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UTSA PATNAIK is a professor of economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is on the editorial advisory board of Social Scientist (Delhi) and Journal of Agrarian Change (London) and a life member of the All-India Democratic Women’s Association. Her publications include The Long Transition – Essays on Political Economy (1999); the volume edited by KN Panikkar and TJ Byres entitled The Making of History - Essays Presented to Irfan Habib (2000) and Essays in Honour of Alice Thorner in the edited volume On Measuring Famine Deaths (2001). The Republic of Hunger, presented on the occasion of the 50th birth anniversary
   of Safdar Hashmi in 2004, is also of
   special note.
   Utsa Patnaik has written extensively on capitalism and agricultural issues. Her publications on these subjects include The Agrarian Question and the Development of Capitalism in India (New Delhi, 1986) and Peasant Class Differentiation (New Delhi, 1987). Following are excerpts from an interview with New Age:
   You work extensively on issues of agriculture. How do you view the strong dissension among activists over food sovereignty and food security?
   I do not really differentiate it as such. By food security I mean production and availability of sufficient food and sufficient purchasing capacity of the people to procure that food. The achievement of food security cannot be left to the private sector or the market forces as private investment is unpredictable. So, the initial investment must be that from the state. Public investment must come into agriculture to make it sustainable.
   For instance in India, for 40 years between 1950 and 1990, there was a reasonable food security. It was ensured by means of policy support, public procurement and distribution. But then the current dominating economic model encourages export-oriented growth and quite alarmingly food security and export of food grains have an inverse correlation, meaning that one decreases if the other increases.
   But apparently India has a third of its total cereal production in excess of the total demand. How would export of excess cereal worsen the food security situation?
   It is not excess really. It is the amount that people cannot purchase due to deteriorating terms of trade for them. The cost of inputs have increased as the government have gradually, since the 90s, stripped the sector off its protection. Most of the subsidies have been done away with and the poor farmers have to fend for themselves which they cannot.
   As the government has decreased subsidies, the cost of production of agricultural products has increased but the value of their output has not increased correspondingly. As the domestic market gradually becomes integrated with the international market, ups and downs affect the local farmers especially in cases of such cash crops as coffee, tea, pepper and cotton.
   When they began to cultivate these crops, the prices were high and moreover, the farmers were protected from shocks in the international market. But later when there was no protection and prices of coffee or cotton marked sharp fall, the farmers found themselves going deeper into debt. And it has not gotten better. So those who had hoped to overcome their losses with more loans found themselves even more deeply indebted. As in most cases these farmers had borrowed money from the local moneylenders at an exorbitantly high rate of interest since they do not have sufficient access to institutional credit. At one point they realise that they would never get out of debt and in fact lose all their belongings.
   Put together there has been an erosion of the purchasing capacity of the poor and the per capita cereal absorption has decreased through the last few years and the 90s. Per capita production of food grain has also decreased. Currently people eat the same levels of food grain that they did 50 years ago and this figure has been decreasing since the government began to pursue neo-liberal economic policies in the early 90’s and opened up the market.
   The issue of famine features strongly in your writings. How would you place it in the current Indian context?
   Well, a famine is not the immediate result of wrong policies or unavailability of food for one or two years. It is a matter of culmination of a long process. The Bengal famine during the war years was actually preceded by almost 50 years of gradual reduction in the consumption of food grain. Between 1911 and 1947, the per capita consumption had decreased by about 40 per cent. The average of 200 kilograms per capita consumption in 1900 decreased to 136 in 1946. Then there was a severe shock which the people could not withstand.
