The Hindu Business Line : Introspection day

THE Independence Day this year has turned out to be different because of the pall of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 cast on it by the Nanavati Commission's report, and the unpleasant after-taste of the messy handling of it by the government.

If a poll were to be held, it is certain to reveal an overwhelming body of opinion to the effect that if only the government had been alive to the universally felt sense of guilt and shame, and what the Prime Minister belatedly divined as the prevailing "sentiment and perception", it could have come up with its promise to reopen cases against everyone named in the report, forming panels for payment of compensation to victims, and the Prime Minister's handsome apology without giving any occasion for Parliament and the nation to become exercised over its apparent insensitivity and suspected attempt to cover up.

This is also the 60th year of the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There has, till now, been no conclusive answer to the question whether it was at all necessary to subject nearly half-a-million direct and indirect victims of the two bombs to the indescribable horrors of hell on earth.

While the world community is fiddling with issues related to the ever elusive nuclear disarmament, the nuclear know-how is insidiously percolating to more and more countries aided by a deliberate policy of proliferation on the part of some governments and by the black market run by "rogue" scientists.

There has as yet been no clue to measures needed to prevent the unthinkable catastrophe of nuclear terrorism whereby, as per Winston Churchill's graphic description, idiot children begin playing with nuclear matchsticks with horrendous consequences for humankind.

Ironically, this is also the year marking the centenary of the launching by Mahatma Gandhi of satyagraha, blending truth and non-violence into a potent mix the like of which the world had not known till then that eventually brought even the mighty British Empire to its knees.

Can it be that man or woman raised to the power of one can still prevail on the strength of soul-force as Cindy Sheehan is proving outside the ranch of the US President at Crawford by setting the national psyche aflame against the senseless occupation of Iraq by the US forces?

B. S. Raghavan

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