Daily Excelsior... Editorial

A gap of imagination
in the last 1000 years
By: M. J. Akbar

Why have both India and China refused to conquer the. ...more

Taking India on
the Pak route !......
Yours Randomly,
By : Dr R L Bhat

"Between the idea/ And the reality/ Falls the shadow,'' ..more

Farm forestry : Equity
- vs - Growth
By D.N. Bajpai

Most of the social and economic arguments against .more

She almost severedoff
her husband’s penis
HERE AND THERE
B.L. Kak

Indian women, though not all, can
be ruthless, .more

EDITORIAL

WRITING ON WALLS

Even though several good things have been done by the Vajpayee Government during its 8 month stint in power, their impact has not been felt by the teeming millions of this country. There is no denying the fact that Vajpayee is honest, dedicated and largely acceptable person to lead the country to progress and prosperity. He has the hind-sight as also the foresight of anticipating tomorrows happenings today itself. He is also amongst the very few tall leaders in the country who are uncorrupted. The BJP which he heads and which is the dominant partner in the coalition Government somehow has failed to convey its good work as also counter the wild allegations levelled by opponents highlighting various deficiencies or inconsistencies. To be precise there is wide communication gap in the Sangh Parivar. Whatever BJP Government says or do, it has been the persistent wont of the various outfits of Sangh Parivar to move in the opposite direction. It is here that all the good things done or projected get totally neutralised. BJP as the recognised political party is made answerable for the misdemeanours and indiscretions that stem from their misconceptions of the constitution as also the National Agenda. It binds BJP to follow the agreed policies in letter and spirit and leave aside those which have been rejected by the alliance partners. It is this commitment and understanding that has facilitated formation of BJP led Government. To that extent it is the duty of entire Sangh Parivar not to embarrass BJP leadership or Government by resorting to overzealous, ill-timed and ill-conceived statements and actions.

It is to be understood that there is no alternative to secularism. If Islamic fundamentalism cannot be forced on the liberal people of India, extreme Hindutva is equally not possible. India is a country where every kilometer reflects change in style, habits, language and even dressess. It is also a country so well known for 'unity in diversity'. Within Hinduism there is a large variety. Likewise, Christianity has its own significance. There is that something known as missionaries which have belatedly become the target of some sections of Sangh Parivar. As per our Constitution, there is no law which prohibits conversion or to what one calls change of faith. Nothing prevents protagonists of Hindutva to practise 'social engineering', the coinage that originated from ideologue Govindacharya. You can have a mission in every city, block, village. You can go to tribal belts or places that reflect only penury, squalor and sickness. They are your brethren and belong to your fraternity. Their upliftment ought to be the first item on the much hyped 'social engineering'. You got to counter it socially with welfare programmes besides their vertical and horizontal integration with the mainstream. Surely such course would never attract them to any other faith or religion. Once you reject them and treat them indifferently, then and then alone the pitch is queered for them to look to others for better acceptance and treat.

Be it attacks on minorities in any form, it must be borne in mind that opposition parties are bound to exploit them to the hilt to the detriment of ruling clan. They succeed in exaggerating all such unfortunate happenings. During the last assembly elections in four States BJP has already noticed drift of minorities towards Congress. Even downtrodden classes within the ambit of Hinduism have shown their inclination to go back to Congress fold. It is attributed to the sense of insecurity generated amongst them all by the overzealous actions of Sangh Parivar. In fact, it is now a daily routine for this or that section of the Parivar to criticise Vajpayee Government. If they do so, opposition parties as also the alliance partners are well within their domain to go one-up to undermine credibility of the Government. It is here that all good things get submerged in the inner party and intra party contradictions that have assumed very disturbing proportions. Within the BJP itself varying voices on the same subject like Insurance Regulatory Bill, Women Quota Bill, Swadeshi and Videshi treat and projections of issues that are beyond the scope of National Agenda continue to dwarf the party in public esteem. Now the situation is such when BJP has more fears from the enemies within than the opposition as far as proper governance is concerned.

