational waves, which it took a century and more for the joint efforts of scientists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barrish and Kip Thorne confirm with data gleaned by the latest technologies and the collaboration of scientists and engineers across continents. Humans will eventually go back in time and discover the cause and moment when the miracle of the Universe took birth. Breathtaking!
The Nobel Laureates in Medicine, Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young were honoured for their discoveries pertaining to the body’s clock, opening up whole new fields of research and raising awareness of the importance of sleep, and getting enough of it, throughout one’s life.
The three Laureates also received recognition for their pioneering studies on genetic mechanisms behind circadian rhythms that adapt the bodily functions to different phases of the day, influencing sleep, behavior, hormone levels, body temperature and metabolism. Their experiments were conducted with fruit flies.
‘I am very pleased for the fruit fly. ‘ said Professor Rosbsash of Brandeis University, and ‘ I’m a little overwhelmed. I stand on the shoulders of giants. This is a very humbling award.’
Indian contribution to gravitational wave discovery
As many as 37 Indian scientists from the nine institutions including the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Pune made critical contributions to the gravitational wave discovery. These gravitational waves were caused when two black holes collided more than a billion light years ago before reaching the earth.
Around 12 IUAA scientists co-authored the first paper on the discovery. Twenty-five others from different institutions joined them in the endeavor.
The pioneer was the IUCAA’s Dr Sanjeev Dhurandhar, who has been working in this field for the past 30 years. The group under him did the foundational work on developing data analysis techniques to detect the gravitational wave signals buried in the detector’s noise by looking for the best match between the calculated wave forms and the detector’s signals.
IUCAA Director, Professor Somak Raychaudhury, said the Nobel Prize is restricted to three persons as a rule, but the discovery in this instance, involved 1,500 scientists across the world. He said: ‘Dhurandhar will be proud today. He built this activity in India. Many others who were a part of this project, were his students…if there were 20-25 to be named for the Nobel, he would have been among them.’
Tarun Suradeep, spokesman of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) India,, said the discovery had opened new vistas for Indian scientists already working in the field and for generations of future scientists who aspired to do so.
