How to resolve the contradiction between combating terrorism and protecting human rights

By Dr Subramanian Swamy

Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms entitled to any person. These basic rights are the right to life, freedom, equality, justice, and freedom of thought and expression.

Terrorism affects human rights in three ways. The terrorist attacks deprive citizens of their lives, limbs and properties and hence their human rights.

To combat these terrorists we place restrictions on human rights of the citizens, on privacy, freedom of travel and association, so the victims of attacks suffer both ways.

Moreover, human rights questions are raised when the terrorists are apprehended, on such issues as torture, deprivation of their "human dignity", the right to a free trial etc., which are regularly raised in defence of the LTTE, in Kashmir under AFSPA, and for crypto Maoists.

Hence, there is a fundamental question to answer in any democratic society, even when such a society is under siege from murdering terrorists, which is: how to protect basic human rights while effectively combating terrorism.

In 1948, the UN codified these basic human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. International Human Rights Law was framed in a number of core international human rights treaties and in customary international law. These treaties include in particular the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its two Optional Protocols.

India has ratified these two Covenants 21 years later during the Janata Party Government tenure (1977-79) but the Protocols which establish the procedures for investigating human rights violation have not yet been adopted by subsequent governments.

In the Indian Constitution, adopted by the Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949, human rights were codified as Fundamental Rights.

However, in the Constitution of India, all human rights including religious rights, are subject to "reasonable" restrictions. Since these restrictions are not enumerated, hence the courts under Article 32 and 226 decide it in a case to case basis. There is in India today a wealth of human rights case laws by which everyone is bound to obey.

Security of the individual, I contend, is also a basic human right and the protection of a citizen's security is, accordingly, a fundamental obligation of Government. 

States therefore have an obligation to ensure this human right, of their nationals and others, by taking positive measures to protect them against the threat of terrorist acts and to bring the perpetrators of such acts to justice. But then what is terrorism?

The UN Security Council, in its Resolution No.1566 (2004), referred to terrorism as "criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, to intimidate a population or compel a Government or an international organization to do, or to abstain from doing, any act".

The fundamental question is thus: Is there a trade-off between the two human rights, that is some reasonable restriction on right of freedom for the right to security, both of which being human rights.

Or whether sacrificing human rights beyond a point is in itself counterproductive to, and undermines national and international security in combating terrorism?  Thus, the relationship between the two is not "linear", but "non-linear".

That is, it is not true that the less we protect human rights, the more we can combat terrorism. The converse is also not true.

Therefore, there is an "optimum combination" of measures to combat terrorism and the level of safeguards that ensure human rights.   The law of diminishing return operates on this trade-off.

That is, after a point, the more and more we sacrifice human rights the less and less we are able to combat terrorism.

Hence, we in a democratic society are required to constantly monitor what is a reasonable sacrifice or restriction of rights for combating terrorism, and what is excessive in the measures adopted to fight terrorism.

Every nation hence is being called upon today to resolve this conflicting demand of the restriction on human rights that is reasonable and tolerable for effectively combating terrorism and while protecting basic human rights. This is a tough dilemma for any democratic nation.

India today is the most terrorism afflicted country in the world. The principal terrorist threat is however from Wahabi Islamic exhortation for jihad to establish Darul Islam in India by hook or crook.

When I wrote the DNA newspaper Op-ed "How to Wipe Out Islamic Terrorism", the synthetic anger of the bleeding heart liberal secularist, the neo-Nehruites to be exact, was directed against my alleged painting all Muslims with one brush for combating Islamic terror.

Just as we did not paint all Germans in the Nazi regime by the same brush, I do not lump all Muslims together. Bareillvis, Sufis, Shias, Ahmediyas who are the overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims are  different. For instance, they all, unlike the Wahabi driven terrorists, accept the reality that their ancestors are Hindus.

Reality? Yes, because the recent genetic studies published in India and abroad show that DNA structure of Hindus and Muslims are the same. Those who do accept this reality, that is, their lineage is Hindu cannot be terrorists. They become part of the Brihad Hindutva family. Hindus will willingly defend and protect the human rights of such Muslims, since they are family.

The Wahabi Sunni Muslims in India who are led by the fundamentalist clergy are the exception because they reject this reality. They think that they are of Arabic culture and also descendents of Ghazni and Ghori, the two original terrorists who traumatised the civilised Hindus unprepared for their brutality. This fanatic group is the breeding ground for home grown terrorists in India.

