DELHI

THE HINDU

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2012

NEWS

11

New tactics to out Election Commission rules on paid news

under the scrutiny of the unsigned understanding for expenditure observers only providing publicity or write NEW DELHI: Even as it is tight- from the day his candidature in their support well before ening the noose around the was accepted by the Return- the papers were led. media-candidates nexus to ing Ofcer, some of them, in According to rules, each thwart paid news instances collusion with a few corrupt candidate had to open a bank through its district media journalists/media houses, do account for carrying out committees and expenditure all transactions and reach election expenditure acobservers, the Election Commission has come to know about new strategies worked out by them to break the rules. We have received reports that such paid news transStaff Reporter chairman and district actions had taken place in collector to look into some instances in the current MUMBAI: The Maharashtra complaints of paid news. We Assembly elections in ve Election Commission has have also written to the States well before the ling of sought the Press Council of Press Council and asked the nomination by prospecIndias assistance to check them to appoint a tive candidates, said Comthe menace of paid news in representative on each of missions Director-General the upcoming zilla parishad these committees, State Akshay Raut. and corporation polls in the Election Commissioner Informed sources said State. Neela Satyanarayan told a since the election expendiWe have created press conference here on ture account of a candidate, committees at various places Thursday. including the spending for under the corporation Ten municipal media publicity, would come J. Balaji count and paid news instances took place well before that either by cash or kind, the sources said. But Commission ofcials have agreed that compared to 120 paid news complaints received during the October-November 2010 Bihar Assembly elections, this time in ve States complaints did not even cross 80. The complaints were almost equal against both the electronic and the print media. On action against those in-

Ahead of Hu Jintao visit, Krishna to tour China

Sandeep Dikshit
NEW DELHI: A month before Chinese President Hu Jintao arrives here to take part in the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-IndiaChina-South Africa) summit, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna will be in China as part of the move by both countries to frequently exchange high-level visits in order to resolve pinpricks that bedevil relations. During a luncheon meeting between Mr. Krishna and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi next Wednesday, the two leaders will also touch upon substantive issues including climate change, the situation in Afghanistan and the role of neighbours in stabilising the country and, above all, the western squeeze on Iran, which is a substantial supplier of crude No act of impulse It is not an act of impulse. to both India and China. It came into being in the Meeting with Hus course of reform and opening successor? up and is rmly supported by Diplomats were trying to Chinas state policy and stratarrange a meeting for Mr. egy. It is not a policy of expeKrishna with Vice-Premier diency. Peaceful development and Chinese Communist Par- is a rational, strategic choice ty Polit Bureau member Xi made in line with the trends of Jinpeng, who is slated to suc- our time and Chinas basic ceed President Hu Jintao. Mr. condition, he explained.

Before ling papers, prospective candidates enter into a tacit deal with media, says EC
dulging in paid news, the sources quoted the Commissions October 20, 2011 order disqualifying Bisauli (Uttar Pradesh) MLA Umlesh Yadav (Rashtriya Parivartan Dal) for three years.

Matter referred to PCI

As far as action against media was concerned, the Commission referred the matter to the Press Council of India (PCI) for follow-up measures. Even in the Bihar polls, it had referred about eight complaints relating to paid news on media to the PCI, the sources added. A complaint relating to paid news against the former Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan is being heard by the Commission though the incident allegedly happened during the October 2009 Assembly elections.

Poll panel seeks Press Councils assistance

corporations and 27 zilla parishads are going to the polls on February 16 and February 7 respectively. The Commission has banned exit and opinion polls till February 16, Ms. Satyanarayan said. The Commission has received 18,881 nominations from 10 corporations. There are 5,219 nominations led for the 502 reserved seats. Ms. Satyanarayan said the Commission has also conveyed its displeasure to the State government for keeping it in the dark about the reasons for giving extension to the Mumbai civic chief Subodh Kumar.

Krishna will inaugurate the expanded Chancery at the Indian Embassy in Beijing to cater for the increased twoway trafc in recent years. Mr. Krishnas three-day visit, beginning Tuesday, comes less than a month after high-ranking Chinese ofcial Dai Bingguo came to India to hold the fth meeting of the Special Representatives on the China-India boundary question. While the atmospherics were good, analysts noted Mr. Dais article in The Hindu in which he discounted notions that China was preparing to attack India or derail its development. China will remain committed to the path of peaceful development, he said expanding on what he meant by peaceful development.

Three-month extension
Mr. Kumar was given a three-month extension on the last day of his term.

