EDITORIAL 31.10.09

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Editorial

 

month october 31, edition 000338, collected & managed by durgesh kumar mishra, published by – manish manjul

 

Editorial is syndication of all daily- published newspaper's Editorial at one place.

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THE PIONEER

1. TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER
2. SLEEPING WITH THE DEAD
3. TELLING MRS G FROM HER LEGACY - ASHOK MALIK
4. SADHANA IS THE REALISATION OF SOUL - ACHARYA MAHAPRAJNA
5. INDIA'S IRON LADY - SIDDHARTH MISHRA
6. INDIRA WAS HER OWN WORST ENEMY - SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY
7. GUNGI GUDIYA WHO TOOK ON UNCLE SAM - CP BHAMBHRI

MAIL TODAY

1. ROAD NAMES DECIDED ON POLITICAL WHIMSY
2. PROBE IOC FIRE
3. INDIRA GANDHI REBOOTED - BY DINESH C SHARMA
4. BOOMTOWN RAP - MAX MARTIN
5. INTERESTING STORIES FROM TAMIL NADU
6. ' FREEDOM OF SPEECH' IN AIR INDIA

TIMES OF INDIA

1. WHAT'S UP, FAMILY DOC?
2. SOME QUESTIONS ARE BEST BURIED - ARVIND PANAGARIYA
3. A FLIGHT TO NOWHERE
4. IT SERVES AN ADMIRABLE PURPOSE - ANIL THAKKAR
5. COOL IT ON CHINA - NAYAN CHANDA

HINDUSTAN TIMES

1. A CONNECTION HAS BEEN MADE
2. NO ANSWERS TO THE KEY QUESTION - PRATIK KANJILAL
3. MRS G FORCE - VIR SANGHVI

INDIAN EXPRESS

1. READING NUMBERS
2. WRONG MEDICINE
3. YOU TOO, ANDRE?
4. THE IDEA OF INDIRA - SHEKHAR GUPTA
5. MAO TV, MOU TV. AND MAHATMA - SAUBHIK CHAKRABARTI
6. 'SHE WAS ALWAYS THE BOSS' - VANDITA MISHRA
7. THE 'R' IN INDIRA - SEEMA CHISHTI

FINANCIAL EXPRESS

1. CLUNKERS AND DOLLAR
2. THE BIG LANDLORD
3. WE CAN SEE NOW: INDIRA TRULY WAS INDIA - JAITHIRTH RAO
4. US ARMY AND BRIT COMEDY, THANK YOU - ANAND RAMACHANDRAN
5. COAL, IN THE BLACK
6. INDRONIL ROYCHOWDHURY
7. REPORT CARD

THE HINDU

1. JOURNALISM FOR SALE
2. U.S. ECONOMY BREATHES AGAIN
3. PROGRAMMING NREGS TO SUCCEED  - PRAMATHESH AMBASTA
4. TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER  - PRANAY GUPTE
5. AID FOR CHILD ILLNESSES STALLS AMID FOCUS ON AIDS FIGHT  - CELIA W. DUGGER

THE ASIAN AGE

1. IS ANYBODY IN PAK LISTENING?
2. A MISUNDERSTOOD LONER - BY P.C. ALEXANDER
3. THE ROYAL BANQUET - BY KISHWAR DESAI
4. GUDIYA TO DURGA - BY INDER MALHOTRA
5. RAPID FIRE WITH UK FAR-RIGHT PARTY CHIEF - BY FARRUKH DHONDY

DNA

1. HAZARDS ALL AROUND
2. GELLING YOUR NUMBER - YOGI AGGARWAL 
3. A COMMITTED RULER
4. GOODBYE SHEPHERD
5. ADDRESS THE REAL ISSUES 
6. CHANGE FOR BETTER
7. BJP'S TRAVAILS
8. JUST DESSERTS

THE TRIBUNE

1. WHY THIS EXTRA BURDEN?
2. POSITIVE SIGNALS
3. WHEN SUGAR IS LESS SWEET
4. PITFALLS OF DEMOCRACY - BY KULDIP NAYAR
5. FUND-RAISING IDEAS - BY S. RAGHUNATH
6. INDIRA GANDHI REVISITED - BY VIJAY SANGHVI
7. US ECONOMY ROARS BACK - BY NEIL IRWIN
8. ARE ALL MEHSUDS TALIBAN SYMPATHISERS? - BY SYED NOORUZZAMAN