The political nature of Fundamentalist Wahabi Islam becomes apparent to all if we learn from four paradoxes in Wahabi Muslim behaviour.

First paradox is—what these Muslims demand as rights when in a minority in any society, they nevertheless vehemently deny to other minorities when they are in majority, e.g., freedom to practice religion. Can Hindu minority in such Muslim majority countries, as Saudi Arabia, build temples, celebrate Deepavali, or carry a picture of Sri Ram in their pockets?

Second paradox is—what these Wahabi Muslims permit when in majority, they vociferously refuse to permit when in minority. Thus, in majority they permit demolition of mosques stating that Masjids are buildings to facilitate reading of namaz, and hence can be subject to demolition to construct a road, for example.

Third paradox is—what such Muslims accept while as a minority in a society where the majority is united, they refuse when that majority is not united. For example, in Australia where the Christian majority is united the Muslims willingly accept Uniform Civil Code. This  is termed as Al Taqqiya, while in flabby, wobbly, amorphous Hindu majority India, they refuse it, because India is Darul Harab.

Fourth paradox is—what methods Muslims in majority use to debunk, brutalise, or to convert non-believers to embrace Islam or reduce them to "Dhimmitude", or to religiously cleanse them out as in Kashmir and Bangladesh, they protest violently in a jihad when the same method is used by a non-Muslim majority against them.

Thus, we in India need to keep these four paradoxes in mind when formulating the trade-off between necessary measures to combat Islamic terror and protecting human rights. Accordingly our security forces in the field must be given clear guidelines on how to deal with Islamic terrorism. 

(The writer is former Union Law Minister and also the Convenor of the Legal and Parliamentary Cells of the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha)

The missing sentiment in polity

Bahujana hitaya, bahujana sukhaya

By Dr R Balashankar

"Bahujana hitaya, bahujana sukhaya." This has for long been the motto laid down for Indian rulers. The Indian ideal of statecraft so fascinated the sixth century Japanese prince Shotoku Taishi that he adopted bahujana hitaya as his country's motto and carved the first Constitution of Japan as Seventeen Articles Constitution based on it. He took the Sanskrit text Usnisavijaya dharani which contains these verses for the consecration of the Constitution in 552 AD. He wrote commentaries and these verses are still recited in daily rituals.

On her second return as Prime Minister, after the defeat of the Janata Party in 1980, late Indira Gandhi dismissed all Janata governments and held fresh elections. At that time Congress adopted the bahujana hitaya as its election slogan and plastered all over Delhi posters with Indira Gandhi's reassuring, smiling pictures with these lines on the top. Attending many election rallies as a cub reporter I remember the great BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee taking a dig at the Congress battle cry saying, 'bahujana hitaya bahujana sukhaya is a fantastic ideal. The poet attributed these words as the utterances of Gautama Buddha as he renounces his kingdom, palace, beautiful consort and toddler son and takes to sanyas for the emancipation of humanity. The words jar on the lips of Indira Gandhi who is out to perpetuate her dynastic rule undermining all democratic norms.'

On this Republic Day, sixty-five years after Independence it is worth analysing if we are anywhere near this goal of bahujana hitaya, bahujana sukhaya. We are again witnessing a number of assembly poll campaigns. Indira Gandhi's party under her Italian daughter-in-law seems to have rephrased bahujana (large majority) into alpajana hitaya, alpajana sukhaya (for the will and benefit of the smallest segment of the society). What else do we make of the persistent onslaught on Hindu interests and identities by a minority government, led by a non-elected, nominated Prime Minister, with all the major offices of the state and the ruling party reserved for individuals with minority tag and deliberate attempt to divide and subdivide and micro-divide the Hindu society in the name of caste, sub caste, mini and miniscule castes for special state patronage.

This is not the way of statecraft or nation building. This is deliberate and vengeful destruction of the nation and its moorings. Even the British did not perpetuate such cruel divide and rule policy on the people of this country. When free India adopted the new Constitution the ideal was to strive for the creation of one nation, one people where all minor identities were to enrich the macro Indian nationhood. The country was to be a model of welfare state. Democracy in true letter and spirit, with people as the sovereign was the goal. Not the repeated assertions by discredited politicians and media persons that Parliament is supreme.