   Quite evidently, there is a similar process going on currently in India. If the trend continues for several years more and there is a severe shock thereafter, most of the rural poor would surely be faced with severe hardship and the situation will be close to another famine.
   How do you explain India’s growth then? Its phenomenal growth is cited around the world as a model for economic reform and strategy. With the increasing income, the government can surely put in place a comprehensive system of social security or safety net?
   India’s growth has been a jobless growth. It is driven by the service industry. It means that although people are getting highly paid jobs at home and abroad, the opportunity is restricted to only a few and only those who cross several hurdles that would be almost impossible for the poor to do. Service sectors, especially information technology, would only employ a few hundred thousand and result in overwhelming economic growth. But this growth is neither equitable nor does the government take any measures to ensure that it becomes equitable.
   The fact that this model is cited around the world as a model is because gradually, after years of protection, the Indian economy has not gone into Fund-Bank (World Bank and International Monetary Fund) fold. It was surprising to see when a new government came to power in the early 90s, within barely two weeks there were a host of economic reform packages. The comprehensiveness and pace of implementation of these economic packages did not leave a doubt that these were pre planned. Even today the prime minister of India himself is someone who represents the neoliberal paradigm. It is the dominance of this open market philosophy that is hailed by the establishment across the world. That does not necessarily mean that it is reducing poverty or inequity in earnest.
   Regarding poverty, according to reports and on the basis of the international poverty line of a ‘dollar a day,’ India has made remarkable advances towards poverty reduction and is said to have already achieved its target of the Millennium Development Goals.
   The international poverty line refers to purchasing power. On that basis the Indian equivalent comes to something like Rs 12 per day, which is ridiculous and cannot be the benchmark for poverty. According to the official statistics the percentage of rural poor in India is only 28.3 but I have estimated that it is actually over 85 per cent. The anomaly can explained by the methodology used for official statistics which severely undercounts poverty since it merely extrapolates the poverty benchmark from a given base year but does not consider what the cost is at the current value which is evidently far more than what the deflator indicates.
   As for the international poverty line, it has been shown by scholars and academics that it cannot be a realistic measure.
   You criticise the neoliberal economic policies that require privatisation, liberalisation and primacy of the market. But there is also a strong socialist movement in India. Is it not possible to reverse the trend of economic reforms once they have been proven to be worsening disparity and poverty?
   The central government is not so interested in these matters as long there is enough growth and exports. But yes sure there are some instances of really progressive reforms and programmes. For instance, in Kerala, the chief minister approved the establishment of a debt relief act headed by a retired judge in 2006. The act addresses private debts as well as state debts that it decrees to be written off.
   The minimum procurement price of certain crops and cereals is also where local governments may exert some efforts and some have suggested increasing the official prices considering the cost of production. In case of tea, there is plan to monitor its prices and ensure that farmers do not have to suffer from the shocks.
   But these things take time and there has to be genuine commitment within the political establishment to do so. Fortunately, there are such efforts in the process and there are some people who genuinely believe in making people’s lives better. It is surely a difficult path but certainly not impossible.

