TWO INDIANS CONVICTED AND JAILED FOR MONEY LAUNDERING

TWO INDIANS CONVICTED AND JAILED FOR MONEY LAUNDERING

Kathmandu, 15 Dec. Special court Thursday convicted two
Indian national for money laundering and sentenced them to
one-year jail terms each.
Sunil Jaiswal and Shrawan Shah were arrested
with Rs 19.2 million and Rs. 0.92 million respectively in
Dhanusha in October and couldn’t account for the money.
They were arrested as they were heading for Janakpur from
Jayanagar by rail.
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NO FLIGHTS IN AND OUT OF JANAKPUR COLD WAVE UPDATE

Kathmandu, 15 Dec.: There were no flights in and out of
Janakpur Thursday in central terai with a cold wave hitting the Himalayan, hill and terai regions.
Poor visibility prevented takeoff and landings of aircraft, civil
aviation officials said.
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OPINION

WEN JIABAO; A TALE OF TWO TRIPS

Kahmandu, 15 Dec.: As the nation prepares to welcome Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, we cannot but ponder how spectacularly things have changed on the geo-strategic front. Seven years ago, Wen studiously left Nepal out of his South Asian itinerary in deference to India’s sensitivities. This time, he is scheduled to arrive as part of his country’s sustained drive to challenge India’s traditional predominance in Nepal, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook.
After chiding the Nepali government for prematurely announcing Wen’s visit in violation of accepted diplomatic practice, Beijing subsequently has been leaking bits and pieces of information that are clearly aimed more at arousing the interest of audiences in India. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Nepal was never really a blip on the regional radar screen whose importance successive monarchs exaggerated for their vile ends. What is certainly new is that the Chinese have come forth in acknowledging Nepal’s importance with ever-greater candor after the country became a republic.
In February 2005, when King Gyanendra seized full executive control, China stood in sharp contrast to the rest of the world by calling it an internal matter. The royal regime, if not the monarch himself, sought to portray the stand as Beijing’s support for the takeover. The Nepalese opposition and key sections in India sought assiduously to reject the notion that the Chinese were in fact supporting the king.
In a flush of revisionist history, some Chinese experts, too, contended that the royal regime was needlessly reading too much into China’s traditional tenet of non-interference in foreign policy. But lest we forget, two months after the royal takeover, Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Wu Dawei told a news briefing in Beijing that his government supported the king and the government of Nepal to ensure national stability and reconciliation and for economic development. But Wu did not stop there. “The international community should respect the choice made by the Nepali people,” he counseled.
Wu’s forthrightness, however, could scarcely mask Beijing’s wider ambivalence. This was a time when the Chinese were miffed by the growing Indian and American involvement in the Tibet issue through the exile community in Nepal. Keeping quiet posed a problem for China. But openly backing the monarchy while New Delhi and Washington were both opposed to the royal intervention risked bringing the two largest democracies closer.
If the Indians could countenance greater American involvement in a country they jealously considered their exclusive sphere of influence, in the Chinese perspective, then that could only bode well for the evolving partnership between Washington and New Delhi to contain Beijing.
Anxious to keep the Indians away from the Americans, Wen decided to skip Nepal. But Beijing sent Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing to Nepal on a stand-alone mission, whose utterances backed the royal regime.
Since the real fight in Nepal was not over democracy, but a contest among disparate external players to deepen their foothold in a strategically sensitive region of the world, it formed weird alliances. India and the West were pitted against the Chinese, Pakistanis and Russians. Democracy gave a veneer of legitimacy for intervention for one set of players. Suddenly, the Maoists gained greater acceptability as responsible partners while still branded terrorists (assisted no doubt by their shrewd assurances on a wide range of often-contradictory “international” issues as Christianity and homosexuality.)
Washington and New Delhi, to be sure, were still not on the same page. But they felt it would be far easier to compare notes this way than having the Chinese to spoil things. The Americans and the Chinese continued to hold bilateral consultations on Nepal within the framework of their strategic dialogue. New Delhi, ever mindful of maintaining its strategic autonomy, kept Nepal on its formal consultations with Beijing.
Despite the growing warmth in relations between the Asian giants, China believed India was not being reciprocal. Less than three months after Wen’s much-touted visit to India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh travelled to Washington and signed a document that established New Delhi on a path towards military and security partnership with the Americans.
The suave Shyam Saran, former Indian ambassador in Kathmandu turned foreign secretary, flew in to Beijing in early 2006 with assurances that New Delhi was not out in a grand campaign to contain China. The Indians shrewdly fed the Chinese information on Nepal that aroused some alarm in Beijing. The quid pro quo was a go-slow on the US-India nuclear deal, which the Chinese anyhow believed their Indian surrogates in the Indian political left would be able to derail. State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan gave the first intimation of a rethink of his government’s Nepal policy by postponing his visit to Kathmandu.
To Beijing’s disappointment, during a March 2006 visit to India, US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Singh signed a nuclear cooperation agreement dramatically reversing long-standing US policy punishing India for its nuclear programs and its non-membership in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Worse, from Beijing’s perspective, the agreement allowed India to strengthen its civilian nuclear capabilities even while building a credible minimum nuclear deterrent aimed in large part at China.
When Tang did arrive in Kathmandu, it was too late for Beijing to walk back. Tang seemed to equate the royal regime with the alliance protesting it (by which time the palace had revitalized channels with Washington, which was queasy about the New Delhi-brokered 12-point alliance between the opposition parties and the Maoist rebels).
New Delhi, for its part, had hoped to pressure Beijing into settling the long-standing territorial dispute and failed. The Indians who pushed that approach today are openly calling for the deployment of the Tibet and Taiwan issues for that precise purpose. The game continues. Those political forces who railed against the monarchy for playing one neighbor off against the other in order to secure itself in power today find themselves able to do little else as a matter of daily survival.
It would seem audacious to some that an already weakened Nepalese monarchy was somehow a chip in the larger strategic rivalry of the times. Yet Maila Baje thinks it is within this framework that we can comprehend our current plight with a plausible degree of sanity.
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THE OTHER SIDE OF TERRORISM