THE ASSAM TRIBUNE

1. SAVING PLANET EARTH
2. HIGHER EDUCATION
3. MORE WASTED ASSETS - ARUP KUMAR DUTTA
4. REMINISCENCE OF INDIRA GANDHI - TARUN GOGOI

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

1. PORN NOW RECESSION PRONE
2. HEED THE FM'S CALL
3. WHY PRESS NOTE 2 MAKES LITTLE SENSE
4. YOU NEED MONSTERS TO VALUE HUMANS - VITHAL C NADKARNI
5. 'INDIAN IT SHOULD NOT APE US PRODUCTS'
6. 'INDIA CAN EXPECT GREATER INFLOWS' - APURV GUPTA
7. 'WE'LL ROLL OUT 3G BY OCT '10 IF AUCTIONS HAPPEN ON TIME' - JOJI THOMAS PHILIP

DECCAN CHRONICAL

1. IS ANYBODY IN PAK LISTENING?
2. GUDIYA TO DURGA - BY INDER MALHOTRA
3. RAPID FIRE WITH UK FAR-RIGHT PARTY CHIEF - BY FARRUKH DHONDY
4. A MISUNDERSTOOD LONER - BY P.C. ALEXANDER
5. THE ROYAL BANQUET  - BY KISHWAR DESAI
6. SPELL IT OUT PLEASE  - BY DOT WORDSWORTH

THE STATESMAN

1. V-B PLOT THICKENS
2. DEFENCE PURCHASES
3. DELAYED ACTION
4. TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
5. INDIAN CHEF CREATES 'WORLD'S HEALTHIEST MEAL'

THE TELEGRAPH

1. DARK LADY OF INDIA
2. UNFAIR CLAIMS - SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY

DECCAN HERALD

1. RENEWED HOPE
2. BEYOND RHETORIC
3. DISASTER POLITICS - BY GAYATHRI NIVAS
4. A PILGRIM'S PATH - BY KHUSHWANT SINGH
5. THOSE AUTOCRATS - BY MEERA GUTHI

THE NEW YORK TIMES

1. ANOTHER MISSTEP ON THE ROAD TO REFORM
2. HAWAII'S CHILDREN, LEFT BEHIND
3. THE HOUSE ETHICS COMMITTEE AT WORK
4. CONSTRAINING AMERICA'S BRIGHTEST - BY BOB HERBERT
5. THE CARNIVORE'S DILEMMA - BY NICOLETTE HAHN NIMAN
6. RUNNING WITHOUT A NARRATIVE - BY CAMERON STRACHER

I.THE NEWS

1. CLINTON'S CALL
2. EYE OF THE STORM
3. FRIDAY PRAYERS IN AL AQSA - DR MUZAFFAR IQBAL
4. ANTI-TERROR STRATEGY? - DR MASOODA BANO
5. CRY, BELOVED PAKISTAN - ROEDAD KHAN
6. MERGING MINISTRIES? - DR SANIA NISHTAR
7. THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE DOGAR - BABAR SATTAR
8. CAPITAL SUGGESTIONS - ANJUM NIAZ

 

PAKISTAN OBSERVER

1. NAVAL CHIEF DRAWS ATTENTION TO GWADAR PORT
2. WORDS OF WISDOM OF HILLARY CLINTON
3. SINGH'S DOUBLE STANDARD IN IHK
4. DEMOCRACY IS THE BEST REVENGE! - NOSHEEN SAEED
5. UNFOUNDED CONCERNS OVER PROLIFERATION - MOHAMMAD JAMIL
6. SUICIDAL ATTACK IN IRAN - YOUSAF ALAMGIRIAN
7. THE TENACITY QUESTION - DAVID BROOKS

THE INDEPENDENT

1. C'WEALTH'S NEW FACE
2. THREAT TO SEA FISH
3. CHEMO FOR THE BJP…! - ROBERT CLEMENTS
4. MARKETS, PRIVATE OWNERSHIP AND STATE ENTERPRISES - FORREST COOKSON
5. BANGLADESH SET TO OVERSHOOT THE MDG
6. CHILD MORTALITY WITH UNSATISFACTORY HEALTH
7. DROPPING THE SLIDE RULE - MICHAEL R CZINKOTA AND THOMAS A CZINKOTA

