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EDITORIAL
NOIDA/DELHI
THE HINDU
Grounding
Vijay Mallya
he suspension of Vijay Mallyas diplomatic
passport by the Ministry of External Afairs,
within a week of his failing for the third time to
heed an Enforcement Directorate summons to
appear in connection with a money laundering probe, is a
prompt and appropriate step. The Directorate had
repeatedly sought his personal presence and, in the face
of non-compliance, wrote to the MEA seeking revocation
of the passport. The Ministry, which has given the liquor
baron a weeks notice to explain why the oicial travel
document should not be revoked or impounded, should
increase the pressure on him to return to India and face
the law of the land. As a sitting member of the Rajya Sabha he is due to retire on June 30 and as someone who
portrays himself as the victim of a campaign of calumny
and asserts that he has neither the intention nor any
reason to abscond, it is appropriate that he submit himself to due process. At its last hearing, the Supreme Court
had given him time until April 21 to clarify when he
would appear before the court. Regardless of his dim
view on the merits of the allegations against him, Mr.
Mallya still has to discharge his liabilities, which the
banks that have lent to his companies have quantified at
about Rs.9,000 crore. He also has to answer the Central
Bureau of Investigations charge that the Rs.900-crore
loan Kingfisher Airlines had taken from IDBI Bank involves money-laundering; it is in this connection that an
open-dated, non-bailable warrant against him was issued
by a special court in Mumbai.
Mr. Mallyas elbow room is shrinking, and he must
know that he is not merely battling the legal consequences of corporate loans gone bad. He is also battling a widespread perception that the loans went bad because of his
profligate ways, poor management and possible malfeasance. His flamboyant lifestyle has been central to contributing to a negative public perception; if anything, his
sudden exit from the country has only added weight to
such a view. He has challenged the determination by
banks that he is a wilful defaulter by arguing that he is
personally not a borrower, and only gave a personal guarantee for corporate loans. Any credibility that one could
attach to his defence will have to flow from his own conduct and submission to due process in this country,
something that the Supreme Court has underscored by
asking him for a possible date for his appearance and an
authentic statement of his assets. The Central government must not ease the pressure on him, and must take
recourse to all diplomatic and legal means to achieve the
objective of bringing him back. It cannot aford to lend
the impression that it allowed Mr. Mallya leave India at a
crucial stage in the legal proceedings for recovery of the
money due from him and is not doing enough to submit
him to the process of law.
On March 31 and
April 1, leaders of
52 countries including
India
came together in
Washington DC
ZIA MIAN &
for the fourth NuM.V. RAMANA
clear
Security
Summit. Held every two years since 2010, these summits
started with the recognition of the risks
posed by plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU), the key ingredients for making
nuclear weapons, and aimed to secure all
vulnerable nuclear material in four years.
Despite this high-level political attention,
and fanfare, these summits have achieved little. To make matters worse, countries that in
2010 were producing plutonium and highly
enriched uranium continue to do so, and the
dangers from nuclear weapons have been
neglected.
The main failings were of conception and a
political willingness to settle for easy options. Despite the expansive declarations of
the need to maintain efective security of all
nuclear materials, which includes nuclear
materials used in nuclear weapons, the summits narrowed their focus to civilian holdings in non-nuclear weapon states. This material is already being monitored by
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
inspectors and, more importantly, is but a tiny fraction of actual global stockpiles. Some
numbers will help put this in perspective.
Obama said at hundreds of military and civilian facilities around the world, theres still
roughly 2,000 tons of nuclear material.
(600 kilograms) of weapons-grade plutonium, while Pakistan has about 0.2 tons (200
kilograms). India is also believed to have separated about 5 tons of reactor-grade plutonium material that can be fashioned into nuclear weapons but was not made for that
purpose. India has another 0.4 tons of reactor-grade plutonium that it has placed under
IAEA safeguards and thus is not available for
use in weapons. Pakistan, so far, has no stockpile of reactor-grade plutonium.
Many, including Mr. Obama, have recognised that plutonium is a problem. Speaking
in Seoul, South Korea, in 2012, he stated, We
know that just the smallest amount of plutonium about the size of an apple could
kill hundreds of thousands and spark a global
crisis. This is why we simply cant go on accumulating huge amounts of the very material, like separated plutonium, that were trying
to keep away from terrorists.
This insight, shared by almost all countries
with nuclear energy, has been lost on Indias
Department of Atomic Energy, which is committed to the separation of plutonium from
the spent fuel from nuclear reactors (dubbed
reprocessing). It has also pursued the construction of a special kind of nuclear power
plant called a fast breeder reactor that makes
more plutonium than it consumes as fuel.
Most countries with nuclear energy have
never gone down this route; of the few countries that have tried, most have abandoned it.
Nonetheless, India continues to pursue this
goal despite the fact that the two technologies underlying this way of generating nuclear energy, reprocessing and fast breeder reactors, have proven hugely expensive and
CARTOONSCAPE
CM
YK
highly problematic.
But nuclear developments in India and Pakistan did come up at the 2016 summit. In his
wrap-up statement to the media, Mr. Obama
pointed out two major obstacles to nuclear
disarmament. The first was that it is very
diicult to see huge reductions in our nuclear arsenal unless the United States and Russia, as the two largest possessors of nuclear
weapons, are prepared to lead the way. The
second was wed need to see progress in Pakistan and India... making sure that as they
develop military doctrines, they are not continually moving in the wrong direction. He
is correct on both counts.
No sign of scaling down
Any real progress towards ending the
grave danger posed by nuclear weapons to
humankind must address the brute fact that
the United States and Russia had about
14,700 nuclear weapons (as of 2015), and the
other seven nuclear weapon states held a
combined total of about 1,100 weapons.
Worse yet, both the United States and Russia
have launched massive long-term nuclear
weapons modernisation programmes,
which in the case of the United States is estimated to cost as much as $1 trillion over the
next 30 years. For a President who started of
promising in Prague in 2009 that the United
States will take concrete steps towards a
world without nuclear weapons, the modernisation programme represents Mr. Obamas greatest failure.
Similarly, the nuclear situation in South
Asia is bad and getting worse, just on a smaller scale. And this has been the failure of
South Asian leaders. Both countries are developing nuclear arsenals that are basically
scaled-down versions of those created by the
superpowers during the Cold War. India has
developed a variety of land-based missile
types and is operationalising the Arihant nuclear-powered submarine, to be armed with
the 700-km range K-15 or 3,500-km range K-4
nuclear missiles. Pakistan, for its part, has
been developing air-launched, groundlaunched and sea-launched cruise missiles
and an array of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, some with ranges of over 2,000 km. It
also has a naval strategic forces command
and may arm some of its conventional submarines with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles,
and, in the long term, seek to build its own
nuclear-powered submarine.
Pakistan also is seeking nuclear weapons
to use on the battlefield. These pose special
challenges; as the White House Press Secretary explained, Tactical nuclear weapons
that are designed for use on the battlefield
are a source of concern because theyre susceptible to theft due to their size and mode of
employment the threshold for their use is
lowered and these weapons create the risk
that a conventional conflict between India
and Pakistan could escalate to include the
use of nuclear weapons.
Just as India clings to its plutonium ambitions, Pakistan refuses to budge on its tactical
nuclear weapons. General Khalid Kidwai,
who for 15 years was responsible for the
countrys nuclear weapons programme, insists that Pakistan would not cap or curb its
nuclear weapons programme or accept any
restrictions.
The future looks bleak. Years have been
wasted securing small amounts of nuclear
material while real nuclear dangers have
grown. To address the nuclear threats that
actually imperil the world, the focus should
be on getting states to make a clear commitment to eliminate nuclear weapons and
agree to concrete and urgent plans to eliminate nuclear arsenals and the nuclear material stockpiles that make them possible.
Zia Mian and M.V. Ramana are with the Program on
Science and Global Security, Princeton University, U.S.,
and members of the International Panel on
Fissile Materials.
Letters emailed to letters@thehindu.co.in must carry the full postal address and the full name or the name with initials.
KG gas scam
In its eastern ofshore units, the
Gujarat
State
Petroleum
Corporation is currently dealing
with High Pressure and High
Temperature (HPHT) fields that
are being explored in very few
parts of the world (The new KG
scam, April 18). Such diicult
projects are known to take time to
develop. Perhaps the fact that
ONGC has not produced a single
barrel of oil from its deepwater
eastern ofshore locations till now
might help.
Oil companies take up projects
only after elaborate surveys by the
Directorate
General
of
Hydrocarbons There is oil and gas
The
proposed
high-octane
campaign towards having smaller
families, with spacing of children
to protect maternal health, is
welcome (Weekend Being page
Whats the family plan?, April
17). For long, the emphasis on the
small family norm has been
ignored. Demographers generally
agree that unchecked global
population growth will impact
everything from pollution control
to new epidemics like Zika,
sustainable
food
production,
climate change, and freshwater
supplies. Overpopulation is the
unspoken driver of environmental
destruction. Rising numbers with
only a finite supply of resources on
our planet is a recipe for disaster,
and managing this is the challenge.
India no doubt was one of the
earliest nations to adopt family
planning as a national mission but
somewhere along the way we seem
to have lost the plot. A fresh
national approach to encouraging
small families, especially among
those who are poor, should be our
priority and the campaign should
proceed in this direction. Benefits
like enhanced rations, access to
clean fuels like gas, state medical
benefits, and continuing education
should be the incentives towards
adopting a small family norm.
J. Anantha Padmanabhan,
Tiruchi
H.N. Ramakrishna,
Bengaluru
ND-ND