Articles by A Correspondent

Morality tells us that the Palestinians are in the right. But the path that leaders of the Palestinians have chosen, of violent resistance to the coloniser and occupier, has not yielded freedom from Israeli control. "Revolutionary" violence, first from Al Fatah and then Hamas, ultimately devolved into rent-seeking by a narrow Palestinian elite with a fi nal settlement indefi nitely deferred as per the design of a brutal, vicious and utterly immoral Israel. When faced with a test of violence it knows it cannot win, a people could simply choose not to play that particular game. If the Palestinians were to foreground non-violent political tactics, it will democratise the question of national strategy by showing everyday people that they too are soldiers of freedom. The Palestinian people now have to reclaim their half-state and refashion it into a real weapon of resistance.

The upcoming Bali ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation threatens to constrain the National Food Security Act even before it is fully implemented. Outdated WTO provisions will severely limit the extent of food subsidy India can provide and the best the United States is willing to agree to is a two-year reprieve. More generally, Bali is also expected to see a very lopsided outcome with a US-led initiative succeeding in ramming an expensive trade facilitation agreement down developing countries' throats and refusing to address long-standing issues in agriculture and rules of origin.

In the last three decades, 12 lakh ha of forests have been diverted for other purposes, including for regularising encroachments, irrigation, power and mining projects. Most diversion proposals get approved because the forest bureaucracy is complicit in promoting them and uses every underhand means to do so. A system designed to protect forests has thus become a major mechanism for their destruction. And the Ministry of Environment and Forests is reluctant to deal with these systemic flaws.

The World Trade Organisation will meet next week to hammer out an agreement on the modalities in agricultural and industrial goods issues of the Doha round. Strangely, in what was supposed to be a balanced development round, the focus will be solely on these two areas even as the rest of the agenda has been kept out. The draft agreements are also skewed (once more) in favour of the advanced economies. India, in particular, will gain very little and lose considerably if it agrees to the proposals on the table. Why then has India gone along so far with the US and WTO demands? Is this too a result of Manmohan Singh's government wanting to accommodate the interests of the country's new "good friend", George Bush?

Picking on an entire community for crimes committed by a few is not unusual in India. One would have expected the police to exercise some caution in the matter of the investigation of the Mumbai train blasts. Instead, the names and faces of the "suspects" are public knowledge, there is no one to defend them and virtually no questioning of the tactics used by the police on issues related to "terror".