It is time that RSS which is the mother of Sangh Parivar shows cohesiveness as far as National Agenda is concerned which also includes secularism that is part of the Constitution. Otherwise, it could be the only and last Government led by BJP because people shall refuse to accept it as fit for governance or as an alternative to others governance. It has got to widen its spectrum to make it acceptable to all sections of society rather than keep on raking up issues and controversies which are disowned by its largest wing i.e BJP. Writing on the wall is very clear. Vajpayee has enunciated the course in his new year message making it amply clear that there is no place for religious bigotry in India and every citizen irrespective of caste or creed has to live in prosperous, peaceful and amicable atmosphere.

APATHETIC ADMINISTRATION

Even as the Government employees strike enters 14th day, there is no indication from the administration to mitigate peoples hardships that continue to increase by the day. It is ridiculous and quite unbecoming of any Government to remain mute spectator to peoples woes attributed to employees strike. First, how awkward it looks when employees do not get their salaries on the New Year day. They have families. They have to pay rent. They cannot avoid daily liabilities to run the household. These are hard times when their pockets have been hit hard. People have also grievances and continued strike in all offices has brought the work to standstill. So each of the aggrieved suffer due to inaction. The worst sufferer is the ailing humanity. With medical services virtually paralysed, patients are left high and dry to fend for themselves.

Unfortunately, the administration has not moved even one centimeter to provide alternatives. It is the duty of the State to keep all essential services functional. One fails to understand the utility of district, divisional or State administration if it cannot find alternatives. Here is an administration which neither settles pending issues with the employees nor do anything to mitigate the hardships of the people with alternative arrangements. It is all the more unfortunate that the demands put forth by the striking employees are in fact settled commitments of this Government. It is precisely their failure to redeem such commitments and promises that have compelled the employees to persist with strike. It is not the job of the employees to find resources for Government obligations. The large unwieldy cabinet and the heavy-weight bureaucracy has to find ways and means to meet the obligations. Yesterday, traffic was brought to a halt by protesting employees. Tomorrow it has all the making of turning violent. The administration shall be well advised to be constructive and realistic in its approach not only towards employees but also for the suffering people whose only fault is that they belong to this wretched State.

A gap of imagination in the last 1000 years
By: M. J. Akbar

Why have both India and China refused to conquer the world when they had their opportunities during phases of the last thousand years? The easy answer is that both, blessed with civilisation, depth of territory, a substantial manufacturing base, natural resources, technology and therefore wealth had nothing to seek outside their shores. What, after all, do you want from conquest but wealth, and the power to maintain that flow of wealth? London was a poorer city than Murshidabad when Robert Clive was dazzled by the gold of Bengal, which, compared to the riches of the rest of India, was a poor cousin of Awadh or Gwalior or Hyderabad or Mysore or a dozen other principalities across the map of the subcontinent.

Both India and China had major cities along the sea, and a coastline that gave them access to worlds beyond their imagination, but even their curiosity was not touched leave alone ambition. They were not shy of water. The princes of both land masses had impressive river fleets, and their ships took trade along chartered and unchartered and profitable routes for uncounted centuries. But neither India nor China developed a navy even when sea power became the definite factor in the confrontation between the emerging and declining powers. India had even less excuse than China, because in the first millennium after the birth of Christ her ships carried trade, culture and Hinduism to the furthest of the islands to the east: the world recognised India's maritime achievements by calling the waters of the east the Bay of Bengal and the oceans beyond the Indian Ocean. India once ruled this ocean; which is why it was called Indian. It is obvious that although Delhi was a central spot in our historical imagination, the weight of true power had shifted before and after the birth of Christ towards the east. Patliputra after all was an eastern city on the Ganga, and closer to the Indian Ocean than to Taksila and Afghanistan.Even after the end of the first millennium, Jaichand, who ruled from the east, was richer and more powerful than Prithviraj; it is possible that he was motivated more by indifference to the fate of Delhi than by any determined desire for treachry. It was from Bengal and Kalinga that the ships sailed with their cargo of goods and culture towards influence and profit.