DISCREETLY but progressively and confidently the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is expanding south and southeast almost uncontested – after the collapse of the former USSR-led Warsaw Pact – outside the mandate designated by its statute into the Arab Middle East as well as into the Caspian Sea regions.
   However, the US obsession with the Iranian threat and with finding an exit strategy from the Iraqi quagmire made Washington less attentive to Turkey’s legitimate vital national interests, thus insensitively antagonising the alliance’s southern strong arm and alerting it into the defensive, not against enemies, but against its own allies. Turkey now stands in the eye of a storm created by this same ally, a storm threatening a geopolitical fallout between the two NATO allies since 1952.
   NATO has already secured its presence on the middle tier between the two regions, in Turkey (a member), Afghanistan (where it has a 25.000-strong force) and to a lesser extent in Iraq where the western alliance is training the ‘new Iraqi army.’
   The contesting French influence had eased when former president Jacques Chirac near the end of his term shifted to coordinating with the United States in Lebanon; the French contest, particularly on the African theatre and especially on NATO’s northern Arab tier, seems to have been completely neutralised with the electoral victory of the new president Nicolas Sarkozy, who chose to engage Washington as a ‘friend’ and decided to rejoin NATO’s military structure.
   The absence of any credible indigenous system rules out any worthwhile obstacles to NATO expansion from within the Arab Middle East region. The League of Arab States is practically no more than a fractured, division-burdened high-level forum of a regional gathering structure with no teeth at all, threatened by the US-Israeli strategic alliance and NATO with disintegration into an alternative wider ‘Greater Middle East’ security structure that would embrace Israel as an integral leading partner.
   The expansion southward was highlighted on October 9 with the signing of a treaty with Egypt at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, ‘in a move that opens the door for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to be involved in security matters along Egypt’s border with Gaza (Strip),’ according to the Jerusalem Post the next day, to possibly secure, in particular, the Salahuddin Passage (Philadelphi Route), according to Ynet. Egypt has become the second Middle Eastern country to sign a treaty with NATO after a similar treaty with Israel in 2006.
   Both treaties with Egypt and Israel were initiated under the Individual Cooperation Programmes, which aim at ‘promoting political and military ties with the Euro-Atlantic and the Mediterranean regions along with security cooperation with NATO and MD partners, in order to enhance Mediterranean regional security and stability,’ NATO said in the statement.
   The ICP was upgraded from the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, which was adopted by the NATO summit in Istanbul on June 28-29, 2004 with an eye on the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council to have priority in joining the alliance in partnership arrangements. Both the ICP and ICI were conceived as mechanisms to bypass the NATO statute, which confines its expansion to Europe and the North Atlantic regions.
   The Mediterranean Dialogue was the vehicle the NATO used to approach partnership arrangements in the region. This dialogue was originally initiated by European founders of NATO to promote economic and political cooperation with the southern Arab neighbours; in 2002 the MD was upgraded to security matters of concern and in 2004 NATO elevated its dialogue status to conceived genuine partnerships and an expanded framework of cooperation. The MD branched off the much older European – Arab dialogue, which began in the last quarter of the 20th century as an economic, political and cultural forum that has nothing to do with NATO or military prospects.
   The ICP produced the Egyptian and Israeli treaties; the ICI had earlier produced cooperation arrangements with seven MD countries, namely Israel, Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan; similar cooperation was arranged with non-MD members of the GCC, namely Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia (which became an ICI partner in January). Since July 2005, the NATO has also provided air transport for peacekeeping forces in Sudan’s volatile Darfur region.
   Areas of both ICP and ICI cooperation arrangements include joint military war games, military training, defence reform, war on terror, countering Islamist militancy, military and security intelligence sharing, control of borders, demilitarisation of the surplus of old and obsolete ammunition stockpiles and Unexploded Ordnance, serving NATO ships at partners’ seaports, hosting NATO-supported regional Security Cooperation Centre/s, providing logistical support to NATO’s peacekeeping operations, helping NATO in patrolling the Mediterranean Sea and regional waters, countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction, ‘to get these states closer to NATO’s way of thinking,’ according to a NATO official, opening NATO defence colleges to partners’ military officers, and other mechanisms to enhance practical cooperation on regional stability and security.
   Initially adopting a low-key approach, NATO now feels more confident to send its secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and his deputy on unprecedented public visits to Algeria and other ICP and ICI ‘partners.’
   Scheffer may be officially warmly or cordially welcomed, but on the popular level NATO is conceived as a US tool to prolong both American grip on Arab oil and Israeli grab of Arab land. Accordingly, its presence in the region is abhorred and is fomenting further deep-seated anti-Americanism because of the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq and the limitless US support to the Israeli occupation in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
   Specifically, NATO’s treaties with Egypt and Israel, its cooperation with Jordan, with Lebanon falling within its mandate and the around the clock NATO patrols in the Mediterranean is in practice creating an external NATO wall that reinforces the internal military occupation walls Israel is erecting to tighten the siege it imposes on the Palestinian people.
   
   Interrupting, disrupting
   Kurdish-Turkish crisis
   However, ‘Just as the White House claims it has finally turned the corner in what it defines as the “central front” in the “war on terror” – Iraq – it has found itself desperately trying to contain new crises on the war’s periphery stretching east to Pakistan, west to Turkey and south to the Horn of Africa,’ Jim Lobe wrote in Asia Times on November 10.
   To prove his point, Lobe cited Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf’s latest ‘coup,’ the continuing threat of a Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, the looming probability of war between US-backed Ethiopia and Eritrea, ‘amid a lack of concrete progress on the Israel-Palestinian peace process, the ongoing political impasse in Lebanon, and still-mounting tensions between Iran and the US’ and amid an anti-Americanism that now pervades the entire region.
   This is for sure an unwelcoming environment for NATO, but at the same time an environment that the US, a leading NATO player, will use as the raison d’etre for dragging the North Atlantic alliance into even more expanded role in the region.
   ‘The situation along the border between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan most directly threatens the administration’s efforts to stabilize Iraq,’ said Lobe, but this is exactly where the NATO’s gradual, confident and successful expansion south could be curtailed, hindered and face problems because the US double-standard policies vis-à-vis what Washington herself lists as ‘terrorist organisations’ as well as her regional hegemonic plans pit the alliance against its Turkish founding member or at least create an environment conducive to a collision course between the two allies.
   In October, Turkey’s parliament overwhelmingly voted 507 to 19 in favour of ordering the army to launch an offensive across Turkey’s south-eastern border in search of PKK Turkish-Kurd rebels hiding in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks made no less than 24 attacks into Iraqi Kurdistan since 1984, but without effect. The PKK guerrillas could easily disappear in the rugged mountain terrain of the Qandil Mountains.
   Now the Turks are after their ‘terrorist-harbouring’ Iraqi-Kurdish hosts as well, who were securing a safe haven for Kurdish rebels, demanding their extradition, a demand that the US-allied Kurdish Iraqi President, Jalal Talibani, and the president of the Kurdistan regional government, Masoud Barzani, had categorically rejected and, motivated by seemingly Pan-Kurdish loyalties, announced their readiness to fight back any Turkish military incursion into their territories.
   The prospect of a Turkish-Kurdish war that could embroil the Iraqi Kurds, the only trusted Iraqi ally supporting the US occupation, and destabilise the only stable Iraqi region of Kurdistan to open a new front with a potential new flood of Iraqi refugees, this time Kurds, is a nightmare for the US. Washington can ill-afford to lose the support of either the Iraqi Kurds or that of the Turkish government across the border; both play a vital role in supporting the US war effort in Iraq.
   ‘With American troops already stretched thin and US military leaders not trusting most Arab-dominated units of the Iraqi armed forces, the United States has relied extensively on Kurdish forces for counterinsurgency operations throughout Iraq,’ Stephen Zunes wrote in the ‘Foreign Policy in Focus’ on October 25.
   
   US double-standards
   Meanwhile, Washington has turned her eyes away from the fact that Iraqi Kurdistan has become a safe haven for organizations outlawed by the US as ‘terrorist’ groups. The US-backed Iraqi Kurds were honest to their rhetoric of Pan-Kurdish nationalism and turned their US-protected region into a base for Kurdish rebels from and against neighbouring countries. The US-outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party took on Turkey; but a US-sponsored Iranian Kurdish group known as PEJAK took on Iran.
   Washington also turned a blind eye to the fact that the PKK since two years has become the mother organisation of four splinter groups each of them working separately but in coordination in Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq.
   On October 28, the turkishweekly.net quoted the author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of US Policy and the Middle East Crisis,’ Reese Erlich, as saying, ‘Kurdish and American sources say the United States has been supporting guerrilla raids against Iran, channelling the money through organisations in Iraqi Kurdistan.’ Writing in the latest issue of Mother Jones, Erlich reported that the PKK, which is listed on the United States State Department List of Terrorist Organisations, ‘about two years ago split into four parties in each of the countries where the Kurds live’ in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. ‘So the PJAK is the Iranian affiliate. Basically they’re still part of the same organisation.’ He added that the United States accommodates the presence of the PKK in Iraq, but opposes its actions in Turkey, while on the other hand it supports attacks by the PKK’s splinter group on Iran.
   Osman Ocalan, brother of the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, told AP last week that some fighters had moved toward Iran, and that there were now more PKK fighters there than in northern Iraq. ‘PKK forces are split into three parts situated in Turkey, Iraq and Iran,’ Ocalan said. ‘If there is Turkish pressure on our forces in Iraq, the fighters will head toward Iran.’ How could this free movement on Iraqi soil be possible without accommodation by the US occupying power and their Iraqi Kurdish arms?
   Iraqi Kurds’ Pan-Kurdish ‘solidarity’ with their Turkish, Iranian and Syrian compatriots is undercutting US efforts to contain further deterioration in its ties with Turkey. Two weeks ago, Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, said Iraq could not solve Turkey’s problems. ‘The handing over of PKK leaders to Turkey is a dream that will never be realised,’ he said.
   Washington seems caught between Iraq and a hard Turkish place, with whom relations are already thinly stretched by the recent US Congress resolution declaring the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks 90 years ago a Turkish ‘genocide.’ A recent German Marshall Fund poll found that only 11 per cent of Turks have positive views of the United States. One of the main factors in the extraordinary growth of anti-US sentiment among the Turks was the US unwillingness to pressure its ally Barzani to stop the PKK from crossing into Turkey.
   President George W Bush spelled out US opposition to a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq. Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan was infuriated to declare that the future of bilateral ties with the US will be determined by Washington’s active involvement against the PKK, without ‘double-standards,’ in accordance with US law that labels it as a terrorist organisation. Erdogan returned disappointed from his November 5 summit with Bush in Washington; the crisis lingers on as Bush could not assure the Turkish leader enough for Ankara to rule out the military option.
   ‘This crisis was predictable and predicted. US officials have long known that a Turkish incursion was just one terrorist event away. As tensions mounted, the administration had numerous opportunities to engage in preventive diplomacy. A combination of lack of imagination, incompetence and sheer lack of knowledge at the State Department has caused this impasse,’ Henri J Barkey wrote in the Washington Post on October 27.
   The New York Times on October 22 reported that ‘American officials acknowledged that neither the United States nor Iraq had done much recently to constrain’ the PKK. Current and former Bush administration officials said a special envoy appointed by the Bush administration in 2006, General Joseph W Ralston, ‘had recently stepped down in frustration over Iraqi and American inaction.’
   Ahead of their summit Bush sent his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to Ankara and to the meeting of Iraq neighbours in Istanbul with a ‘diplomatic’ proposal to diffuse the crisis based on hitting at the heart of the Pan-Kurdish declared loyalties of the Iraqi Kurds’ leaders, Talbani and Barzani, by splitting the Kurds into a terrorist camp, which Rice declared in Ankara as the ‘common enemy’ of her country, Turkey and Iraq and a non-terrorist camp which both men represent.
   During their summit on November 5, Bush promised Erdogan that Turkey would be furnished with US intelligence on the camps and movements of the PKK. The Turkish press reported this as a ‘green light for military strikes.’ For the US, the main issue now is that ‘Turkish military action is limited and strictly controlled,’ commented Spiegel online. ‘Where possible,’ the publication added, ‘military action should be coordinated with the (Iraqi) Kurdish regional government so as to avoid clashes between the Turkish army and the northern Iraqi Kurdish militias.’
   NATO had earlier expressed its solidarity with Turkey. On October 24, NATO defence ministers meeting in the Netherlands said the 26 allies expressed solidarity with Turkey in the face of the attacks. PKK rebels have killed more than 40 Turks in hit-and-run attacks over the past month. ‘I think the Turkish government is showing restraint, remarkable restraint under current conditions,’ NATO chief Hoop Scheffer told a news conference.
   But for how long could Turkey practice restrain before her NATO allies translate their so far verbal solidarity into deeds?
   Scot Sullivan, writing in The Conservative Voice on November 9, had a different interpretation of the results of the Bush-Erdogan summit: ‘The US is appeasing Iran and Iran’s PKK allies while preparing to confront Turkey. Such is the inescapable conclusion following Erdogan-Bush Summit. A careful assessment of the Erdogan-Bush summit indicates that Bush remains hostile to Turkey and sympathetic to the PKK-Iran Axis that seeks to partition Iraq. Bush made only two modest assistance offers to Turkey. Each offer raised more questions than answers.’
   First, Bush’s offer to share intelligence with Turkey implies that the US has been withholding such intelligence from Turkey until now despite US obligations within NATO and despite bilateral counterterrorism agreements. Second, the establishment of coordinating mechanism between the US and Turkey for conducting joint operations against the PKK is in reality ‘no more than a hotline, or more accurately a US phone number.’
   To add insult to injury, the ‘US brush-off of Turkey became evident, according to Sullivan, when ‘General Petraeus was named as the US point of contact. For the Turkish military, GEN Petraeus is pro-Kurdish. He approved without question the PKK military build-up in northern Iraq. He also approved granting the Kurdish peshmerga the status of an independent military force that is answerable only to Kurdish president Barzani.’
   