We never envisaged a situation where the government on very flimsy grounds would pit itself against the Army Chief, who was forced to drag the government to the apex court for justice.

What it has exposed is the Achilles heel of the UPA government.  It has lost all its moral authority. A sagacious and popular Defence Minister or Prime Minister would not have allowed the escalation of such a situation. AK Antony is a good man. He could be a good PCC president. But he as Defence Minister is a big anachronism of our democracy, a travesty of Sonia Gandhi's whimsical selection of wimpy minions into onerous positions. The Army Chief who vowed to cleanse the system and restore the reputation of the Indian Armed Forces has become the fall guy. This is what happens when the system patronises mediocrity and denounces meritocracy. 

Does our Constitution reflect in any manner the government of today? Power without responsibility, power without accountability, power without constitutional sanction. This is what Sonia Gandhi exhibits with unfathomable display of brazenness. And we have a political class that has forgotten the fundamental principles of political career.

We are saddled with the shameful spectre of over two-fifths of India's children going to bed underfed. Infant mortality is one of the highest, not much improvement in literacy levels, access to safe and clean drinking water and countless other curses that afflict the poor. This is not the muckraking reporter's fantasy for raising uncomfortable issues. I recently came across a book that masterfully narrates the macabre wave of crime that poverty and  exploitation breeds in the society.

"…people say that they are going to Malaysia or United States with a glimmer of hope in their eyes. In Tsunami Nagar (Tamil Nadu) people speak that way about selling their kidneys," says the book with a revelation that every single person there has sold his/ her kidney because of poverty. The book, The Red Market, by Scott Carney (reviewed in this issue), narrates a heart wrenching situation where blood dairies thrive sucking the human blood by modern day monsters. The report reads like this; recently, a few days before the Indian celebration of Holi, an emaciated man with graying skin, drooping eyes, and rows of purple needle marks on both arms stumbled up to a group of farmers in the sweltering Indian border town of Gorakhpur… At first the farmers ignored the man's request for bus fare. But he persisted. He wasn't a refugee, he said. He was escaping from a makeshift prison where his captor siphoned off his blood for profit. The farmers shook off their stupor and called the police.

"The emaciated man brought the officers to his prison of the last three years: a hastily constructed shack sandwiched between Pappu Yadav's concrete home and a cowshed. A brass padlock hung from the iron door's solid latch. The officers could hear the muffled sounds of humanity through the quarter inch of metal.
"They sprung the lock and revealed a medical ward fit for a horror movie. IV drips hung from makeshift poles and patients moaned as if they were recovering from a delirium. Five emaciated men lying on small woven cots could barely lift their heads to acknowledge the visitors…The Blood Factory, as it was quickly known in the press, was supplying a sizable percentage of the city's blood supply…"

It is not only the blood and organs of the poor that is not safe in today's rich man's world. Even the dead body, hair, skin and burnt out bones are not enough to satiate their greed. Who buys all them? Only those who can afford. Where is the market? It is huge and mostly in the West elite circuit.

This is not the India of our dream. There is enough in the nature for the needs of every one, we often say. But not enough to satisfy the greed of even a few. The book says till recently, the trade in dead bodies was so extensive that just about every classroom skeleton in "America must have come from India." This is a story of the invisible crime and racket that lurks in the wings of every miracle medical breakthrough and dazzling recoveries from the jaws of death. It also exposes the savage human cruelty on the hapless victims by the powerful only to preserve and protect their health and beauty.    

Republic Day is not the time to entertain depressing thoughts. India's economy is thriving in spite of Sonia and Manmohan Singh. Perhaps we will still continue to be the second fastest growing economy in the world. The European Union and the US are looking at India along with other BRIC countries to maintain the momentum of capitalist growth model. The other day The Economist in its cover story acclaimed India's Unique Identity (UID) scheme saying, "one massive problem in India is that few poor people can prove who they are. They have no passport, no driving licence, no proof of address, The state spends a fortune on subsidised grains, for the hungry, but an estimated two thirds of it is stolen or adulterated by middlemen. Armed with the system, India will be able to rethink the nature of its welfare state, cutting back on benefits on kind and market distorting subsidies, and turning to cash transfers paid directly into the bank accounts of neediest"

But whose baby is the UID after all? Already 200 million identity cards have been made. Another 200 will be ready in the next one year according to reports. But the Planning Commission, Finance Ministry the Standing Committee of Parliament the sarkari NGOs and the Home Minister P Chidambaram have raised objections and it is being reported the scheme will be aborted. Is it that Sonia Gandhi does not want it? Because no other power in the UPA would have prompted such a massive opposition to a scheme launched with such fanfare. Perhaps an identity card might in many ways save the poor man from the crimes of the powerful as mentioned above. 