Bihar Health Society seeks explanation on tubectomies

Shoumojit Banerjee
PATNA: Taking cognisance of

Question mark over detection and treatment of TB in Mumbai

Vinaya Deshpande
MUMBAI: Experts here treating

Justice Ganguly, noted for frank and forthright views, retires

J. Venkatesan
NEW DELHI: Justice A.K. Ganguly retired on Thursday from the Supreme Court on attaining the age of superannuation. He was given a warm farewell by the members of the Bar and the Bench at a function organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association amid standing ovation from lawyers. Justice Ganguly was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court in December 2008. During his tenure spanning a little over three years, he rendered landmark judgments on various branches of law, in particular criminal jurisprudence, constitutional and human rights issues.

Cure rate of the New Sputum Positive (NSP) is 86.42 per cent for 2011 The civic administration does not have the count of all the TB patients in the city
scopes in which one has to observe the sputum continuously for seven minutes. If there are, on an average, nearly 70 samples sent to a laboratory, is it possible that the person will properly examine each sample, Dr. Phadtare asked. Moreover, there are many cases where the patients are X-Ray positive and sputum negative. Of the 14.5 million cases, only 3.5 million are sputum positive. Do you not treat the rest of the TB patients then? Only talking about sputum examination is wrong, he said. The civic administration does not have the count of all the TB patients in the city. Those who take private treatment are not included. The civic administration has the numbers of only those patients who are enrolled in the government-run Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP). Doctors say patients keep going to various doctors for better treatment and thus get out of the RNTCP net. Till recently, private patients could not re-enrol for RNTCP. A new criteria has recently been added, which will enable patients of private doctors to enrol under the RNTCP. The gures given by the civic administration are for the year 2011 when the new criteria was not included and thus give an incorrect view of the number of TB patients in the city. There is lot of mistreatment of TB patients. The fault lies with the doctors as well as with the patients. Proper diagnosis is not done most of the times. Early detection and regular treatment are key to the cure. But even the patients keep hopping around, Dr Jehangir Sorabjee, Consulting Physician and Professor of Medicine at Bombay Hospital told The Hindu. He said that there was no particular age-group less immune to the TB bacilli. Our patients are mainly from the middle class or the poor. Those suffering from HIV [Human Immunodeciency Virus] and diabetes are more at risk mainly because their immune system is weak. Nearly 50 per cent cases are non-pulmonary, he said.

the shoddy manner in which a controversial sterilisation camp was conducted by an NGO in the backwaters of north-eastern Bihar last month, the State Health Society (SHS) has served notice on the Araria district civil surgeon, directing her to explain how she gave a clean chit to the NGO that conducted 61 tubal ligation surgeries in a few hours. The move comes days after The Hindu in a detailed expose laid bare the conditions under which the camp was held by the NGO, in agrant violation of sterilisation norms, on the premises of a middle-school in the remote hamlet of Kaparfora. Investigating authorities from the SHS and the State police have found major lapses in the manner in which the camp was conducted on the evening of January 7 by the Jai Ambe Welfare society, an accredited NGO operating in the Purnea-Araria belt. In her report, Husna Ara Begum, the civil surgeon, stated that the camp had taken place during the day and that it had been a success, with no complaints from any of the beneciaries. The report had been presented by Principal Secretary (Health) Amarjeet Sinha, who at the time had termed it a prima facie account of the matter. Speaking to this correspondent, K.K. Singh of the SHS acknowledged that the NGO organisers had violated several norms while organising the impromptu camp. Camp timings should be during the day, from 9 a.m. to 4p.m. Further there was no evidence of any paramedical staff having been assembled by the organisers in this case, he said. When the patients exceed 30 in number, additional surgeons are usually deployed by the organisers, while in this case only one surgeon, A.K. Choudhary, operated on the patients, Dr. Singh said. It is yet to be ascertained from accounts whether those accompanying the surgeon could be dubbed quacks or not, he said, and added that the camp was overseen by a district medical ofcer. He, however, did not rule out alternative arrangements while holding such family planning camps in the remote hinterland. On the question of complaints from the beneciaries, he stated that there were only minor injuries, and the surgeries were by and large successful. Three women had profuse bleeding that day after tubal ligation surgeries were performed on them. Meanwhile, a fresh FIR (14/12 dated 02/02/2012) has been lodged by the Araria police against the promoters of the Jai Ambe Trust, accusing them of cheating and forgery. More than 60 forged stamp heads were seized by the police in a raid in Purnea.