It was only from the 13th century onwards that Hinduism began to lose out to the evangelical Buddhism from Sinhala in Southeast Asia; but even at the time of the great Cambodian king, Jayavarman VII, who provided critical momentum to this change, scholars travelled to Cambodia to seek knowledge from the most eminent international experts on the Vedas. The decline of Indian influence in Southeast Asia is clearly a direct consequence of the rise of Muslim power and its institutionalisation in Delhi in the 13th century. The horsemen from Afghanistan and Uzbekistan shifted the centre of military gravity towards cavalry and the linkages moved towards central Asia and Persia. The only semi-naval battle fought by the Moghuls was against an alliance of the Portuguese and the Burmese pirates who had begun to rule by the Bay of Bengal with some impurity.The Portuguese fleet and armies were destroyed at Chinsurah by the forces of Shah Jehan. Russia, it is believed, spent its imperial age is search of access to the warm waters.

But even in the 15th century trade between Bengal and China flourished: in 1415 a Chinese fleet brought a wonder from Malindi in Bengal which they believed to be a variation of the unicorn because it had the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, a fleshy, boneless horn, luminous spots and walked with the stately rhythm of a monarch.The emperor himself came to the port to receive this highly-advertised visitor. It was a giraffe. (The emperor, a little muted in his wonder, said that he would have rather received a copy of the Five Classics. Snob.)

The Chinese made one serious efforts to understand the value of a navy thanks to the persuasive efforts of an admiral who was also a Muslim and a eunuch. (Eunuchs were a power in those less bigoted days, not victims of a stupid prejudice that equates the absence of a penis with loss of intellectual and other abilities. Malik Kafur, arguably the greatest general of the early priod of Muslim rule in India, was a eunuch). His name was Cheng Ho, and if he had his way he would have made China a colonial power in the 15th century. Between 1405 and 1433. Cheng Ho led seven naval expeditions across the rim of India Ocean, each lasting around two years, and touched more than 30 countries including Zanzibar, Egypt and Arabia. He took with him naval townships. The first expedition consisted of 62 of the largest ever junks, 225 support vessels and 27,870 men. The system of Cheng Ho's commerce was uniquely Chinese; and remains a lesson in Chinese tactics till this moment. Since he was on a "goodwill" rather than a colonising or trading mission, he could only offer "gifts" to his hosts wherever he landed. In return he made sure that he received "tributes" and double sure that the latter was worth more than the former. Chinese superiority had to be established. Any ruler who made the mistake of testing this superiority was taught an exemplary lesson. When on his third voyage the Sinhalese king tried to trap his fleet, Cheng Ho's soldiers captured his palce, deported him to China and placed their nominee on the throne. The faction had promoted such imperial ambitions in the early party of the 15th century, when China could have conquered much of the Africa and Southeast Asia that later went to the Portuguese, Dutch and English lost the argument in perking.

The English were comfortable and victorious as long as they had the sea behind them and the psychological comforts of a Royal Navy that had the power to ensure that any emergency supply line to home would be kept open. Is there something to be learnt from the fact that English power expanded almost without interruption and began to collapse after the British shifted the capital to Delhi in 1911? The Raj, which could rule upto Sind and Mysore from Calcutta, froze and then frittered once it moved into the landlocked cities of the north. It is ironic that the Englishmen who conquered the world on ships created a superb Indian Army but were less than successful in creating a comparable Indian Navy. Perhaps they had become, by the turn of this century, more Indian than English in their strategic perceptions. They also looked west, not east, until Japan nearly pierced its way onto the subcontinent. By that time a victory had become indistinguishable from defeat, at least as far as the colonies were concerned. The Indian Army fought valiantly and successfully for the Empire in both world wars, and its role particularly against Rommel in the deserts of Africa has not received due to recognition. But the Indan Navy had very little support to offer the overstretched British effort on the seas. This too was understandable. The British had little need for an Indian Navy whose primary role would be to raise Indian Influence in the Gulf or Africa as it had once done in Southeast Asia. That would be competing with the European powers. The Indian Army, on the other hand, could become an insurmountable force against any invader able to penetrate the ring of mountains on the north and north west. India never needed a Wall of China because it had the Himalayas already.