Kathmandu, 15 Dec.: Plane hijackings and military coups were frequent in the 1970s through the 1980s. Other forms of terrorism were prevalent throughout history, and continue to be so in various guises. Some engage in such activity in the name of "freedom," "ending suppression and exploitation" or for "national defense", Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review.
The two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century did not occur overnight. The penchant for intimidating, annexing or colonizing in and outside Europe by European powers contributed to the eruptions that had effects on a global scale. The wars were basically the work of the European powers and hence thrust upon the rest of the world as well.
The vast colonies that European capitals had overseas were converted as sources for troops, materials and other purposes. The people in the colonies actually did not have much to say, except to abide by what the foreign lords dictated.
Talk of democracy and all those speeches on freedom of expression were confined to the vaunted precincts of the privileged in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels or Lisbon. The Scandinavian countries, too, do not have a glorious record in this respect.
Within Europe itself, the Polish were terrorized. So were the Balkan states. They were partitioned, divided among the major powers or offered pieces of the slice to those that needed to be appeased for yet higher profits.
In the post-World Wars decades, too, terrorist activities have taken place on most continents, not infrequently with the tacit support of national governments. South Asia has suffered a lot from terrorist activities. The worst is when governments are responsible and all sense of morality is thrown to the winds.
India represents an intriguing case. In the name of independence and shaking off exploitation of "indigenous" people, many militant forces have sprung up in the last seven decades since the country became independent in 1947 after the imperial British finally agreed to quit the land they used to describe as the "Jewel in the British Crown".
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed through terrorist tactics. The Maoists in India are among the many groups in quest of "revolutionary" changes. A fifth of India is affected by the Maoist movement that wants drastic economic and political changes, and the process is growing fast much to the consternation of the central government in New Delhi which claims to govern the "world's largest democracy".
By the way, democracy defined on the basis of mere population and multiparty polity would make the Vatican the smallest democracy and the Scandinavian countries that boast of the least corruption as among the pygmies among democracies. Nepal would be placed very high in the list. If population were the criterion for the scale of democracy, Nepal would beat most European countries and indeed Canada and Australia as well. But, then, Bangladesh and Pakistan would be much ahead of us and many more.
In the name of democracy, terrorism has been perpetrated in many countries. During the cold war years, both the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, backed all sorts of groups that they considered to be safer bets to serve their interests. The puppets or front organizations were funded, trained and armed for violent activity against both the state and even innocent civilians.
The sponsoring merchants of destruction generally kept themselves physically at a distance from the actual scene of action but constantly called the shots. Success was calculated on the basis of the havoc wrought and the casualty figures that soared.
In the so-called post-Cold war years, too, such terrorism continues in different guises, overt or otherwise. South Asia since the 1970s has been a den of terrorist activity whose intensity rises and falls, only to return with vengeance. Casualty figures in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka would exceed 400,000.
Kashmir, Assam and several north-eastern Indian states together with the Maoist-affected areas have suffered no less than 250,000 people killed in four decades. Maoist violence in India last year resulted in 1,169 killed, including 713 police personnel, 285 civilians and 171 leftwing guerrillas. Maoists have a force to reckon with in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal. More than 10,000 people have died in the conflict. They want a coordinated action with other rebel groups in Assam, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland.
Chiefly because of the ceaseless civil war in Afghanistan, Pakistan has suffered tens and tens of thousands of casualties. The United States found the country a convenient conduit for funneling funds, weapons and other supplies to the Mujahedeen groups fighting against the Soviet-backed regime first installed toward the end of 1979 and stretched for 14 years, although the puppet rulers got changed or ousted.
Governments in the capitalist West hailed the Mujahedeen fighting with the government in Kabul as a fight for freedom. They found the situation opportune for embarrassing the Soviets.
The Tamil militants in Sri Lanka received regular training in the Tamil Nadu state of India. For nearly three decades, the civil war in Sri Lanka created hardships for Sri Lankans. Led by V. Prabhakaran, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was declared a terrorist organization, yet Indian intelligence agencies were reported to have guided the armed rebels. Prabhakaran was, in fact, trained in India before he decided to base himself permanently in northern Sri Lanka.
In the case of Nepalese Maoists, New Delhi considered them to be "terrorists" but it pretended not to see them roaming freely in the outskirts of the Indian capital even as the former "Jewel in the British Crown" claims to be the largest democracy in the world.
Human rights violations in Kashmir are the worst in the whole of South Asia. Without the Western support, Israel in the Middle East would have come to its senses to recognize an independent Palestinian state long ago. The rich Jewish lobby in the United States has ensured that Tel Aviv can get away with anything to "protect" its sovereignty The West has had to pay the price of duplicity: allowing the dictators to rule and laze over the riches fetched by oil flowing from under the burning deserts, and yet crying "authoritarianism" elsewhere.
Peoples in many countries have since long suffered under state terrorism. But international human rights agencies are selective in picking similar issues in one country whereas they overlook the same elsewhere. Raw politics is the reason.
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