Dec/05/2011

Assange allowed to continue extradition fight

A British court on Monday gave WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange permission to continue his legal battle to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex crimes allegations.

The decision means Mr. Assange does not face immediate deportation. British judges said Mr. Assange could apply to the Supreme Court to hear one specific point of his legal case but there is no guarantee that the higher court will accept his request.

In his judgment, Judge John Thomas said Mr. Assange had only a small prospect of convincing the Supreme Court of his arguments.

The “chances of success may be extraordinarily slim” for Mr. Assange’s appeal, Judge Thomas said.

Mr. Assange’s lawyers had argued that every European arrest warrant issued by police or prosecutors was flawed, because neither should be considered a judicial authority.

The High Court judges did not indicate whether they agreed with the argument, but said Mr. Assange’s legal team should have the chance to ask the Supreme Court to grant them a hearing. Mr. Assange said he was pleased by the ruling.

“The High Court has decided that an issue that arises from my own case is of general public importance and may be of assistance in other cases and should be heard at the Supreme Court,” he said outside the courthouse.

“I think this is the right decision and I am thankful, the long struggle for justice for me and for others continues.”

Mr. Assange now has 14 days to submit a written request to the Supreme Court, Mr. Assange’s lawyer Gareth Peirce said.

Mr. Assange’s Swedish lawyers also hailed the decision.

“This is positive news for Julian Assange and means he will remain in the U.K. while the court assesses his appeal,” Mr. Assange’s Swedish lawyer Per E. Samuelsson said. “It is something we have fought for.”

Claes Borgstrom, the lawyer representing the two women bringing sex crime charges against Mr. Assange, called the decision regrettable.

“My clients have waited for over a year for a legal conclusion of this and now they will have to wait even longer,” Mr. Borgstrom said. “Then it will still end with Assange being transferred to Sweden. The rules are very clear about this.”

“I regret he himself doesn’t choose to hand himself over,” Mr. Borgstrom added.

He said the two women had hoped that the last word would be said in the extradition case on Monday.

“Now they have to wait for another few months. We are hardened by now, but of course this is still stressful,” he said.

Mr. Assange was accused of rape, coercion and molestation following encounters with two Swedish women in August 2010. Swedish authorities issued a European Arrest Warrant on rape and molestation accusations, and Mr. Assange was arrested in London in December.

He was released on bail on condition that he live under curfew and electronically tagged at a supporter’s country estate in eastern England.

In February, Judge Howard Riddle ruled that Mr. Assange can be extradited to Sweden to face questions about the allegations, rejecting claims by him that he would not face a fair trial there.

Mr. Assange appealed, and he and his lawyer appeared at the High Court on July 12 to argue that the sexual encounters were entirely consensual and legal in the context of English law.

Two High Court judges rejected the 40-year-old hacker’s challenge, and Mr. Assange challenged the judges’ decision, filing papers to ask for his case to be taken to the Supreme Court.

Some of Mr. Assange’s supporters gathered outside the court before the hearing began. One banner draped over railings outside the court read “Free Assange. Free Manning,” referring to U.S. Army analyst Bradley Manning who is in custody at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas, suspected of disclosing secret intelligence to WikiLeaks.

Putin’s United Russia suffers poll setback

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling party suffered a painful setback in Russia’s parliamentary election on Sunday, polling less than half of the votes and losing its overwhelming majority in the lower house.

With 96 percent of the ballots counted, United Russia received 49,54 percent of the votes, down from more than 64 percent four years ago. The ruling party is set to lose almost a quarter of seats in the 450-member State Duma, and will see its 315 seats reduced to 238 seats. This will deny the Kremlin the freedom to change the Constitution at will.

Opposition parties posted significant gains, with Communists benefiting the most from what analysts said was a massive protest vote. The Communist Party grabbed over 19 percent of the votes, up from 12 percent last time. A Just Russia party came third with over 13 percent and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalists fourth with 11.6 percent.

The ruling party suffered even bigger losses in regional assemblies, failing to win an absolute majority of seats in any but four regions.

The election result dealt a blow to Mr. Putin, chairman of United Russia, as he prepares to reclaim presidency in the March 2012 elections.

