| The
hostages of IC 814 are back home, the hijacking has gone off the front
pages, and India goes back to life- as always. But Rupin Katyal isn't
ever coming back and three jailed terrorists and the hijackers have
got away scot-free. This is a dangerous precedent. Which is why we
are, in the issue, asking so many of the questions that linger: why
did they get away from Amritsar ? Why couldn't the Black Cats reach
there in time ? Why are there so many versions of the sequence of
events floating around ? We have investigated the handling of the
hijack afresh to analyse what could have been done better, so that
India does not suffer such an outrage again.
As the hijack wound down, a curious
thing happened. The stock markets boomed, the Sensex soaring to a
historical 5.491 points in the first week of January. The Sensex rose
and fell in tune with the world markets, unlike the insulated
steadiness we saw in India when the Asian markets crashed in 1997.
India is finally connecting globally. The latest stock boom also came
regardless of the hijack and its related politics is essential to
progress. We have in the past made sense of the markets for you: from
our first cover in July 1985 recognising the market as a " new
money spinner", to the 1992 boom triggered by Harshad Mehta's
speculation, when the Sensex rose to 4,467 on April 22, 1992 and then
crashed to 3,006 by the next month. Most of these previous booms were
bubbles. This time the rise has been even more dizzying, the Sensex
climbing nearly 2,000 points from its May 1999 low of 3,300. The boom
then, hasn't been steady, but dramatic. And that always calls for
caution. This week's cover story primarily aims to examine if this
unprecedented boom is for real. If it is, India could well be on the
way to a new economic maturity. If only our politics would follow
suit.
(Aroon Purie) |