An active school suggests that the upper caste injuctions against overseas travel could be the reason: the famous case of Motilal Nehru being commanded to do prayashchit (penance) after his first visit to England is often cited. This is a nonsense. Caste never prevented the sweep towards the Southeast of Asia that we have noted, and certainly the great trade ships were not officered or manned exclusively by untouchables. This seems a post-facto explanation rather than a reason. At some point ourstrategic thinking became subservient to foreign needs. It still has not changed. India could not become a superpower in the millennium which is just about to end because its destiny was in the hands of men who did not understand the meaning of naval force. I can hardly predict what will happen in the next millennium; but it is almost certain that the next century will be lost because we do not understand that the Army is a part of India's defence services, while a Navy is at the core of its offensive abilities. The two need each other.

Taking India on the Pak route !......
Yours Randomly,
By : Dr R L Bhat

"Between the idea/ And the reality/ Falls the shadow,'' wrote T S Eliot in his celebrated The Hollow Men. In the realm of governance the chasm between the idea and the reality, between the thought and the act is ever imminent. The shadow is always hanging precariously. How you keep the darkness at bay is a test of your truth, sincerity and vision. It is a test of nationalism too, because the difference between making and marring a nation is just the distinction of a shade. You allow a bit of hue to colour your view and you have a whole darkness looming to engulf everything. That is what happened to Pakistan, though it has a big ''jamhuri''-- democratic - written into its very name. Take one contemporary instance. Nawaz Sharif is threatened by the Pak Supreme Court: he takes on the Chief Justice. The President sees a possible handle for himself and sides with the C J Not on principle, not for truth, but because he smells a goodie for himself, cooking there. Nawaz reacts, clobbers a support from army again on the personal level not on principle, and ejects both out. You can reason it out as a dynamism where the different agencies of the government were fighting to find their balance, as the theoriticians did at the time, and say that there was nothing wrong there.

Actually, principally, morally there was everything wrong. Te concerns of the CJP were not those of justice only. The privilege motion against Nawaz Sharif was not an attack on parliament. The presidents siding with the CJ was not solely on principles. All in fact were using the constitution, convention and law to fulfil their personal motives. A similar mince-meat of principles and conventions was made in the ruckus with the Chief of the Naval Staff which has ended with the sacking of Admiral Bhagvat.

Here the government has secured a very dubious, very unsettling, first. And it comes at the top of a series of acts, which would neither be called earnest nor principled. The inept investigation against Gen. Sareen left a bad taste in the mouth. The appointment of some three dozen ''card holders' of Anna DMK as the Central prosecuters in Tamil Nadu to try cases against Jayalalitha tore impartiality to shreds. The ordinance and appointment of the Chief Vigilance Commissioner only raised doubts about the earnestness of the government. The transfer of Bezburvah was anything but an act of transparency. The rumpus with a number of senior functionaries of the government was unnecessary. Each one of these undermined the basis of fair governance; each one gave the established principles a good shaking. One after the other the samskars of the nation are getting unhinged.

During the last five decades a fine-tuned balance has been established between the different wings of the public authority in the country. Particularly fruitful has been the distinction between the army and civilian administration: the former tended the borders and the latter the country within. But now the distinction is increasingly getting blurred. Earlier the army once in a blue moon, would be called to assist the civil administration to control a particularly nasty situation. Now the army is running the administration for the civilian authorities in many parts of the country, on an almost permanent basis. The service chiefs are called upon the make political statements and assesments. The case of snow-mobiles for the soldiers in Siachin symbolised an unsavoury apathy towards the needs of the forces. Now comes an unnecessary interference. Incompetence, apathy and interference in what has undone Pakistan. Supremacy of Parliament and political authority is not an inheritance to be squandered on the dictats of a whim or inaptitude. It is a trust of the people and the nation to be respected, to be preserved through fair and principled working. Forfiet it and you have an illegitimacy masquarading as a supremacy- in letter not the spirit. And a nation in shambles.