India would have been a better place to live had its politicians been less self-serving and more patriotic. In no other country a coterie of religious minorities and foreign born citizens would have been calling the shots in a democracy. It is often said that India is a rich country inhabited by poor people. It is more appropriate to describe India as a rich country held hostage by a gang of super rich politicians. If not, who has stashed away Rs 25,00,000 crore from the country and why does the government not bother  to get the money back? Not that all politicians are bad, but a vast majority are. If all this money had been put to public use, the Republic would have already become a superpower and there would have been no poverty, which according to a recent report leaves annually thirteen lakh children dead before their first birthday and 230 million Indians go to bed hungry, daily.

The missing sentiment in polity

Bahujana hitaya, bahujana sukhaya
The missing sentiment in polity

By Dr R Balashankar

"Bahujana hitaya, bahujana sukhaya." This has for long been the motto laid down for Indian rulers. The Indian ideal of statecraft so fascinated the sixth century Japanese prince Shotoku Taishi that he adopted bahujana hitaya as his country's motto and carved the first Constitution of Japan as Seventeen Articles Constitution based on it. He took the Sanskrit text Usnisavijaya dharani which contains these verses for the consecration of the Constitution in 552 AD. He wrote commentaries and these verses are still recited in daily rituals.

On her second return as Prime Minister, after the defeat of the Janata Party in 1980, late Indira Gandhi dismissed all Janata governments and held fresh elections. At that time Congress adopted the bahujana hitaya as its election slogan and plastered all over Delhi posters with Indira Gandhi's reassuring, smiling pictures with these lines on the top. Attending many election rallies as a cub reporter I remember the great BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee taking a dig at the Congress battle cry saying, 'bahujana hitaya bahujana sukhaya is a fantastic ideal. The poet attributed these words as the utterances of Gautama Buddha as he renounces his kingdom, palace, beautiful consort and toddler son and takes to sanyas for the emancipation of humanity. The words jar on the lips of Indira Gandhi who is out to perpetuate her dynastic rule undermining all democratic norms.'

On this Republic Day, sixty-five years after Independence it is worth analysing if we are anywhere near this goal of bahujana hitaya, bahujana sukhaya. We are again witnessing a number of assembly poll campaigns. Indira Gandhi's party under her Italian daughter-in-law seems to have rephrased bahujana (large majority) into alpajana hitaya, alpajana sukhaya (for the will and benefit of the smallest segment of the society). What else do we make of the persistent onslaught on Hindu interests and identities by a minority government, led by a non-elected, nominated Prime Minister, with all the major offices of the state and the ruling party reserved for individuals with minority tag and deliberate attempt to divide and subdivide and micro-divide the Hindu society in the name of caste, sub caste, mini and miniscule castes for special state patronage.

This is not the way of statecraft or nation building. This is deliberate and vengeful destruction of the nation and its moorings. Even the British did not perpetuate such cruel divide and rule policy on the people of this country. When free India adopted the new Constitution the ideal was to strive for the creation of one nation, one people where all minor identities were to enrich the macro Indian nationhood. The country was to be a model of welfare state. Democracy in true letter and spirit, with people as the sovereign was the goal. Not the repeated assertions by discredited politicians and media persons that Parliament is supreme.

We never envisaged a situation where the government on very flimsy grounds would pit itself against the Army Chief, who was forced to drag the government to the apex court for justice.

What it has exposed is the Achilles heel of the UPA government.  It has lost all its moral authority. A sagacious and popular Defence Minister or Prime Minister would not have allowed the escalation of such a situation. AK Antony is a good man. He could be a good PCC president. But he as Defence Minister is a big anachronism of our democracy, a travesty of Sonia Gandhi's whimsical selection of wimpy minions into onerous positions. The Army Chief who vowed to cleanse the system and restore the reputation of the Indian Armed Forces has become the fall guy. This is what happens when the system patronises mediocrity and denounces meritocracy. 

Does our Constitution reflect in any manner the government of today? Power without responsibility, power without accountability, power without constitutional sanction. This is what Sonia Gandhi exhibits with unfathomable display of brazenness. And we have a political class that has forgotten the fundamental principles of political career.