European monitors criticised lack of fairness in access to resources and media coverage and noted “serious indications of ballot-box stuffing” as well as procedural violations. However, India’s Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi, who also monitored the Russian election, said he had not seen any violations apart from a drunken man trying to vote without his passport.

Opposition parties have alleged large-scale vote fixing, including ballot box-stuffing, “carousel” multiple voting, and rewriting of final protocols that allowed the ruling party to improve its results.

“It’s the dirtiest election ever,” said Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. “The vote lacked any legal or moral legitimacy. United Russia has suffered a crushing defeat but inflated its tally by 12 to 15 percent.”

Claims of vote fixing appeared to be borne out by voting patterns in regions, with United Russia receiving more than 90 percent in Northern Caucasus, where the authorities had full control over the election process. In Moscow the ruling party won 46 percent of the votes, but only 32 percent in Tushino, the only municipal district where electronic ballot scanning machines were used.

President Dmitry Medvedev, who headed the United Russia party list, has rejected allegations of vote rigging, telling his supporters that the election was “honest, fair and democratic.” He said the party was ready to enter into on-the-spot coalitions in the new Parliament to ensure the broadest possible support for its legislative initiatives.

“The lineup in the State Duma will reflect the actual balance of political forces in Russia,” Mr. Medvedev told supporters after the early results became known.

Now a common admission test for management courses

With a view to reduce the physical, mental and financial stress on students by writing multiple entrance examination for management courses, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) had decided to hold a national level common admission test for all management programmes from 2012-13.

The Common Management Admission Test (CMAT)-2012 for all courses approved by the AICTE will be conducted online in 61 cities from February 20 to 28, 2012 and scores awarded will be used for admission in management programs both at degree and diploma level, all over India for year 2012-13.

The respective secretaries of the States dealing with technical education and Vice Chancellors of the universities have been requested to advise the competent authority for admissions in their respective States and jurisdiction to use the merit list of CMAT-2012 for allotment of students in the AICTE approved management institutions for academic year 2012-13. The institutions and State governments are required to register online free of charge for opting to CMAT-2012 scores for admissions for academic year 2012-13. The minority institutions shall effect admissions as per the provision available for such categories.

CMAT scores will help students get admissions in AICTE approved institutes/University departments in all management programmes catering to more than four lakh sanctioned seats of AICTE approved management institutions.

The institutes and central admission authorities will use scores awarded to the students for allotment of seat in the registered management institutes.

The admission test will be based on Quantitative Techniques & Data Interpretation, logical reasoning, language comprehension and general awareness-each paper comprising 25 questions and 100 marks. There shall be negative marking for wrong answers.

Off and on screen, he was a youth icon who spoke their language

He was a style icon without a parallel. A marathon filmmaker and an incorrigible romantic, Dev Anand was above all an eternal optimist in an industry where the happiness quotient is often directly proportional to a film's fate at the box office.

Though his last hit, Des Pardes, came way back in 1978, he preferred to look ahead, than looking back with nostalgia at a wonderful career that had milestones such as Baazi, Kala Pani, Kala Bazar, Paying Guest, Guide, Jewel Thief, Hum Dono and Hare Rama Hare Krishna. His last film, Chargesheet, was released a couple of months ago. He had the script ready for two more.

Part of the triumvirate that ruled at the box office in the 1950s and 1960s — Raj Kapoor was a tramp, a bit of Charlie Chaplin; Dilip Kumar was a tragedy king — Dev Anand was hailed as the quintessential romantic hero: his appearance on the screen was greeted by whistles by many of his millions of female followers.

Unfortunately, he was to become a prisoner of his image, which meant that the actor in him was not utilised to the fullest potential. He was never given enough credit for his acting skills or his perspicacity: he showed grey shades in cinema at a time when character in Hindi cinema was only black or white. Till the end he was to remain a dream hero with his idiosyncrasies. The drawl, the speech, the gait... all these made him what he was.

