SIKKIM OBSERVER Saturday   March 30 – April 5,  2013    

Kerala’s Justice Kuriakose appointed new Sikkim High Court CJ

Gangtok, March 29: Justice Pius Chakkalavil Kuriakose is the new Chief Justice of the High Court of Sikkim. He was sworn in by Governor Balmiki Prasad Singh here at the Raj Bhavan yesterday.

The swearing-in ceremony was attended by the Chief Minister Pawan Chamling, SLA Speaker KT Gyaltsen, Acting Chief Justice SP Wangdi, Cabinet members, Chief Secretary R. Ongmu and other officials and dignitaries.

Justice Kuriakose was appointed as Additional Judge of High Court of Kerela on September 9, 2002 and appointed as Permanent Judge of the High Court of Kerela on 2004.

The 62-year-old judge hails from Thripunithura in Ernakulam district of Kerala. He has replaced former Chief Justice of the High Court of Sikkim, Justice Permod Kohli, who was appointed as CJ on December 12, 2011. Justice Kohli retired on March 1 this month.

Kejriwal to support youth body, may visit Sikkim

 ASESEUA President Nawin Kiran (standing) speaking at Aam Admi Party meeting in Delhi recently where  Arvind Kejriwal (centre) is also present.

Gangtok, March 29: Aam Admi Party leader and social activist Arvind Kejriwal has assured “full support” to the issues pursued by All Sikkim Educated Self-Employed & Unemployed Association (ASESEUA). He has also accepted the Association’s invitation to visit the State.

This assurance has come even as activists of the Association participated in the various activities of the AAP in New Delhi recently, according to Association President Nawin Kiran.

“Our organisation is also in constant touch” with Kejriwal’s party and is also attending meetings conducted by the AAP, Kiran said in a press release.

“We congratulated him for the registration of his party and promised full support from our side for a noble cause he has been doing. And at the same time he has promised us full support for our cause,” Kiran said.

Presently, the ASESEUA team is stationed in Delhi and meeting “various national leaders both political and apolitical and appraising our grievances.”

Kiran said his team is also “being invited by various national organisations both political and apolitical for talks.”

According to Kiran, the Delhi trip was a “success” and Kejriwal has accepted the Association’s invitation to visit Sikkim.

“We will soon return home with an announcement for the people,” Kiran said. Meanwhile, the Association is all set to open its office in the State capital on April 4.

New Delhi: The health of Kejriwal, who is on the sixth day of his indefinite fast to protest against the "inflated" electricity and water bills in New Delhi, has started to deteriorate.

Party activists claim that Kejriwal's confidence is growing day by day due to the huge support that his agitation has been receiving from the residents of Delhi. AAP activists say that several people have joined the agitation and announced that they would fight with Kejriwal.

The party also claimed that 83,000 people have signed protest letters pledging not to pay the "inflated" power and water bills, taking the total to more than 2.69 lakh people. The signed letter will be delivered to Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit shortly.

Be positive, says Dalai Lama

Sikkim in Buddhist pilgrimage map of the world: Chamling

The Dalai Lama (centre) during the opening of Buddha Park in Rabongla, South Sikkim, on Monday.

Gangtok, March 29: With the opening of the Buddha Park in Rabongla, South Sikkim, on Monday by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Sikkim has been placed in the pilgrimage map of the world, Chief Minister Pawan Chamling said.

The Dalai Lama performed the consecration ceremony of the 137-feet tall Buddha statue at the park on Monday. Governor BP Singh, Speaker KT Gyaltsen, Chief Minister and Chief Secretary R. Ongmu witnessed the function amidst thousands of Buddhist devotees from all over the State and neighbouring areas.

The Tibetan spiritual leader said that the people of Sikkim who are peace loving and religious should continue to follow the path shown by Lord Buddha. He said the newly-opened park, known as Tathagata Tsal, should be a place of worship and pilgrimage.

The Chief Minister said the Buddha Park will become a centre for pilgrimage tourism in the State.

The Chief Minister highlighted that his government’s policy is based on Buddhist values and is committed to supporting the State’s various religions and inculcating positive values in the people. He hopes that this new Buddha statue complex, which incorporates a library and a study centre, will attract pilgrims from far and wide.

His Holiness expressed his greetings to the crowd and said: "I've come to consecrate this outstanding statue, which we did according to the rites of Vajrakilaya, because this locality has historical connections with that meditational deity.”

“The place itself is quiet, open and peaceful and the statue adds to the natural beauty of the landscape, which I hope will inspire an inner transformation within the pilgrims who come here," he added.

On March 26 His Holiness gave White Tara Long Life Empowerment, followed by the offering to him of prayers for his long life.

On his arrival here on the same day, the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama today advised students of Sikkim to be positive in attitude and create a positive "karma".

 Speaking to students at Manan Kendra here, the Dalai Lama said: "future of an individual depends on a community, and of a community depends on a society and of a society depends on nation”.

The Nobel Laureate left here on Wednesday morning. He last visited Sikkim on December 2010.