We are saddled with the shameful spectre of over two-fifths of India's children going to bed underfed. Infant mortality is one of the highest, not much improvement in literacy levels, access to safe and clean drinking water and countless other curses that afflict the poor. This is not the muckraking reporter's fantasy for raising uncomfortable issues. I recently came across a book that masterfully narrates the macabre wave of crime that poverty and  exploitation breeds in the society.

"…people say that they are going to Malaysia or United States with a glimmer of hope in their eyes. In Tsunami Nagar (Tamil Nadu) people speak that way about selling their kidneys," says the book with a revelation that every single person there has sold his/ her kidney because of poverty. The book, The Red Market, by Scott Carney (reviewed in this issue), narrates a heart wrenching situation where blood dairies thrive sucking the human blood by modern day monsters. The report reads like this; recently, a few days before the Indian celebration of Holi, an emaciated man with graying skin, drooping eyes, and rows of purple needle marks on both arms stumbled up to a group of farmers in the sweltering Indian border town of Gorakhpur… At first the farmers ignored the man's request for bus fare. But he persisted. He wasn't a refugee, he said. He was escaping from a makeshift prison where his captor siphoned off his blood for profit. The farmers shook off their stupor and called the police.

"The emaciated man brought the officers to his prison of the last three years: a hastily constructed shack sandwiched between Pappu Yadav's concrete home and a cowshed. A brass padlock hung from the iron door's solid latch. The officers could hear the muffled sounds of humanity through the quarter inch of metal.
"They sprung the lock and revealed a medical ward fit for a horror movie. IV drips hung from makeshift poles and patients moaned as if they were recovering from a delirium. Five emaciated men lying on small woven cots could barely lift their heads to acknowledge the visitors…The Blood Factory, as it was quickly known in the press, was supplying a sizable percentage of the city's blood supply…"

It is not only the blood and organs of the poor that is not safe in today's rich man's world. Even the dead body, hair, skin and burnt out bones are not enough to satiate their greed. Who buys all them? Only those who can afford. Where is the market? It is huge and mostly in the West elite circuit.

This is not the India of our dream. There is enough in the nature for the needs of every one, we often say. But not enough to satisfy the greed of even a few. The book says till recently, the trade in dead bodies was so extensive that just about every classroom skeleton in "America must have come from India." This is a story of the invisible crime and racket that lurks in the wings of every miracle medical breakthrough and dazzling recoveries from the jaws of death. It also exposes the savage human cruelty on the hapless victims by the powerful only to preserve and protect their health and beauty.    

Republic Day is not the time to entertain depressing thoughts. India's economy is thriving in spite of Sonia and Manmohan Singh. Perhaps we will still continue to be the second fastest growing economy in the world. The European Union and the US are looking at India along with other BRIC countries to maintain the momentum of capitalist growth model. The other day The Economist in its cover story acclaimed India's Unique Identity (UID) scheme saying, "one massive problem in India is that few poor people can prove who they are. They have no passport, no driving licence, no proof of address, The state spends a fortune on subsidised grains, for the hungry, but an estimated two thirds of it is stolen or adulterated by middlemen. Armed with the system, India will be able to rethink the nature of its welfare state, cutting back on benefits on kind and market distorting subsidies, and turning to cash transfers paid directly into the bank accounts of neediest"

But whose baby is the UID after all? Already 200 million identity cards have been made. Another 200 will be ready in the next one year according to reports. But the Planning Commission, Finance Ministry the Standing Committee of Parliament the sarkari NGOs and the Home Minister P Chidambaram have raised objections and it is being reported the scheme will be aborted. Is it that Sonia Gandhi does not want it? Because no other power in the UPA would have prompted such a massive opposition to a scheme launched with such fanfare. Perhaps an identity card might in many ways save the poor man from the crimes of the powerful as mentioned above. 

India would have been a better place to live had its politicians been less self-serving and more patriotic. In no other country a coterie of religious minorities and foreign born citizens would have been calling the shots in a democracy. It is often said that India is a rich country inhabited by poor people. It is more appropriate to describe India as a rich country held hostage by a gang of super rich politicians. If not, who has stashed away Rs 25,00,000 crore from the country and why does the government not bother  to get the money back? Not that all politicians are bad, but a vast majority are. If all this money had been put to public use, the Republic would have already become a superpower and there would have been no poverty, which according to a recent report leaves annually thirteen lakh children dead before their first birthday and 230 million Indians go to bed hungry, daily.