The Naval Chief is the best judge of the placement of his forces including officers. No babu can know better. Here his view alone should count. Of course, if there are doubts about his integrity, motives, impartiality, that is a different issue. But so long as there is a Chief there, his wisdom in placement, deployment, everything must prevail. No babu, no minister either, is to decide how the service chief is to range his forces, how he is to fight. That is his prerogative. Democratic practice, democratic governance, is a continued devolution of powers. The people delegate their authoriity to their representatives, who in turn entrust different wings with specific functions. Once this secondary devolution has taken place, the political authority ceases to have a right to interfere into the finer details of working. In fact the political interference into the working of designated authorities is what has played havoc with the civil administration. Which chief to have and why not, is the Ministerial prerogative. There the political right ceases. The activities specific are devolved to the functionary, who remains answerable for them; Day to day activity is their prerogative . In case of army, this devolution becomes even more important. Fiddle over it and you would have the whole house burning-- the finely pillared parliament included. Just like Pakistan, eh!

Farm forestry : Equity - vs - Growth
By D.N. Bajpai

Most of the social and economic arguments against farm forestry are suspect. But it is necessary to separate the grain from the chaff, to identify the real problems that can arise, in order to circumvent them. To take the less substantial arguments first : The fear that if trees are grown on private lands only, then the village poor will be deprived of cooking fuel is vastly exaggerated. To begin with, farm forestry does not preclude social forestry. The fact that the private land is being brought under trees does not mean that public land will not be brought under it too.

The serious imbalance between the achievements on private and public lands reflects to some extent the different levels of motivation of the farmer, who seeks profit, and the panchayat and the forest department, that gain very little directly from the project. But it also reflects the fact that so-called common lands are often not really common -- the village notables having long ago acquired user rights by tacit consent. What is more, common land is not wasteland either. It is invariably serving a variety of functions for the village as a whole. For Instance, villagers in the lower Himalayas actively resist attempts to reafforest south facing slopes, because they fear that this will deprive them of pasturage. Thus the villagers have to be convinced first that they will gain more by putting the land under trees, than they are doing from its present use. This is understandably a slow business.

The belief that fuelwood, fruit and other produce from social forestry projects on common lands will be available free of charge to the rural poor is naive, to say the least. As anyone who is familiar with the power structure in a village knows, is gains too will be monopolised by the village notables. The most the poor will get is firewood in exchange for their labour in planting and cutting down the trees.

The belief that the poor are being totally deprived of fuelwood even now is in any case, simplistic. It is worth pointing out that when a trees is chopped down, a lot of wood gets left behind in the form of chips (5 per cent by weight) strips of bark, and twigs that are never carted away. Even if the farmer does not give this away free, he is likely to give it to the workers as part-compensation for their labour.

The fear that if farmers are allowed to grow trees on irrigated lands the country's food production will suffer is based on a strange lack of faith in the working of the price mechanism. The first question that the critics need to answer is just how much land will farmers bring under trees before the bottom drops put of the market for commercial timber.

While uptodate figures for the commercial consumption of wood are difficult to come by, an estimate can be made by extrapolating the figure for the total demand for wood, of one state, Gujarat. In 1994, the demand for timber i.e. commercial demand, was 9.6 lakh cubic metres of air dried wood i.e. just about 600.000 tones. Since the population of Gujarat is now about 42 million, if one extrapolates this for the entire country, the annual commercial consumption of timber comes to around 10 million tonnes.

Since under irrigation, eucalyptus yields at least 30 tonnes per hectare per year of bonedry wood, or 34-40 tonnes of air dried wood, even if only 65 per cent of the tree is usable for timber and pulpwood, the entire commercial demand will be met by no more than 350,000 hectares of plantations.