Editorial

THE ULTIMATE TEST

Kejriwal, Make A Noise In Sikkim

No central leader dares to come to Sikkim and face the truth to what is really happening in the former kingdom. Even national journalists prefer conducted tours of the State sponsored by the State Government. For obvious reasons the Centre pumps in enough money in Sikkim to keep the people perpetually drugged. Even if Arvind Kejriwal does not come to Sikkim the fact that he has reportedly accepted the invitation extended by a Sikkim youth body to visit Sikkim is enough to keep the establishment on its toes. It will go all out to woo the activists of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Even Kejriwal will not be spared. If he and his team get tested in Sikkim and come out clean then they are ready and fit for the battle ahead. So, Mr. Kejriwal, make a noise in Sikkim and prove your credentials.

Dipankar Chakrabarti: The unsung revolutionary

Dipankar Chakrabarti, founder-editor of socio-political magazine Aneek, condemned Sikkim's 'feudal' monarchy in his writings, languished in jail for two years and recently died in Kolkata

By Sunanda K Datta-Ray

A little-known hero of the Emergency died in Kolkata the other day. I was looking for Dipankar Chakrabarti, the 71-year-old founder-editor of Aneek, a socio-political magazine in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, when I was told he had just succumbed to cardiac arrest. This often happens to me — someone I am keen on meeting inconsiderately chooses to bid adieu to life just then. But that’s another story. What is saddening is that more people didn’t know of Chakrabarti.

Someone at a meeting of the Association of Corporate Advisers and Executives asked me recently to recount what he called my newspaper’s heroic deeds during the Emergency. The hall burst into applause when I replied that just as there were more dispossessed East Bengal zamindars in Kolkata than there were actual zamindars in pre-partition East Bengal, there were more Emergency heroes after the Emergency than existed then. Chakrabarti wasn’t among them. Neither was he one of the glitterati who hold high positions and trot the globe while flaunting their supposedly radical ideology.

He neither sought nor received attention. But he and a colleague Sukanta Raha, whose name I learnt only this week, were arrested under the Defence of India Rules for an editorial titled “India’s annexation of Sikkim” in Aneek’s April-May 1975 special edition. They languished in jail for two years after Berhampore’s additional sessions judge refused bail because the article “seems to be calculated to prejudice the minds of the people against the territorial integrity of the Union of India”.

Dipankar Chakrabarti

When I told my Sikkimese friend, Karma Topden, former Rajya Sabha member and India’s one-time ambassador to Mongolia, he asked why Chakrabarti had been singled out for a distinction denied to B G Verghese and me. “Verghese’s editorial, ‘Kanchenjunga, Here We Come’ in the Hindustan Times was very strong”, Karma said. “And you made Sikkim an international issue with your reports in The Observer in London, and your book, Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim!”

I told Karma Marxists would probably attribute the different treatment to class justice … or injustice. I’d add class understanding. District officials are less sophisticated than their metropolitan counterparts who might have made allowance for revolutionary rhetoric. Although Chakrabarti thought Sikkim’s monarchy “feudal and reactionary”, it was “the sacred task of every progressive and socially conscious” Indian “to unite shoulder to shoulder with the freedom fighters of Sikkim, so as to take effective steps to defeat the common enemies of the people of these two countries”. The enemy was the “expansionist Indian ruling clique”.

Despite the clichés, one must respect someone, especially in the moffusil, who sustained for 48 years a magazine that covered, says a Bangladeshi admirer, Farooque Chowdhury, many aspects of modern and ancient society, politics, economics, the Moscow-Beijing rift, China’s Cultural Revolution, globalisation and the environment. Chakrabarti founded the People’s Book Society and the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights. He translated Chinese revolutionary opera and essays by Paul Sweezy, the Harvard economist who wroteDemand Under Conditions of Oligopoly in 1939. Teaching economics at Berhampore’s Krishnanath College must have been one of many avocations.

So versatile a man had to be both Bangal (as East Bengalis are called) and Bolshie, Chakrabarti was born in Dhaka. He was so passionately involved in a country he left when he was six only because having been politically baptised in the Students Federation and sailed close to Communism all his life, he regarded both Bengals as a single revolutionary entity. Not content with famously saddling Lenin with saying (which he didn’t!) that the road to world revolution ran from Beijing to Paris via Kolkata, Bengali Leftists re-routed the road after 1971 to take in Dhaka.

I first heard of Chakrabarti in October 1984 after Smash and Grab was published. He wrote to The Statesman promising “support and sympathy” to “Mr Namgyal” (Prince Wangchuck Namgyal of Sikkim) who had asked apropos of my book, “Who in the world’s largest democracy will raise a voice for justice in Sikkim?” Chakrabarti replied, “It may interest him and others to know that our Bengali monthly magazine, Aneek, did precisely this.” He assured Wangchuck “that many people in India still consider the annexation of Sikkim to have been a blatant act of expansionism”.

He would have welcomed the revised edition of Smash and Grab now being prepared under Tranquebar’s imprint. It will spare readers what Chomsky called “manufactured consent” and save them from a pirated edition. I owe that to someone who paid more dearly than Verghese or I for his commitment to Sikkim’s freedom. (Business Standard)

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