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Swami Vivekananda’s stone cot to be preserved

Swami Vivekananda’s stone cot to be preserved

 

  With India set to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, a granite cot on which he slept during his visit here in 1892, has been handed over to a cultural forum, by the family which played host to the great saint-philosopher.
The ownership right of the granite cot was on Sunday given to the Bharathiya Vichara Kendram director and RSS ideologue P Parameswaran by descendants of famous scholar Manonmaniam Sundaram Pillai, in whose home here, Vivekananda slept.
P S Ramaswamy, the present head of the family, exuded confidence that the Kendram would preserve the monument with all sanctity that would remind the visitors of the life and contributions of Vivekananda in the national awakening.
The cot would be brought to the Kendram’s headquarters here on January 11 in a procession from Karakulam, a city outskirt, where it has been lying for 111 years.
Though it was not known much outside, the family has kept it as a precious asset, Mr. Ramaswamy said.
Vivekananda toured various parts of Kerala in 1892 and reached Thiruvananthapuram, which was then the capital of princely state of Travancore, in December that year.
It was during his trip that he famously described Kerala as a “lunatic asylum” after being shocked to know about the rigid caste system and cruel discrimination that prevailed in the society.
Vivekananda had interactions with spiritual leaders like Chattampi Swamikal and Sree Narayana Guru and also many reformers and scholars.
Later, he left for Kanyakumari where he meditated on Christmas eve ‘on the last bit of India’s rock’, which was later converted into the Vivekananda Rock Memorial.
Swami Vivekananda was born in Kolkata on 12 January 1863.

A collector's edition of Ramanujan notebook

A collector's edition of Ramanujan notebook

The familiar face of Srinivasa Ramanujan looks up in relief from two classy hardback volumes in black. Inside is proof of the mathematician's genius. For both form and content, there can be no doubt that the second edition of Notebooks of Srinivasa Ramanujan is a collector's edition. notebooks of the ‘man who knew infinity,' originally believed to have been written down on loose sheets of paper, have kept mathematicians busy for over a century, scrambling to provide derivations for the results. An effort by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, the two volumes contain over 700 pages in Ramanujan's neat hand, some of his finest work. The books also have a foreword from Bruce Berndt, American mathematician known for his work in explaining the results Ramanujan postulated in his notebooks.

It is believed that Ramanujan actually worked out the problems on a slate in an attempt to save paper, using the sheets only to note down results. Since the discovery of the notebooks, mathematicians have wrestled with the results trying to arrive at plausible derivations. Most of the work has now been solved, thanks to Professor Brendt, according to M.S. Raghunathan, Vice-Chairman of the National Committee supervising the Ramanujan 125 year celebrations.

The books were launched at a function in which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh participated here on Monday. The release was possible with help from the archiving and digitising team at the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) in Chennai.

The production quality is of excellent standard, a huge improvement over the first edition published in 1957, again by the TIFR.

“They were the same notebooks, but the technology was not as advanced as it is now. So the publication was in black and white,” explains Professor Raghunathan. The current edition has reproduced faithfully the different colours Ramanujan originally used for his longhand.

RMRL director G. Sundar details the process involved in producing the new edition: “The 1957 edition was in a very bad shape. With the available technology of those days, they took a photostat and then published the books. As a result, the contrast was not satisfactory, either too bright or too light between foreground and text.” So, the RMRL asked the TIFR to locate the original plates used to print the first edition, but they could not be found. It was then decided to use the original manuscripts being preserved in the University of Madras.

“They gave us the manuscripts for a few days. Though readable, we found that the corners had turned and there was some distortion. We decided to copy them in all formats — microfilm (black and white), scanned images stored digitally. The microfilm is key, because we used that for the printing. Since we knew the colours [from the scanned images], we rendered them finally on the black and white microfilm. The inner pages are now a delight,” Dr. Sundar, an archivist himself, explained.

The entire process took about nine months, with a team of 14 people comprising, both in-house experts and technology experts from outside, working on the notebooks. The graphic images are also being stored with the RMRL and the TIFR, in order to be able to vectorise them for editing and resizing later.

The book will be available with the TIFR for sale, likely in a week, Professor Raghunathan added.