Tuberculosis (TB) have contested the high-cure rate claimed by the civic administration and says the city lacks modern machinery to properly diagnose and treat patients. Surgeries, an important aspect of the treatment, have taken the back seat. The operation theatre in the Maharashtra governments only specialised TB hospital has been lying unutilised for major surgeries for more than ve years now. They have also said the government should allocate more funds towards the expensive treatment as lack of funds leads to discontinuation of treatment, putting the patients in a high-risk category. Nearly a month ago, a team of doctors from the Hinduja Hospital detected 12 cases of TDR-TB (Totally Drug Resistant Tuberculosis). An expert team of doctors from the Central government immediately visited the city and termed the cases XXDR-TB (Extra Extensively Drug Resistant TB). The team later graded it as XDR-TB for want of international acceptance of the term TDR-TB. I think TDR-TB should not be used. There is no international validation for the term. Moreover, if such a thing happens, it will lead to human disaster. The terminology has created panic among doctors, staff working in hospitals, consultants, trainee doctors, persons working in laboratories, post-mortem sections. They are the highrisk group, according to Jaisingh Phadtare, a pulmonologist and professor at the Department of Medicine, Grant Medical College, Mumbai, who has been practising since 35 years. The civic administration has said the cure rate of the New Sputum Positive (NSP) is 86.42 per cent for 2011. New Sputum Positive (NSP) cases are those patients whose sputum tests positive when tested for TB for the rst time. But experts have contested the claim. How does the sputum get examined? Not many places in the city have uorescent microscopes. They have simple binocular micro-

Side-effects
He said the patients drop out of the treatment or seek new doctors due to the sideeffects and the cost of the treatment. Lack of proper nutrition aggravates the problem. This is where NGOs play a very important role. In fact, the government cannot function without the NGOs. They are involved in counselling, ensuring uninterrupted drug supply, nancing the drugs, facilitating access to health service, giving moral support to the family, creating awareness about the need for nutrition, Dr. Phadtare said. NGOs such as the Chetana Foundation, the Lalbaugcha Raja Trust and the Mahalakshmi Trust have played an important role for years to support TB patients, he said. Doctors lamented the lack of thoracic surgeons in the city. It does not pay all that well. So hardly any surgeon chooses it now. But surgeries form a denitive role in the treatment of TB. The infected part is surgically removed, which takes off the load on the patients body, Dr. Phadtare said. The only State-run specialised TB hospital, at Sewree in Mumbai, has an Operation Theatre, but no major TB surgery has taken place there since 2006, the doctors at the hospital told The Hindu. No steps were taken to operationalise it till the news of the cases of alleged TDR-TB patients put the spot on the dilapidated condition of the hospital. We will operationalise the OT by the third week of February. The surgeons attached to KEM hospital, Nair Hospital, Sion Hospital will come on days allotted to them. The honoraries too are being contacted, Manisha PatankarMhaiskar, Additional Commissioner, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, told The Hindu.

2G case
A bold and courageous judge, he was known for his frank and forthright views and comments, which became evident during the hearing of the 2G spectrum case since October 2010. He was part of the Bench with Justice G.S. Singhvi in the 2G case in which 122 licences were cancelled on Thursday. With a smiling face, he endeared himself to the members of the Bar and the Bench. He was the Chief Justice of Orissa and Madras High Courts, before being elevated as a Judge of the Supreme Court. Justice Ganguly was convinced enough to observe in a judgment that the Supreme Court had violated the fundamental rights of citizens during Emergency in 1975. And in an unprecedented move, he commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence, earlier upheld by it, of a man who murdered four members of a family.

Justice A.K. Ganguly at a farewell function organised for him at the Supreme Court in New Delhi on Thursday. PHOTO: PTI He observed that Supreme Court violated the fundamental rights of citizens during Emergency Under Hindu Marriage Act, illegitimate children have rights over parents property, he held
tal rights of a large number of people in this country. The instances of this courts judgment violating the human rights of the citizens may be extremely rare, but it cannot be said that such a situation can never happen. We can remind ourselves of the majority decision of the Constitution Bench of this court in Additional District Magistrate Jabalpur. The majority opinion was that in view of the Presidential order dated June 27, 1975 under Article 359 (1) of the Constitution, no person has the locus standi to move any writ petition under Article 226 before a High Court for Habeas Corpus or any other writ to enforce any right to personal liberty of a person detained under the then law of preventive detention (MISA) on the ground that the order is illegal or malade or not in compliance with the Act. Justice Ganguly, while quashing the allotment of land made to the former Indian cricket team captain, Sourav Ganguly, in Kolkata by the West Bengal government, said We are sorry to hold that in making the impugned allotment in favour of the allottee, the State has failed to discharge its constitutional role. The said allotment was made by the government admittedly without verifying whether the allottee had surrendered the previous plot allotted to him. Such action of the government denitely smacks of arbitrariness and falls foul of Article 14. On Hindu law, he held that under the Hindu Marriage

