ssm@cmu-ri-leg.ARPA (Sesh Murthy) (02/27/85)
Dear Editor: At least once a day on television, radio or in the
newspaper I hear about the Third World. Is there a First and-or
Second world? If so, what do they stand for? - K.F., New York.
Dear K.F.: Yes, indeed, there are First and Second worlds, but they
are terms that are not used as often as Third World. The First World
consists of the Western industrialized non-communist nations, such as
Australia, Canada, Italy, United Kingdom, United States, West Germany
and others.
The Second World is the communist nations as a political and
economic bloc, such as Albania, Cambodia, Cuba, East Germany, the
Soviet Union, Vietnam and others.
Third World countries, such as India, Jordan, Zimbabwe, Morocco,
Indonesia and others, are defined as a group of nations that are not
aligned with either the communist or the non-communist blocs.
Incidentally, there is even a Fourth World; a group of nations
characterized by extremely low per capita income and an absence of
readily exportable natural resources. Countries such as Afghanistan,
Chad, Haiti and Sri Lanka, among others, fit into this category.
CALCUTTA, India (AP) - Britain's Princess Anne arrived Tuesday in
India's biggest city as president of ''Save the Children Fund'' to
visit relief centers in India.
The 34-year-old princess, Queen Elizabeth II's only daughter, was
resuming an official 10-day visit to India, canceled after the Oct.
31 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. She was received at
the airport by British High Commissioner Robert Wade-Gery.
The princess was to spend two days in Calcutta and was scheduled to
visit relief centers operated by Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity,
but she will not meet Mother Teresa, who is in Australia.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - Union Carbide Corp. plans to restart a
methyl isocyanate unit even though it has been unable to interview
workers at a similar plant in India where a leak killed more than
2,000 people, Chairman Warren Anderson said Tuesday.
But Anderson continued to insist that ''the combination of
circumstances that led to Bhopal (India) simply couldn't happen here.
It's inconceivable.''
Anderson, holding pep rallies Tuesday for Union Carbide employees
and retirees at the Charleston Civic Center, said later that the MIC
unit restart at nearby Institute depends only on approval by federal
regulatory agencies and the outcome of Carbide's own investigation
into the Bhopal accident.
He said the investigation is limited to technical matters because
the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation has refused to let Carbide
officials interview employees of the Bhopal plant. The agency also
has limited samples the company can take from the plant, he said.
Anderson said investigators have been able to obtain only samples
''from the bottom of the tank'' where the leak occurred.
During a brief news conference, Anderson also refused to say whether
he would enjoy living in Institute, where a constant odor permeates
the air around the Carbide plant.
''I wouldn't be worried to live there,'' he said. ''Anything that we
can do to tighten down and make less and less escapes from plants and
less fumes in the air is the direction we need to go toward.''
The Institute MIC unit has been shut down since the Dec. 3 accident
in India. Carbide announced earlier this month that it will restart
the unit in April following its Bhopal investigation.
NEW DELHI, India (AP) - Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi rejected a
demand that he order a judicial inquiry into the killing of more than
2,500 Sikhs following the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi.
Reports by three Indian civil liberties groups, as well as newspaper
accounts, said police and some members of the governing Congress
Party instigated mobs to attack Sikh homes and shops in reprisal for
the Oct. 31 slaying of Mrs. Gandhi, her son's predecessor.
The government has said Mrs. Gandhi was killed by two Sikh members
of her security guard.
Gandhi said he had been asked if he was shielding anyone by not
ordering an inquiry. ''Of course, I am. I'm shielding the Sikh people
themselves,'' the United News of India quoted him as saying. He did
not elaborate.
India's New Prime Minister: A Man in a Hurry
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
c.1985 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW DELHI, India - By the tens of thousands, politicians from across
India arrived here earlier this month, resumes in hand. But for many
of these aspirants for new terms in public office, a surprise was
waiting.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who had already removed numerous
political veterans, this time denied no fewer than 40 percent of his
party's incumbents a chance to run in state elections in March. Many
of those ousted were veterans of years of legislative service.
After little more than 100 days in office, Gandhi is still jolting
the expectations of many supporters and critics with a series of
changes in the government that he inherited when his mother, Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi, was assassinated on Oct. 31.
The overriding impression Gandhi is generating is that of a young
man in a hurry, apparently convinced that an opportunity to shake the
system comes rarely in a nation's history.
''I can tell you that if today we do not take hard decisions,'' he
told an interviewer recently, ''then it is going to be a long time
before anybody is going to get the chance.''
Political commentators here, however, agree that there has been more
talk than action so far. The talk has been of modernizing government,
eliminating corruption, giving new incentives to farmers and
businesses, cleaning the environment and healing the wounds that
remain after the riots of November.
But among Gandhi's actions were several that commentators also say
would probably not have been taken by his mother.
Almost immediately after his Congress (I) Party swept the national
elections in December, for instance, Gandhi dismissed several of his
mother's key advisers.
This month, he reshuffled dozens of senior bureaucrats, transferring
many of them to posts outside New Delhi. This week, the government
dismissed three heads of nationalized banks accused of making
fraudulent loans.
Gandhi has also set up a Cabinet-level commission to deal with Sikh
leaders to find a solution to the dispute over Sikh demands for
greater autonomy for Punjab, the fertile state in the northwest. A
group of Sikhs, including two security guards, have been accused of
conspiring to kill Mrs. Gandhi.
In addition, the 40-year-old prime minister has made several
gestures to his badly splintered political opposition, apparently
mindful that although his party won 80 percent of the seats in
Parliament, it won only 49 percent of the vote.
Accordingly, when the chief minister of the state of Karnataka
offered to resign after his party was defeated, Gandhi allowed him to
remain in office. The official, Ramakrishna Hegde, a key leader of
the opposition Janata Party, praised the prime minister for ''showing
a refreshing departure from the past.''
