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TelegraphIndia.com - Opinion
Raining on the Games
We are past the first week of September and it is still raining in Delhi. After years of living with climate (hot and sunny for nine months and then cold and smoggy for three), this year we’ve had weather. There’s green scum growing on brick, every other person smells powerfully of the damp and mornings darken with the promise of rainy-day holidays. And yet, most of us still leave home without umbrellas; after years, decades of spotty rain, it’ll take more than a few weeks of wet to get us to believe in the monsoon. foe in deed Scratch the surface and all sorts of unseemly things crawl out. The properties of those who left for Pakistan after its war with India in 1965 were given in charge of the Indian government as custodian by the Enemy Property Act, 1968. In 2005, however, the Supreme Court ordered the custodian to return the property of the raja of Mehmoodabad, who had become a Pakistani citizen, to his son and legal heir, who had always been an Indian citizen. This was the crucial scratch. Apparently unnerved by the number of claims from allegedly legal heirs within the country to property taken over by the government and then leased or rented out, the government issued an ordinance last July that annulled the court order. It allowed the custodian to repossess the property returned to the raja's heir. There is an embarrassing ugliness in this that has not been ameliorated by subsequent events. In the first place, an ordinance is reserved for pressing issues of governance that need to be acted upon when Parliament is not in session. The government obviously felt that this issue was of prime importance. Why? Second, the ordinance overturned a Supreme Court order. Encroaching on the judiciary's territory is the last thing the executive should be doing if it is at all concerned about the health of this democracy. power puzzle India's interest in the political future of Australia is understandable. In recent years, Indian nationals working or studying in Australia are increasingly facing abuse ' apparently of a racial nature ' from white Australians. Many of these episodes have ended up in death. And yet, the administration of Kevin Rudd, the recently deposed prime minister and leader of the Centre-Left Labour Party, failed to take any decisive action on such racial crimes. So India may well hope that Mr Rudd's successor and party colleague, Julia Gillard, who became the first female prime minister of her country, would be more proactive in making Australia a safer and more equitable place for immigrants. Such an expectation is not unwarranted. After all, Ms Gillard has cobbled together a 'rainbow coalition' with crucial support from one Green and three Independent members of parliament. And the Greens want the new government to focus on humane treatment of asylum-seekers and other foreigners in Australia. So this is Ms Gillard's best chance of salvaging the global image of her country even as she tries to repair the schisms within her party. public secret Ranil Wickremesinghe was not on a holiday in India. In Chennai this month, he sought Indian assistance for agriculture in northern Sri Lanka and promised to hear out all 'stakeholders' to resolve the ethnic problem. The healing touch The author is former ambassador to Nepal and Bangladesh Six yards of grace and elegance Ogaan, an exclusive, expensive designer store in south Calcutta has recently morphed into, well, another exclusive, expensive designer store ' the Sabyasachi Mukherjee store. The opening of the store was accompanied by the Page 3 pageantry that would, and should, accompany the name and label of one of India's foremost designers. Mukherjee's efforts to convert the Page 3 people of Calcutta into sari lovers is commendable. More ...
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