Letters to the editor

The India-US nuclear deal is a good deal. The best diplomats, scientists and well-wishers of India have worked hard to finalise it...

Good deal

•The India-US nuclear deal is a good deal. The best diplomats, scientists and well-wishers of India have worked hard to finalise it, and it is one that will not only get India out of the nuclear doghouse, but will in fact herald a new era in India-US friendship. Something that is overdue. Communists, especially the CPM, have done everything possible to hold India back from its economic renaissance and from becoming a rival economic power to China. They must be stopped and only the BJP can do this (It has special reason to cooperate, since the deal is in reality a culmination of the far-sighted steps taken by the BJP-led NDA government). A time comes in the history of a nation when petty political interests must be put aside. This the BJP must realise, and help India clinch the nuclear deal. The people of the country will not forgive any entity that lets down the nation on this issue.

— Bijayananda Patnaik

New Delhi

Valid comparison

•It was thought-provoking to see two leading lawyers — Arun Jaitley and Abhishek Singhvi — sparring on your pages on behalf of two major political parties. Singhvi as Congress spokesman may be doing a good job for his party, but judging from his rejoinder ‘Hitler, Pervez, Indira? Odious comparison to Jaitley’s article, I felt as though he was obfuscating the issue of Indira Gandhi’s imposition of Emergency. In taking up the three leaders’ basic motives and political compulsions behind imposition of a totalitarian rule — suspending basic human rights, muzzling the press, putting opponents behind bars,manipulating the judiciary and so on — Jaitley’s “comparison” seemed quite valid. Was Indira not equated with India and India with Indira by her own party president, the way Adolf Hitler was eulogised?

— M. Ratan

New Delhi

Fate of Acts

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•Although it has been ten months since the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, was enacted by the Parliament, it has not been brought into force till date. The Act, which was supposed to tackle the menace of child marriage more effectively by providing for strict measures and repealing the archaic Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929, is still awaiting notification of enforcement; it seems the Centre has forgotten about it. Even the Supreme Court took serious view of this matter when an NGO approached it for its early enforcement, but in vain. It is all the more unfortunate that the courts cannot direct the concerned governments by way of mandamus to notify any statute, as the power to decide the date of enforcement is vested in the executive by the Act itself. This needs to be corrected. Earlier, the much publicised Forest Rights to Tribals Act had met with the same fate. Do we need judicial intervention (activism?) even for enforcement of statutes?

— Hemant Kumar

Ambala

Bless the General

•Three cheers for General Musharraf: he is weakening Pakistan faster than India can. As is typical of him, he claims to be doing one thing and does the other. He claims that it was the rising militancy which forced his hand to clamp emergency and then proceeds to crack down on Supreme Court judges, opposition politicians and human rights activists. So, what happened to the lofty ideal of human rights that his government kept preaching to us? Still, we should now wish the general a long tenure as president so that the situation continues to deteriorate under his leadership.

— Surendra Sundararajan

Baroda