In fact, eucalyptus cannot meat all commercial needs, and some land will have to be brought under shisham, teak and other hardwood species, whose annual yields are very low. Taking this into account, if we assume that the average yield from farm forests is no more than ten tonnes per hectare of air dried wood, then two million hectares of plantations will meet the whole of the current demand. Even if demand doubles in the next ten years (by when the farm timber will begin to flood the market) the maximum area under trees that it will sustain is just four million hectares of seven per cent of the irrigated land of the country.

In actual fact nothing of this sort will happen. To begin with, much of the tree planting is taking place on dryland, or land not suited for agriculture such as Rajasthan, Saurashtra the western ghats and much of the Deccan plateau. In the last named areas, teak forests have been massacred to grow ragi, a millet that gives a yield of two-and-half quintals every alternate year on slightly sloping land -- the land that is deal for teak. Secondly, a large part of the tree planting is being done on the boundaries of the farmers' holdings, and in windbreaks and shelter belts. Thus the irrigated area in which crops will be supplanted by trees will be far smaller than the estimates give above.

The impact of farm forestry on employment is a far more serious issue. If it does indeed turn out that farm forestry reduces unemployment, then the government will have to take steps, at least in the initial stages, to encourage it only in dryland and semi-arid areas. But so far there is no convincing proof that this is indeed so. Forestry operations are labour-intensive almost by definition. The national commission on agriculture and estimated over a decade ago that forestry operations in natural forests generated 146 man days of employment per hectare in a year. High density farm forestry in which farmers have first to plant 3500 to 5000 trees per hectare, fertilise, irrigate and prune them thin, then cut down every alternate tree, at the end of three or four years, and rotate the entire crop in 5 to 8 years, should generate a vastly greater amount of employment. In fact a report on fuelwoods of the Planning Commission estimated that intensive fuelwood plantations would create 500 man days of work per year.

Thus, whether there will be a net gain or loss in employment will depend on the crop being replaced by trees, the degree of mechanisation of its cultivation, and the degree of mechanisation of the felling and logging operations when the trees mature. The least that even the most determined critics of social forestry must concede is that no generalisation is possible on the relationship of farm forestry and employment generation.

Some facts are however beyond dispute. The first is that when a tree crop replaces, say millets, on a family-operated farm the gains go directly to the family, which is then able to employ its leisure in other income earning or life-improving ways. Secondly, when trees are intercropped with normal agriculture, or planted around the boundaries, there will be gain, not loss, in employment. Lastly, it must be remembered that wood generates a vast amount of down-stream employment in industry and construction, unlike foodcrops which create almost none.

However since the bulk of the direct employment is generated in the sowing, and later the felling and logging operations, if farm forestry is not to create sharp peaks and dips is labour use and thus stimulate mechanisation as the green revolution did, then a system of 5 to 8 years rotation needs to be established right from the start.

It is also worth pointing out that the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Banglore's estimate that tree farming will cost Karnataka 200 million man days of labour over five years sounds far too high. The state has a rural population of only 18 million. The population of landless labourers would therefore be at most 4 to 5 million. What is more if eucalyptus is the main tree species being planted, this must be on irrigated land, and there are only 800,000 hectares of such land in the entire state. The loss in man days therefore works out to between 40 and 50 per labourer and 250 per hectare of irrigated land. Since only a fraction of the land in Karnataka has been brought under trees, and an even smaller fraction at the expense of other crops, the figure of 200 million man days is just not credible.

Only one of the many criticisms of farm forestry is wholly valid. This is that in its present form it is threatening to increase the rich-poor gap in the rural areas. This is because only the rich farmers have enough land to spare, to wait five to eight years, to reap the benefit of their crop. For the poor, who live from crop to crop, putting in more than a few trees around the boundaries of their fields is just not feasible.

This problem can, and must, be surmounted for it is the poor who need the vast income that farm forestry can generate, far more than the rich. The way to do this is to offer an annual grant or preferably a low interest loan, to the small and marginal farmers against their tree crop, to meet their consumption expenses during the years when their trees are maturing. This can be done either by confining assistance to small and marginal farmers or by limiting it (at say Rs. 0.50 per tree per year) to a maximum of 1,000 trees.

So far, Gujarat and Rajasthan are the only states that have done something on these lines. Both states are giving grants of Rs. 250 per hectare per year for 15 years. But neither is confining the grant to small farmers or to a limited number of trees. A shift to loans pegged to the number of trees left standing at the end of each year will both increase the actual income of the farmer during the gestation period, and greatly reduce the scope for the misuse of this new facility. (INAV)

She almost severed off her husband’s penis
HERE ANDS THERE
B.L. Kak

Indian women, though not all, can be ruthless, nasty when they find their husbands sexually enjoying elsewhere. Ms Bhaswati Roychoudhuri, a housewife, residing West Bengal’s Hooghly district , has amply proved, if any proof was needed, that she could not be expected to remain quiet when her husband had several admirers.

Ms Bhaswati got herself married to a handsome man, Mr Samir by name, six years ago. And as weeks and months rolled by, Ms Bhaswati discovered that her husband had several women admirers and that he was sleeping with "many". What came as a big surprise to her was that her husband made no attempts to conceal from her his association with several women.

For months together Ms Bhaswati laboured hard to make her husband mend his way. She had to go slow eventually as her appeals and pleadings made no impression on Mr Samir, who continued his adulterous behaviour. With the passage of time, relations between the two soured. And what was worse was the choice of operations employed by Mr Samir who was alleged to have become defiant, making love to other women in front of his wife.

Newton’s third law of motion had to apply in this case: Ms Bhaswati’s sadness gave way to deep-seated anger. And matters came to a head in the early hours of December 25 when she woke up to find her husband not beside her. She ran fast and furious when she found him in another room with a woman in a compromising position. That was the last straw.

The deeply-hurt woman (Ms Bhaswati) seized a sickle-like sharp instrument and attacked her husband. She almost severed off Mr Samir’s penis. She did not stop there. She rushed out of her house and went to the local police station and confessed her "crime". The police rushed to the spot and, after admitting Mr Samir at a local hospital, arrested Ms Bhaswati, whose statement was recorded in front of the district magistrate.

Ms Bhaswati was arrested not because she considered her husband as the unwanted person but for the "crime" she herself confessed. On the other hand, however, India’s "most wanted criminal", Deepak Sharma, once again succeeded in giving the slip to the police after a three-month-long stay in Hyderabad. The notorious criminal who was involved in 60 murders vanished from his rented accommodation in Kalyanpuri colony near Hyderabad within minutes of Zee TV featuring him as India’s most -wanted criminal.

The local police, on a top-off , rushed to the place on December 24 night only to find that Deepak Sharma had already made good his escape. Alleged to be a henchman of a prominent politician of Uttar Pradesh, Sharma stayed in a house in the serene Kalyanpuri colony for three months. But little did the residents realise that their new neighbour was a dossier criminal.

Given the track record of the criminal as projected in the Zee TV "India’s most wanted" programme, residents of the colony have been found unwilling to be quoted on the issue, though they admit that Sharma had been staying in the area for the past three months as a tenant in a two-bedroom independent house. A resident of the colony was quoted as saying: "In fact, he told us a few days back that we should not be surprised if he appears in a TV serial as he claimed to have acted in one such serial". "We never knew that our neighbour was the most wanted criminal, until we watched the TV serial", said another.

A cursory glance of Sharma’s dossier revealed that the accused dubbed as a professional killer-cum-extortionist was involved in a record number of 60 murders from 1990. The 5 feet 10 inch tall and well-built criminal first shot into prominence when he murdered Shukla, said to be a BJP leader, in broad daylight at Muzaffarnagar. A few days later, Shukla’s 17-year-old son, Ravi, was also chased by Sharma and his accomplices and hacked to death. The father and son were murdered for opposing a party ticket to his mentor,Sushil, credited with a criminal record.