Gandhi has also allowed more time for the opposition on state
television.
-
In the opinion of many experts, few things have corrupted Indian
politics more in recent years than the practice of buying off
legislators with bribes or promises of office to topple state
governments. An estimated 2,700 defections occurred between 1967 and
1983.
Mrs. Gandhi took the practice to a national scale, toppling the
government in Kashmir last year and trying unsuccessfully to do the
same in Andhra Pradesh in southern India. Last month, after years of
talk about changing the system, Gandhi won passage of a bill to
effectively prohibit defections for the first time.
Crisscrossing the country on behalf of Congress Party candidates in
state elections set for March 2 and 5, Gandhi repeatedly refers to
the anti-defection bill as a symbol of the changes he seeks.
''We will give a clean, efficient and honest government, the like of
which was never seen before,'' he told an audience in Mangalore last
week. This week, he called for a return to ''the good old days'' of
idealism and honesty.
The anti-defection measure bars any defecting lawmaker from holding
office. Praised widely as a reform, it has a crucial side effect. It
would also make it harder for Gandhi's own allies to desert him
should they come to resent his changes.
''People are saying that the anti-defection bill was actually a
clever move on his part to protect his own majority in Parliament,''
said Romesh Thapar, editor of the monthly magazine Seminar.
If it was, it demonstrates at least that a leader once dismissed as
untested is now being judged as shrewder than people thought. With a
certain nimbleness, Gandhi is asking votes both to continue in his
mother's tradition and to overhaul the system he inherited from her.
''Power has gone from the old and corrupt to the young and
upright,'' said Srikant Verma, the Congress Party general secretary,
who added hastily, ''That does not mean that all congressmen were old
and corrupt or there was corruption in Mrs. Gandhi's time.''
In any case, Gandhi appears to have established an extraordinary
chemistry with voters.
Newspapers continue to gush over his every move. His aides may go to
work in business suits, but Gandhi's wearing the Congress Party
uniform of a kurta, or tunic, with a shawl draped across one shoulder
is inspiring many young people. At parties where the music tends to
be Michael Jackson or Boy George, young men are showing up in
Rajiv-style kurtas.
On the one hand, Gandhi has proved himself adept at polemics,
accusing his political foes of incompetence, dishonesty and worse. On
the other, he has promised not to ''lose my head'' because of his
powerful position and was willing to tell one interviewer that ''what
is scary is the expectations people have.''
He has also promised to resign if he does not fulfill his promises.
Political commentators generally predict that Gandhi's popularity
will bring fresh victories to the Congress Party in March, when 11
states and one union territory elect legislatures. Three quarters of
the country's voters are to take part. There will be no voting in the
Punjab or in Assam, where conditions remain unsettled.
The elections are considered essential to the prime minister's
efforts to cement his victory in December and govern effectively. Not
surprisingly, many government decisions are being held in abeyance
until then.
The delays have meant that Gandhi's sweeping promises of action and
reform remain to be put into effect. The most serious delay has been
in his pledge to find a solution to the disputes over the Punjab and
the Sikhs.
Thousands of innocent Sikhs were beaten and about 1,000 people were
killed in the rioting that followed Mrs. Gandhi's assassination.
There has been testimony that the police, with the encouragement of
certain political leaders, stood by and in some cases took part in
the violence. Yet Gandhi also continues to reject Sikh demands for an
impartial inquiry into what happened. Critics say this refusal is the
biggest blemish of his time in office.
-
Gandhi reiterated his position Tuesday, asserting that an inquiry
would only stir up hostility toward Sikhs among Hindus. ''I am very
keen to safeguard the interests of the Sikhs and do not want any
anti-Sikh atmosphere to be built up again,'' he said.
He won praise from many quarters for his vow to investigate fully an
espionage network in the government. At the same time, it has been
noted that he and his aides waited until after the elections in
December to disclose the existence of the operation.
He promises also to reduce the government's role in regulating the
economy and creating unnecessary jobs. But when there was talk of
dismissing 2,000 railroad employees as useless, he was reported to
have been burned in effigy in West Bengal, and the government kept
the workers.
Western diplomats say they hope that Gandhi will shift India's
orientation a little bit away from the Soviet Union, if only because
of his supposed realization that Western Europe and the United States
can help India best in modernizing.
The prime minister has so far shown no signifiiant signs of
diminishing New Delhi's friendship with Moscow, however. He was
careful to schedule a trip there before his trip to the United States
next June. In calling for a nuclear freeze and a ban on weapons in
outer space, Gandhi has also sided with the Russians.
--
uucp: seismo!rochester!cmu-ri-leg!ssm
arpa: ssm@cmu-ri-legtodd@reed.UUCP (Todd Ellner) (03/03/85)
> > Dear Editor: At least once a day on television, radio or in the > newspaper I hear about the Third World. Is there a First and-or > Second world? If so, what do they stand for? - K.F., New York. > Dear K.F.: Yes, indeed, there are First and Second worlds, but they > are terms that are not used as often as Third World. The First World > consists of the Western industrialized non-communist nations, such as > Australia, Canada, Italy, United Kingdom, United States, West Germany > and others. .... and on, and on, and on. What the hell does any of this article have to do with net.cooks? Todd Ellner
jerem@tekgvs.UUCP (Jere Marrs) (03/04/85)
> > > > Dear Editor: At least once a day on television, radio or in the > > newspaper I hear about the Third World. Is there a First and-or > > Second world? If so, what do they stand for? - K.F., New York. > .... and on, and on, and on. > What the hell does any of this article have to do with net.cooks? > > Todd Ellner *INDEED! ** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE ***