CHINA BAZAARBAZAAR Workers Against CHINESE TOYS, CHINESE JEWELLERY ANY ITEM for Rs
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16-22 April, 2003; NOW! 1 SIKKIMESE eeman(Meals) JA PURE VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT PEOPLE NOT GANGTOK; WEDNESDAY, April 16-22, 2003 READY FOR Sirf Khana CONGRESS ANAND LAMA SPEAKS OUT ON THE REASONS HE SpecialisedNo North Bar Indian cuisine QUIT CONGRESS and special fast food items All items TROLLEY served. JEEMAN (MEALS), KUNDEH-KHANG BUILDING, NEAR TURN TO pg 7 SADA THANA, TIBET ROAD, GANGTOK. Phone: 225098. NOWSIKKIM MATTERS VOL 1 NO 42 ! Rs. 5 E-MAIL: [email protected] FOR DETAILS sudden communique Afrom the Prime Minister’s Office announced that the PM WHEN THE PM COMES CALLING was taking up Sikkim’s invita- tion for a visit. a NOW! pic The State had 48-hours to prepare for the first visit by a Prime Minister in nine years. Sikkim must have done something right, by the time Mr. Vajpayee left on Monday, he had announced a Rs. 500 crore economic package for the State. Although the Prime Minis- ter insisted that he had no “po- litical agenda,” and that the visit was more for rest than for anything else, he kept a rather hectic schedule. Meetings with political par- ties and the routine accept- ance of memoranda were part of his itinerary. Every political leader worth his salt pre- sented his take on Sikkim politics to the PM and delimi- tation ranked highest in eve- ryone’s concerns. NOW! provides details of the various representations made to the visiting PM and his comments on the Sikkim experience. TURN TO PAGES 3, 4, 5 AND 6 FOR DETAILS 4 DAYS=Rs. 500 CRORES FIRST TIME IN SIKKIM Chamling warns party CHINACHINA BAZAARBAZAAR workers against CHINESE TOYS, CHINESE JEWELLERY ANY ITEM FOR Rs. 90 indulging in CHINESE BELLS, CLOCKS, STEEL UTENSILS, UMBRELLAS, CHINESE MATS, PLASTIC communal CONTAINERS, CRICKET BATS, CHINESE GIFT ITEMS, BAGS... AND MANY MORE FABULOUS ARTICLES!!!!!!! politics TURN TO pg 11 CHINA BAZAAR, HOTEL BAYUL, MG MARG. FOR DETAILS NOW OFFERS IT’S ANNUAL SCHOLARSHIP Near Krishi Bhawan, Tadong Gangtok. Phone 270876 UPTO 30% Below Power Deptt, Kazi Road Gangtok. Phone: 227917 ON DIPLOMA & OTHER COURSES Nayuma Building, Namchi Bazar Namchi. Phone: 263919 RUSH TO YOUR NEAREST CENTRE TODAY e-mail: [email protected] 1 2;GANGTOK NOW! 16-22 April, 2003 16-22 APRIL, 2003 ED-SPACE A TYRANT DISAPPEARS SIKKIM MATTERS Turbulence Ahead These are uneasy times we live in. A time, when people, despite years of education teaching them otherwise, throw all sobriety to the wind and get possessed by paranoia: the minority starts fearing being swamped by the majority; the majority views minority efforts at furthering their cause as unjustified; or at best, an exercises in political gimmickry; the powers that be get distrustful of the fourth estate and the media gets carried away by sensationalism. It is all a babble of voices and the decibels keep rising and the ca- cophony results in even more confusion and distrust. The usual suspects during such periods of hyperbole are the politicians. But turn to any camp and they will sol- emnly hold that the pollution of Sikkimese society is the handiwork of “vested” interests. Given how things have shaped up, and where it could lead, the situation can serve no one’s “vested” interest. No politician, bureaucrat or pro- fessional can benefit from the animosity which recent de- velopments have been sowing in the Sikkimese society. Divisions along caste and community lines exist in all societies, but because we claim to be civilised, these divi- SO, WHO FEELS SAFE? sions are kept blurred and under-played. It is easy to put up a harmonious front with combined cultural programmes the hands of a vengeful Red Army nalized so that its revival becomes and mutual back-slapping during less turbulent times. The by ALAN COWELL (though some said part of his skull impossible. test of our maturity as a society and as a democracy comes survived and was presented to Every dictatorship, though, is when this camaraderie can be maintained even during dif- he statues were toppled, the Josef Stalin). distinctive and finds its distinctive ficult times. The anonymous pamphlets and phone calls portraits defaced, the pal- In Romania in 1989, Nicolae end. Mengistu Haile Mariam fled have already started making the rounds. People are less Taces stripped of their fin- Ceaucescu did not flee his enraged Ethiopia in 1991 to take up exiled careful in private and it is more than obvious that the com- ery. But it was never going to be people fast enough and was lined residence in Zimbabwe, courtesy munal divide has cleaved through Sikkim. Unless the lead- quite enough. up against a wall and summarily of Robert Mugabe who, it turned ers and