Indian Nuclear Plants Sitting Ducks

The nuclear developments in Germany over the few days on the heels of the Fukushima crisis has grave importance for India.

The German Chancellor recently did a 180 degree turn on her decision of last year to greatly extend Germany’s 17 nuclear plant’s lifespan. With overwhelming public concern for nuclear safety after Fukushima she now has proclaimed Germany will be free of nuclear power by 2022. Indeed, currently only 4 of the 17 plants are now on line. This was monumental as her policy of only late last year snuggly embraced the burning atom as the panacea of long cold German winter power shortages.

Fukushima of course was largely influential in this about turn. The world watched with dropped jaws and crossed fingers as we watched little men in white overalls look very industrious. For the better part of I was convinced they didn’t have the foggiest idea what they were doing, or worse what was happening, but it was terribly reassuring.

What wasn’t reassuring, actually quite destabalising, was that this was happening in the most technologically advanced country in the world. The world sees the Japanese as very clever and insanely organised, if not a little humourless. If it could happen there it could certainly happen in German, indeed they even share traits.

This is why the rest of the world certainly shouldn’t have nuclear power. The rest of us are dimwitted, disorganised and always up for a laugh.

But what has not been reported widely is the findings of the safety enquiry commissioned by Merkel to assess the structural integrity of the plants. This was the decider. Regardless that the tests were conducted with 30 year old safety perimeters they have concluded that none of the 17 nuclear plants would withstand a crash by a large plane and seven would not withstand the crash of even a light aircraft!

This is terrible news for India. "You don't have to take the bang to the enemy; the bang is already there when you take out his nuclear plants." India is surrounded by some strange idiot neighbours. Pakistan to her West should have been certified years ago and China to her north is madly ambitious. Giving these countries the courtesy of constructing nuclear plants for use as bombs at their convenience is being far too hospitable.

As Matin Zuberi says,"The core of a typical nuclear plant contains about 1,000 times the radioactivity released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high explosive bomb used against it would acquire the attributes of a nuclear weapon without its blast effect.”

What worries me to my core is that India could suffer an incalculably catastrophic disaster not from powerful missiles from a highly militarized neighbour but from some dribbling at the mouth nutter with a Cessna or a Tata tempo laden with explosives in the car park.

With the US assassination of Osama exposing the porosity of air defense systems, with their brazen abuse of Pakistani sovereignty, India is mortally defenseless. All it would take for an Indian nuclear plant to be breached would be a Pakistani helicopter with an almost effeminate explosive. If a German plant cannot withstand the impact of a small aircraft we can assume a plant in Kalpakkam would not repel a crazed, red eyed Pakistani pilot high on patriotic tripe.

The terrorist attacks of the last few years would not have found a place in fiction. They have been too brazen and wholly implausible. Now the ridiculous notion of a terrorist attacking a nuclear plant must star highly in security agencies risk assessments not in the grubby newsprint of pulp fiction. After 26/11 any satanic scenario seems wholly real.

If India cannot protect the heart of Mumbai, as indeed the Americans could not protect her New York from a handful of murderous zombies, then what hope can we hold for a dozen nuclear plants?

How could these plants be protected from erstwhile human beings who are dedicated, increasingly sophisticated and have, as the Headley trial has evidenced, State sponsorship? It is like the Peacock desperately trying to save her white domed, delicate eggs from the village rats. The point of difference being that only one egg cracked will leave Hindustan a desolate, sterile nuclear landscape.

It is deeply ironic how delicate these plants are that harness such brutal power. But it is deeply moronic that India’s political establishment have swallowed the sales pitch of nuclear plant manufacturers with this very real risk of incineration.

Are Australian Judges Mentally Challenged?

Chief Commissioner Simon Overland’s herculean effort to initiate change in Victoria Police’s cultural outlook towards Indian students has been given a kick in the guts by Judge Gaynor.

As a County Court Judge she has given a youth a suspended sentence for participating in an intense series of attacks on Indians in Melbourne. He drove a gang of seven thugs who viciously assaulted six Indians over a four day period in 2009.

She heard testimonial evidence of the gang “Punji hunting”, a term coined by the goondas for hunting Indians. Despite this, and this is where you will think someone has spiked your chai with an Old Monk Patiala, she judged that the attacks were not racially motivated but simply they attacked Indians because they were perceived by the gang as “soft targets”.

This is not the forum but this where the reader can let loose with some chaste Punjabi abuse. I certainly did.

I believe Judge Gaynor may have got her law degree from a guy I know in Nizammudin market and then hit her head on a speeding rickshaw. I wouldn’t let this woman judge a Methodist Church cake baking competition never mind cases of grave violence.

Listen very carefully Gaynor. When a gang goes ‘Punji hunting’ it is racist. When a gang attacks people because they are perceived as “soft targets”, based on their race, it is racist!

I cannot convey the seriousness of this miscarriage of Justice. It is a near mortal blow to a hope that Police and students can work together.

I was asked to brief the Victorian Police high command, with student leader Dayajot Singh, during the massive Indian student protests in Melbourne. Chief Commissioner Overland was not what I expected. He looks like he will knock you out with the butt of his gun, shove you in a car boot and bury you under the West Gate Bridge in a shallow grave. But he proved to be highly sympathetic to the student’s plight and very international in his outlook.

In fact he became too sympathetic. On the morning he rang me to say he was calling a press conference to ensure the State Government finally accepted the fact that many of the attacks were racist, he swiftly allocated enormous resources to sensitive areas. Sunshine, with mounted police, circling helicopters and regular patrols, was reminiscent of the Indian President popping out for a curry.