   Wider strategic envelopment of Turkey
   Turkey is a close NATO ally; she contributes troops to NATO’s operation in Afghanistan and provides access to Incirlik air base for heavy US military logistical support and supply to its forces in Iraq, where NATO is training the new Iraqi army. However, more importantly Turkey sits astride the cross roads of the huge oil reserves in the Caspian and Gulf regions.
   The Caspian Sea region is gradually emerging as one of the most explosive parts of the world and the US and NATO involvement is linking it inextricably to the already war-torn Middle East region. This NATO-US involvement is alerting the five Caspian states – Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan – to be on guard; in the past decade, the number of warships on the Caspian has almost doubled, while coastal infrastructure is also being rapidly reinforced, Vasilina Vasilyeva reported in Moscow News on November 8.
   On a wider scale the NATO-US heavy and aggressive involvement in both regions is strategically invoking defensive responses by Chine and Russia, which geopolitically consider both regions, but the Caspian in particular, their backyards; hence their evolving bilateral strategic coordination as well as their growing closer ties with Iran, the regional major player targeted by the NATO-US involvement.
   ‘The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is considering the possibility of providing security for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline,’ Vasilyeva quoted Robert Simmons, the NATO secretary general’s special representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, as saying. ‘The Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline runs to Turkey, a NATO country, and passes through the territory of Azerbaijan, a NATO partner. The protection of energy infrastructure includes the security of this oil pipeline in addition to other energy infrastructure facilities.’ NATO has also finalised a long-term programme to provide military support for all pipelines along the Caspian-Turkey-Balkans route. Vasilyeva added that terrorism is the biggest threat to the pipeline.
   On October 16, Russian president Vladimir Putin told Iranian media in Tehran that ‘international terrorism cannot be dealt with by expanding a military-political organisation that was originally set up to counteract the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. There is no Soviet Union and no Warsaw Pact today, while NATO not only exists but is expanding.’
   Counterproductive US policies is antagonising Turkey, which is indigenously deeply involved in both regions with vast strategic, economic and political interests, and consequently threatening to disrupt a successful NATO expansion south, invoking cracks within the NATO membership, and creating a pragmatic possibility for potential Turkish strategic shifts.
   Under the headline, ‘Turkey Rediscovers the Middle East,’ the July/August edition of the magazine Foreign Affairs wrote, ‘a significant shift in the country’s foreign policy has gone largely unnoticed: after of decades of passivity, Turkey is now emerging as an important diplomatic actor in the Middle East.’ Within this context Turkey’s pragmatic evolving ties with Iran and Syria, both condemned by Bush as two pillars of a world’s ‘axis of evil,’ is an indication.
   Similar pragmatic evolution of ties and coordination with the two major obstacles to NATO’s expansion south and southeast, namely Russia and China, could not be ruled out should the United States, the backbone of the alliance, persist with its political and military insensitivity to the strategic interests of her allies.
   Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait, UAE, Jordan and Palestine; he is based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied territories.

Doctrine of necessity

Doctrine of necessity was ill-judged by the EC regarding the BNP’s invitation case.
   MT Hussain
   Dhaka

The EC invited Saifur-Hafiz faction of the BNP for dialogue ignoring Hannan-Delawar faction. This indicates that the government is advancing with its so-called minus-two formula and the EC has lost its neutrality.
   One of the standing committee members, RA Ghani, has said that the meeting of 29th October was just a get-together but not a formal meeting.
   According to the constitution of the BNP, without permission of the chairperson the standing committee members can’t call such meeting.
   Abdul Hamid Chowdhury
   On e-mail

‘Businessmen’ well known for their corruption, misappropriation of money and notoriety should not be let off the hook under any grounds or circumstances.
   Syed
   Old DOHS, Dhaka

TCB needs new set of teeth.
   Akhtar Ahmed
   On e-mail

I think Pakistan deserves a break from dictatorships — these have harmed the country in many ways, including promoting radical violent Islamic groups, breeding terrorism and suppression of political freedoms. 60 years on, it is time to permit fair elections supervised by neutral bodies with a caretaker government at the helm during this process. Greater regional political and economic autonomy will ensure start of a long-lasting political process.
   Sabbir
   On e-mail
   

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