Interestingly, though he came to be recognised for his dialogue-delivery, his peculiar style started off as a necessity. When he came into films in the 1940s, he had a bit of a gap in his teeth. He was advised by P.L. Santoshi to get that corrected. However, post the filling operation, he did not get his original speech back. He came to experience a little difficulty in speaking fast. This was to later become his trademark!

Back in the 1950s, when Raj Kapoor was busy perfecting his Chaplinisque ways and Dilip Kumar was beginning to find box office joy in tragic portrayals, Dev Anand brought to the big screen the first shades of urban cinema. Nearly half-a-century before it became fashionable to speak the urban language at multiplexes, he carved out a niche for himself as a modern urban hero. And many decades before the media came to hail Shah Rukh Khan for his anti-hero ways, Dev Anand had pulled it off with Baazi, Navketan's first film. Navketan was the banner he set up in 1949: Dev Anand went on to produce more than 30 films under it.

Unique distinction

It was during the making of Baazi that he met Kalpana Kartik, who went on to become his wife soon. Nearly 20 years after Baazi, he had the guts to show the weaker side of a hero's personality by shedding a tear or two in Prem Pujari, in 1970. In between he had achieved the unique distinction of starting a film with a song. The film was Hum Dono and the song “Abhi na jao chhodkar.” It is likely to be used whenever the world talks of Dev Anand. The film was re-released in colour recently to a muted response, forcing him to shelve plans to go colour with his other black-and-white masterpieces.

He was often commended for his dress sense. Only Dev Anand could pull off bizarre combinations like orange trousers with a pink shirt without losing his vanity one bit! To many, though, he evoked the image of Gregory Peck. Dev Anand himself met the legend once during a foreign shoot along with Suraiya — with whom he was to have a special relationship that he never shied from.

He was never the greatest of dancers. Yet, he was a rare hero whose career was not dependent on the vocal chords of playback singers. Raj Kapoor used the voice of Mukesh, and Shammi Kapoor rode to popularity with Rafi's magic. But Dev Anand was different. If in Taxi Driver Talat Mahmood lent his voice to“Jayen to Jayen Kahan,” Dev Anand did justice to Rafi's voice in the situational song “Apni to aah ek toofan hai” in Kala Bazar, and later to Kishore Kumar in “Gaata Rahe Mera Dil.”

Fascination for hills

Contrary to common perception, he had a sense of research and used to take time off visiting locales much before a film's cast would be finalised. He had great love for natural landscapes and was particularly fascinated with the hills. In the 1960s, he went to shoot in north-eastern India when most filmmakers preferred to go to Kashmir and other northern States to shoot. Most of his romantic songs, including “Tere mere Sapne,” were shot in the hills.

He was a teetotaller who remained personally untouched by his success and his numerous awards, including the Padma Bhushan and the Dadasaheb Phalke award. Nor did he take his romantic image too seriously. His heroines often talked of feeling ‘safe' with him. But really off and on screen, he was a youth icon who spoke their language, used their music, chose their subjects.

An inacurate graphic has been removed from this article.

New intelligence technology feeding surge in political espionage

Large part of Intelligence Bureau remains deployed on political tasks, not national security duties

Early this summer, India's intelligence services were facing the most serious internal security threats since 26/11: new urban terror cells, on which there was little information, were known to be planning strikes; Maoist insurgents had expanded their reach and lethality to unprecedented levels; Pakistan's descent into chaos had threatened renewed violence in Jammu and Kashmir.

Few people at the North Block headquarters of India's domestic intelligence service, the Intelligence Bureau, cared: dealing with these national problems, strange as it might sound, isn't their job.

Instead, highly placed intelligence sources have told The Hindu, a large part of the IB's resources were committed, and remain committed, to providing the government raw information and assessments on its increasingly bleak political prospects. In the summer, the IB carefully monitored Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's public meetings in Uttar Pradesh after the events at Bhatta Parsaul; later it sought to penetrate Anna Hazare's anti-corruption mobilisation in New Delhi.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Union Home Minister P.Chidambaram, the sources alleged, both received briefings on these events, in part based on passive communications intelligence monitoring — technology capable of intercepting staggering amounts of voice, text and e-mail data, without legal authorisation. Earlier this month, The Hindu, in partnership with a media consortium brought together by WikiLeaks, revealed India's intelligence services and police forces had made large-scale acquisitions of such equipment since 26/11.

It is improbable that either the Prime Minister or the Union Home Minister knew what the basis of the information provided to them was — and neither, the sources insisted, had authorised its use. The equipment had in fact been deployed with a legitimate objective — ensuring that at large rallies political leaders were not targeted by terrorists. There are, however, no firewalls in the IB to ensure that data obtained for counter-terrorism aren't available to political analysts; nor is there a system to ensure that the interception of information is first logged, and then destroyed.

Less than a third of the IB's estimated 25,000-strong manpower, two former high-ranking officers told The Hindu, is dedicated to what might be described as national security tasks — like monitoring terrorist groups or extremist organisations. Even that ratio, one serving officer said, was “a charitable assessment.”

There are at least two joint directors — officers of a rank equivalent to inspectors-general of police and joint secretaries to the Government of India, who sit at the apex of the permanent bureaucracy's operational systems — devoted to analysis of the activities of Congress dissidents and non-Congress parties. Five other joint directors have the job of making assessments of the political landscape across India, with the help of the stations the IB has in State capitals, which in turn help the Director brief the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister on potential political challenges emerging across the nation. There are only one or two joint directors for the operations division that deals with counter-terrorism.

Even though it is improbable that the Home Secretary would issue warrants to tap the conversations of opposition leaders, the IB was able to use technology to build a picture of who had been talking to whom and when — and, in some cases, what their conversation had been.

For politicians in power, this kind of information is invaluable; for everyone else, it ought to be a nightmare.

The East India Company's political officers, the seeds which gave birth to the modern IB, saw mass movements as the main threat: for them, state and government were one and the same thing. Little changed in the years after Independence: except in the North-East and Jammu and Kashmir, the IB invested the bulk of its energies on monitoring revolutionary communists. The IB's anti-communist unit, the “B-Wing,” was its most prestigious division; the former National Security Adviser and now-West Bengal Governor, M.K. Narayanan, spent much of his career in the unit.

In 1969, though, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi broke with the right wing of her party, the B-Wing diminished in size. Mrs Gandhi believed that the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, not the Left, was the principal threat to India — and also, weakened by the rifts in her party, began to use the IB as an independent channel of information-gathering on adversaries and the bureaucracy. “There were plenty of people in the intelligence services who built careers out of feeding her paranoia,” one contemporary recalls.

Following the end of the Emergency, her abuse of the IB led some officers to be hounded out — but there was no effort at structural reform.

In 1987, on the eve of the outbreak of the long jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, the IB station in Srinagar had fewer than 100 personnel — most of them focussed on the Congress' troublesome ally, the National Conference, not the Islamist networks that would soon send thousands of people across the Line of Control for training at Inter-Services Intelligence-run training camps.

Punjab had a far larger IB station — but much of it was, again, committed to watching the many factions of the Shiromani Akali Dal through the 1970s. India, as a result, had next to no information on the training of Khalistan terrorists and their links with the ISI until the early 1980s.

Ever since then, the numbers of IB personnel committed to national security tasks has slowly grown — a process that has been further nudged along by the organisation's current chief, Nehchal Sandhu, himself a career-long counter-terrorism operative.

‘A product of history'

“I think the problem was the product of history,” says A.S. Dulat, a highly regarded career intelligence officer who retired as chief of the Research and Analysis Wing after serving in the IB for over two decades, “the product of time when we could not take our survival as a nation for granted. It is unforgivable that it still goes on today — and it needs to stop, now. It is in the interests of neither our intelligence services nor our polity, just a handful of self-serving individuals.”

Not a few serving intelligence officers agree with that — but national security still hasn't become the IB's principal task: it only began monitoring the Maoist movement late in the day, and police officers in West Bengal, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh told The Hindu that the organisation has only just begun to put together a serious body of intelligence.

Expending staff resources on political intelligence gathering is all the more reprehensible because the IB is desperately understaffed. In 2008, the Union government announced it had sanctioned 6,000 additional staff — expanding the organisation by almost a quarter. In practice, though, the strength of the 25,000-member organisation has stayed static, in part because it hasn't found the kinds of staff it needs, but also because it can train only some 1,200 personnel a year, barely covering for retirement.