elders restore sanity, we shall get pushed over and For Iraqis truly to start over, executed along with his wife, out, needed no lessons in oppres- also bring down whatever semblance of democracy we have said many who had witnessed the Elena, just as Benito Mussolini sion. Uganda’s Idi Amin, pleading had so far. end of tyranny elsewhere, there and his mistress Claretta Petacci Islamic solidarity, fled to Saudi The delimitation of constitutions underway at present would have to be a body to display had suffered the final humiliation Arabia in 1979. The deposed Shah has revealed the ugly face of Sikkim. The fangs are bared — figuratively at least — an iden- in Milan in 1945. of Iran, Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, and the blood-lust is out in the open. What each side should tifiable relic of Saddam Hussein to Yet, in Iraq, there was perhaps died in an Egyptian military hos- realise here is that democracy was never about confronta- symbolize the collapse his power a more complex dynamic. Not just pital, an embittered international tion, it is about compromise. Given the way things have “I think an important word is clo- many Iraqis but also the United outcast 18 months after being panned out of late, it appears that no side is willing to ap- sure,” said Timothy Garton Ash, an States wanted to draw a final line driven from his throne by Iran’s proach the middle ground. If one enters an argument con- Oxford scholar who closely fol- — beneath “regime change,” be- Islamic revolution in 1979. vinced of the righteousness of their cause and unwilling to lowed the collapse of Communist neath the ambiguities of the past And no post-tyrannical pro- dictatorship in eastern Europe. when Washington supported Mr. scription has escaped criticism. make any compromises, no matter what the other’s point “The people really have to have the Hussein against Iran, beneath The Nuremberg war trials of of view, the issue can hardly be resolved without hostility. sense that the old regime has gone America’s own humiliation in the Nazi elite in the late 1940’s, Imagine a showdown for Sikkim! No matter who comes and a new one has begun.” bombing Afghanistan only to fail for instance, failed to purge Ger- out victorious, no one will be left standing when the dust Those who have suffered the in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. many’s postwar administration of settles. Given the puerility that we have been forced to suffer humiliation of dictatorship, in That, perhaps, was one reason former supporters of Hitler, said through, it is time for Sikkim to relearn the rules which other words, must in turn humble the American military hastened Mr. Garton Ash, paving the way weaved its social fabric. If every side were to tone down the oppressor, and know that the last week to drop four 2,000-pound for the protests of a subsequent their defiance and listen to the other voices in the fray, they once absolute power of the des- bombs on a residential area of generation that the so-called de- would realise that everyone wants more or less the same pot’s carefully crafted mythology Baghdad where it believed Mr. Nazification of German society thing and no matter what each’s priority may be, their dif- has been stripped away. Arguably, Hussein to be hiding, only to cre- had not gone far enough. ference can be worked out. Most importantly, when every- that function was served in part by ate a huge crater and subsequent South Africa’s Truth and Rec- one around you is losing their mind, it is necessary for the the wild looting of post-combat avowals from Torie Clarke, the onciliation Commission was ac- leader to keep his cool. Baghdad that focused on the very Pentagon spokeswoman, that she cused by some of apartheid’s vic- It is embarrassing that such moralising needs to be emblems of the once untouchable had not been losing too much sleep tims of giving amnesty to the per- spelled out, but alas! things have come to such a pass. status of the regime — the gov- over whether the bombs killed Mr. petrators of racist violence with- ernment ministries and private vil- Hussein or not. out offering reparations to its vic- las and gilded palaces. Such an ambiguous end to tyr- tims, leaving a festering wound for When VIPs Call But lawlessness does not equal anny is hardly what the world has the future. A similar tribunal in A child was overheard in a share-cab complaining catharsis. striven for since the end of the cold Chile was dismissed by its critics about why the PM of India had to visit Sikkim if all that “Until the body of Saddam is war. Indeed, many eminent peo- as a whitewash of the government they got were afternoons lining the streets waving the handed up, dead or alive,” The ple have spent many hours in of Gen.