All of this constructive effort was in the face of blistering personal attacks from the Indian media. But he soldiered on. He suffered terrible clashes with the State Labor Government who made billions of dollars annually from foreign students but couldn’t find it in themselves to spend a pittance on the most basic transport security or indeed to increase Police resources. Which was infuriating as the Government demanded that the Police protect those very students.

Overland’s greatest attribute has become a terrible weakness. The Chief Police commissioner has a code of honour that has no place in the seedy world of politics. During the high pressure days of the Indian student attacks it is hard to convey how intensely he was besieged by a rabid media, both Australian and Indian. That code ensured he refrained from telling the media the litany of sexual assault cases perpetrated by the student community. Recently that code has ensured he has refused to bring internal Police politics in to the gutter, putting his job in mortal danger.

This positive attitude gave impetus to policies that embraced multiculturalism despite been wholly unfairly painted as a 1970’s South African death squad commander. I will never forget his heartfelt reply to a South Indian student who, on the verge of tears, at the Flinders Street protest confessed to not knowing if Australians wanted him in the country. ‘I want you here son’.

Indeed, contrary to popular belief, Victoria police led by Overland have made a herculean effort to apprehend a great number of perpetrators of attacks on students. Despite a lingering racism that still fouls Australian society of which Police are members of.

But now this.

What cop is going to even bother to take a report from a bleeding Indian student when he knows with certainty that the Judiciary are just like them but only more so?

Hazare Vs. Pawar. The Saint and His Sinner.

India’s split psyche is witnessing a mighty clash between Her personalities. Two colossal Maharastrian bhoomi putras. Hazare the son of the soil and Pawar who seems to own each and every last crumb of it. A man defined by austerity, on a fast unto the death, against a blimp, defined by unbridled greed.

This historical smack down began with the Government watering down the Lokpal Bill(Citizen Ombudsman Bill) draft to an unrecognizable concoction of itself. This molestation of the spirit of the Bill has been in process for the 42 years that the Bill has been pending. The original draft was designed to bring the corrupt to an expedited justice on a complaint of the common man.

This is in the spirit of the Right To Information Act that Hazare was so terribly instrumental in. An act that empowers any lunatic, who can bang up a letter, unprecedented access to Government files which leads to exposure of bureaucratic misdeeds. Previously this was the privilege of nephews of forgettable MLA’s and life members of the Gymkhana Club.

A memorable reported case was of a disheveled gentlemen dressed in a lungi and bathroom slippers given VIP treatment by his local ration shop administrators. Previously they had refused to supply him a ration card with a large dose of contempt. The chap had availed the RTI Act and these bullies, who had been pulled up by their superiors, supplied the card and asked for forgiveness.

The promise of this poetic justice cannot be compromised. But a cancerously corrupt Congress Government not only has redrafted the proposed bill to only allow the Speaker of the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha Chairman to refer cases of alleged graft but they also formed a Group Of Ministers to draft the bill led by none other than the perfect embodiment of corruption, Sharad Pawar. The equivalent of installing Tiger Woods as the Principal of Lady Shri Ram College.

I can imagine Hazare laughing heartedly to this comical absurdity then experiencing an intense contempt for another obscene molestation by Pawar on his country. Hazare has risen to lead this national movement out of sheer bloody mindedness. With a God like strength of character that feeds the energy needed to treat a cancer that most us see as inoperable.

That character has been formed by a hard life. Hazare hails from Ralegan Siddhi in Maharastra. The village was parched half dead by drought, alcoholism being the only thirst satiated with copious amounts of local grog. Her inhabitants in a life sucking feudal quicksand.

Returning to Ralegan Siddhi and fired by the teachings of the Mahatma, which he read quietly in his spare time whilst an Indian Army driver, he first tackled the alcoholism that crippled the villagers.

He then implemented a water collection and conservation system that made, for the first time, irrigation possible. A resurrecting, baptism of hope.

Then with community labour he built a school for the newly inspired village youth.

Constructive victories that made Ralegan Siddhi a pilot village for Indian rural development. A guiding light that saw untold thousands achieve a self reliance, allowing them to enjoy an undreamt of human dignity.

Pawar shares these developmental instincts. However, it is no secret that his ‘village’ population consists entirely of his close relatives. Who have enjoyed a long golden age of prosperity.

His criminal intelligence is colossal. If it had been applied to the betterment of India there is no telling where She would stand. There is no doubt his legacy would have shone a great shine. But now in the increasingly dim twilight of his life he is perceived as a pathologically greedy old man who has the gall to declare he is worth 3.6 crore to the Election Commission.

Pawar’s mantra of ‘greed is good’ is as fashionable as Hazare’s Gandhian beliefs are unfashionable. Hazare’s gospel of an India of self-reliant villages has long been pigeon holed in the looney file. But he has made a spiritual connection with a young middle class that aspire to internationalism and whose closest experience to rural India is Hauz Khaas village. Young adults who use mobile phones, the 21^st century’s Kalashnikov, indiscriminality.

Blissfully, with this genteel uprising Pawar has already resigned from the drafting of the Bill. Can the movement keep up this momentum? Can India find a peace between the two warring impulses instilled in Her DNA? The sulking tactics of utopian non-violence and shamelessly exploitative feudal politics. The rustic pureness of Khadi pressed against a comfortable Raymond suit.

I pray the final equilibrium finds an India that is not a fiefdom of fractured personalities. It needs to be home to the Lokpal Bill and sizeable prisons, well stocked with Pawar’s extended family.