Does this mean the IB's political intelligence work should end?

Complex questions

Back in March 1658, Henry Cromwell, Lord Deputy of Ireland and Oliver Cromwell's son, offered an evocative description of what intelligence services are called on to do, in a letter to England's spymaster, John Thurloe: “picking the locks leading into the hearts of wicked men.”

In a thoughtful 2009 volume on domestic intelligence-gathering in the United States, the scholar Brian Johnson pointed out that the reason to have intelligence agencies in the first place was to gather information “not related to the investigation of a known past criminal act or specific planned criminal activity.” That is the job of police services; intelligence organisations must search for crimes no one has — as yet — committed.

The core of the problem is this: we do not all agree on who Henry Cromwell's “wicked men” might be. From 1975, following allegations that the United States' intelligence services were spying on its own citizens, an official committee led by Senator Frank Church issued 14 reports revealing that peaceful dissidents had been targeted for surveillance. Even in countries like the U.S. and the United Kingdom, where oversight mechanisms exist, credible fears of abuse still exist.

“I think we should not have a simplistic view of this issue,” argues Ajit Doval, who served as IB Director in 2004-2005 and was the first civilian to be awarded a Kirti Chakra, for a daring undercover operation that led to the successful conclusion of the second siege of the Golden Temple. “The fact is that in India, there are many political movements which may not be terrorist in character, but are none the less real threats to the nation. The Khalistan movement was not, after all, initially violent — but better intelligence on its intentions would have saved lives.”

“The distinction I would draw,” Mr. Doval says, “is this: political intelligence should be focussed on gathering information on actual and potential national security threats, and the despicable behaviour of some individual intelligence officers, who seek to curry political favour.”

MI5's history

It isn't always easy, however, to know precisely what political intelligence actually is. From the eminent scholar Christopher Andrew's Defence of the Realm, MI5's authorised history, we know that MI5 monitored left-wing politicians and the trade union movement. In an article written this summer, The Guardian's Martin Kettle recounted reading now-declassified MI5 files on his father, Arnold Kettle. Arnold Kettle had been a lifelong communist and, back in university, a friend of the Soviet Union's double-agents inside MI6, Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess.

MI5 carefully followed Dr. Kettle's activities, down to recording his lectures on Shakespearean literature, and his intellectual debt to F.R. Leavis. Their only substantial discovery was, however, that Dr. Kettle was homosexual — a “secret” his family had known for years.

Mr. Kettle, interestingly, said he believed MI5's decision to spy on his father was correct: in its early years, after all, the party he belonged to wanted to overthrow the regime and was receiving foreign finance to do so. By the 1950s though, he pointed out, the communist party “wasn't going anywhere as a revolutionary force, and was increasingly looking for democratic and liberal legitimacy.” His father remained under surveillance, though.

There is no simple answer — but in India, where political parties have shown little interest in understanding and debating even a private member's bill seeking oversight of our intelligence services, the first steps towards one are yet to be taken.

China overtakes India as ‘Diabetes Capital'

In 2009, fourth edition of Diabetes Atlas put India at the top

China has overtaken India to wrest the title of the ‘Diabetes Capital of the World', going by the latest figures revealed by the 5th edition of Diabetes Atlas.

At 90.0 million, China today has the largest number of people with diabetes. India follows with about 61.3 million, and the third on the list is far behind – United States at 23.7 million.

These figures revealed by the Diabetes Atlas, an effort of the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), in mid-November have once again stressed the rampant progress of the epidemic in a world that seems largely under-prepared to tackle the growing numbers.

The current figures are a huge variance from the statistics presented during the last edition of the Diabetes Atlas. In 2009, the fourth edition put India at the top of the list of nations with diabetics. At 50.7 million, India was the country with the highest number of people, and China followed with 42.3 million. However, things changed in 2010, when China produced results of a nation-wide study, pegging the country's diabetic population at 92.4 million.

The revised statistic was accepted, and further validated globally when the 5th edition arrived at a figure of 90 million people.