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Soft option again
The Railway Ministry's decision to
hike the freight rate on a few essential
commodities from 5 to 16 per cent as also
the Indian Airlines' announcement to
increase its fares by 10.5 to 14 per cent
indicate an increasing tendency in the
Government to choose the softest option
of passing on all its financial burden to the
consumers. Railway Minister Ram Vilas
Paswan has been desperately looking for
additional resources to bridge the budget
gap for 1997-98 caused by the extra
burden of Rs 2,800 crore in the wake of
the Fifth Pay Commission's
recommendations. Even after imposing
freight hikes on foodgrains, pulses, sugar,
kerosene, LPG, urea and coal, the
Railways will be short by Rs 800 crore
due primarily to the political profligacy of
Mr Paswan. The Minister might claim that
the inflationary impact of the freight hike
will be marginal and the present low
inflation situation may warrant it, but
the moot issue is that the Railway
Minister is not setting his priorities
right. In recent months, there has been a
collapse of infrastructure in the
Railways resulting in a number of
accidents. While the existing tracks
need replenishment, new trains are
being introduced giving little time or
money for track and equipment
maintenance.
Life without army
The Jammu and Kashmir Government's
decision to implement a gradual pullout
plan for the armed forces, currently
deployed in civilian positions in most
districts in the Valley, including Srinagar
and Baramulla, is indicative of the extent
of normalisation in the trouble-torn State.
There are still areas where the militants
and foreign mercenaries remain active, but
the overall situation has considerably
improved. Much of the credit for this
should go to the military and pare-military
forces who, despite heavy odds, had
substantially weakened the strike
capability of the militant groups. The fact
that a representative government could be
put in place following an election,
however flawed it might have seemed,
provided an opportunity to a beleaguered
population to engage in a responsive
interaction with the civil administration.
Having said that one should not lose sight
of a third factor contributing to the
normalisation process. Despite the recent
fiery exchanges along the line of control in
Kashmir, there has been an overall decline
in the volume of infiltration as well as the
supply of arms and ammunition from
Pakistan in recent weeks. This can
justifiably be traced to both domestic
and external factors. It can even be a
tactical move to lie low at a time when
Pakistan's attempts to muster
international support in favour of its
case on Kashmir had not made much
headway. In any case, it would be
wrong to underestimate Pakistan's
capacity to stir up fresh trouble in the
Valley. And that calls for extra vigil.
The leaky system
Telephone tapping is like the
measles. It disappears from one
place only to reappear in another.
No amount of legal bans and court
pronouncements can really banish
this blatant official intrusion into
private conversation. True, tapping
of telephones is largely done by
State agencies covering important
people or issues governing national
security. Since the justification is
accepted extension of phone tapping
to both issues and individuals has
become a matter of discretion rather
than of national interest. The latest
publication by a newspaper of
transcripts of tapped telephone
conversation involving eminent
persons remotely or intimately
involved in the Tata Tea-ULFA
affairs raises several issues. The
least debatable of all is the propriety
of newspapers publishing the
conversation and the most of them
all is the leaking of the tapped
conversation by what is presumed to
be a Government investigating
agency. Although it is well known
that even private agencies can now
listen to miscellaneous telephone
conversations, the process of
telephonic dialogues finding their
way into newspapers smacks of a
conspiracy to damn the business
house involved. The statutory need
for telephone tapping may have thus
deviated from national security to
acquisition of information through
intrusive eavesdropping and the
using of such information to further
specific interests. In all the
telephone tapping cases that this
country has known so far, from the
old case of T. T. Krishnamachari
and of Ramakrishna Hegde to Mr
Chandra Shekhar and the latest, the
motive has been either political
vendetta or sectarian interests.
Intrusion in the interest of national
security very rarely gets publicised
and rightly so. But the kind of stuff
published by the daily provides the
ultimate argument for banning all
telephone tapping. Official enquiries
will serve no purpose. They either
don't go to the root of the matter or
they are ignorably non-committal.
The real issue is to plug the leaks
from the investigating agencies and
punish the leakers. It is a tall order
because, as it has been well said, the
ship of State is the only ship that
leaks from the top.
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