Majority decision
A Bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Ganguly took the view that the majority decision of a ve-member Constitution Bench upholding the suspension of fundamental rights during Emergency in the ADM Jabalpur vs Shivakant Shukla case (1976) was erroneous. Justice Ganguly, who wrote the judgment, said: There is no doubt that the majority judgment of this court in the ADM Jabalpur case violated the fundamen-

Act (HMA), illegitimate children would be entitled to all the rights in the property of their parents, both self-acquired and ancestral. Interpreting Section 16 (3) of the HMA, he said: Such children are only entitled to the property of their parents and not of any other relation. The relationship between the parents may not be sanctioned by law but the birth of a child in such relationship has to be viewed independently of the relationship of the parents. A child born in such relationship is innocent and is entitled to all the rights which are given to other children born in valid marriage. This is the crux of Section 16 (3). Justice Ganguly made it clear that the President or the Governor exercising the power of pardon in granting remission of sentence to a convict could not encroach into the judicial domain and give a nding on the guilt of the convict. If such a power was exercised arbitrarily, mala de or in absolute disregard of the ner canons of the constitutionalism, the by-product order could not get the approval of law and in such cases, the judicial hand must be stretched to it. Taking a serious view of the former Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, at present Union Minister for Science and Technology, interfering in a criminal investigation against a family of a Congress MLA, he imposed an exemplary cost of Rs. 10 lakh on the State government. Coming to the rescue of hawkers, he held that they had a fundamental right to carry on with their business. He asked the Delhi government to enact law to regulate their trade keeping in mind the right of commuters to move freely and use the roads without any impediment. On personal liberty, he said that in preventive detention cases, the representations received from the detenus must be disposed of expeditiously and every days delay must be properly explained and accounted for. The representations should be very expeditiously considered and disposed of with a sense of urgency and without any avoidable delay.

Mahatma was a man of paradox, says Joseph Lelyveld

My book only has an unusual view of Gandhi as a social reformist. I mean to be provocative but not offensive
Staff Reporter
MUMBAI: Mahatma Gandhi and

Babasaheb Ambedkar had a lot in common but they could seldom stand each other, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld said in Mumbai on Thursday. Borrowing from Joseph Conrad, they both could be called the secret sharers, he said during a discussion on Gandhi and the struggling

subcontinent organised by the Asia Society. Mr. Lelyveld is the author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. Gandhi was a more divided and complicated man. If India has a social conscience today, which I believe it does, it can be called Gandhian, he said. Describing the Mahatma as a man of paradox, Mr. Lelyveld said: His truth became

If India has a social conscience today, it can be called Gandhian, says the Pulitzer Prize winner Gandhi was always a work-in-progress right till the end
[an] obstacle to progress, to difcult negotiations and negotiation with his followers. He would say his inner voice has asked him to do something. This was a very crippling approach to political life. Rejecting Rajmohan Gandhis criticism of his book, who called it cynical, Mr. Lelyveld said the book only had an unusual view of Gandhi as a social reformist. I mean to be provocative but

not offensive. Gandhi was always a work-in-progress right till the end. At one point Gandhi, who hated and resisted religious conversion and interfaith marriages, said in his ashram in 1946 only those marriages are permitted which are marriages between Hindus and Muslims. He said that Gandhi was deeply upset when he saw in Bihar during Independence that Hindus butchered Muslims with the cry, Mahatma

Gandhi ki jai. The Mahatma later described Independence as a sad affair. Mr. Lelyvelds book investigates the formative years Gandhi spent in South Africa and the struggle he faced with his home country on his return, as India continued to revere him even as it rejected values he considered central to his mission. Mr. Lelyveld said he would not have liked to cover Gandhi from close quarters as a

journalist. You may have written down exactly what he had said, but he would still ostracise you for writing something he did not mean. He said that Gandhis attitude to questions of journalists, who were not exactly reverent of him, was ippant and disrespectful. Ranjit Hoskote, cultural theorist, poet and art critic, engaged Mr. Lelyveld in a conversation after his talk.
...ND-ND