THE AUSTRALIAN

1. NATION NEEDS BOLDER LEADERSHIP FROM PM
2. BLUNDER DOWN UNDER
3. PASS THE SAUSAGES

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

1. FOUR WHEELS GOOD, TWO WHEELS GOOD TOO
2. TIME TO BUTTER UP YOUR LITTLE TEAPOT
3. PASSING THE BUCK ON SECURENCY
4. THEY'RE RACING - BUT NOT ONLY AT FLEMINGTON

THE GURDIAN

1. EUROPEAN UNION: CHANGING CLIMATE IN BRUSSELS
2. DRUGS POLICY: SHOOTING UP THE MESSENGER
3. UNTHINKABLE? A BONUS AMNESTY OVER (A RATHER NICE) BREAKFAST

DAILY EXPRESS

1. SHUN THIS ISLAMIST MARCH
2. JACQUI SMITH WILL INDEED BE SORRY AFTER AN ELECTION

THE KOREA HERALD

1. CO2 EMISSIONS
2. BAFFLING RULING
3. PROBLEM OF DEVELOPING NEW DRUGS - SILVIO GARATTINI

THE JAPAN TIMES

1. MORE DOUBTS ABOUT COPENHAGEN

THE JAKARTA POST

2. IT'S NOT JUST THE MESSY TOILETS!
3. HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO LEARN INDONESIAN? - M. MARCELLINO
4. LESSENING THE ECONOMIC GAP AMONG JAKARTANS - EKO BUDIHARDJO
5. SUSTAINING THE BUSWAY FOR JAKARTA - WILMAR SALIM
6. ISLAM FROM A WESTERN PERSPECTIVE (PART 2 OF 2) - NIKOLAOS VAN DAM

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THE PIONEER

EDIT DESK

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

EVENTS THAT SHOCKED AND SCARRED INDIA

Aquarter of a century may not be a long time in a nation's life, but it is long enough for memories to be dulled and events to be forgotten. Those who were born after 1984 would have scant knowledge of the events of that year with their tragic consequences. Those who were around would have fading memories; some would rather not revisit the searing summer of that year and a winter that saw gloom descend on the country. As we observe the 25th anniversary of Mrs Indira Gandhi's assassination by her bodyguards, it would be in order to also recall that the chain of events which began with Operation Bluestar that saw the Army storming the Golden Temple to flush out Khalistani extremists led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale ended with the massacre of more than 4,000 innocent Sikhs. Mrs Gandhi had acted with characteristic determination when she ordered the Army into the Golden Temple on June 3, 1984, brushing aside dissenting voices and supremely confident that once Bhindranwale and his men had been neutralised, the Sikhs would forgive, if not forget, the desecration of their holiest shrine. The Army succeeded in securing its objective, but Mrs Gandhi had horribly miscalculated on the aftermath of Operation Bluestar. On October 31 the nation was shocked when she was shot dead at her house by those who were supposed to protect her. What followed was tragedy thrice over: Armed gangs of Congress goons roamed the streets of Delhi for three days, without any let or hindrance, killing innocent men, women and children; looting the homes of Sikhs; reducing colonies to ashes. Elsewhere, Sikhs were dragged out of trains and murdered. By the time the Army was deployed and order restored, 2,733 Sikhs had perished in Delhi alone; another 2,000 had been killed across the country. It was a pogrom conducted in the guise of avenging the death of Mrs Gandhi even as the Congress Government of the day twiddled its thumbs and did nothing to prevent the blood-letting. Rajiv Gandhi's infamous statement — "When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake" — did nothing to assuage the savaged sentiments of an entire community. The series of reports subsequently submitted by various commissions of inquiry and committees set up by successive Governments have served to record tales of horror in graphic details, but none of them has really helped in bringing the guilty men of 1984 to justice.

There is, of course, no percentage in reopening wounds inflicted 25 years ago. India has moved on. Punjab has moved on. The Sikhs, as a community, have moved on. Those who survived the massacre will never forget either the horror of being hounded by murderous mobs or the sorrow of losing their loved ones. It would, however, be a tribute to those who died in the madness that followed Mrs Gandhi's death to learn some lessons from the disastrous course on which the Congress had embarked to grab political power in Punjab. It chose to ride the proverbial tiger of Khalistani separatism by promoting Bhindranwale in the hope that he would destroy the Akali Dal. The plan went awry, as it was bound to, and then it was too late to get off the tiger. Sadly, the Congress still persists with this strategy, making common cause with malcontents in its pursuit for power. Assam, where ULFA has been used by the Congress at election time, is but one example. There are many more. For instance, the Congress using the MNS to split Opposition votes in Maharashtra. Politics of cynicism, it would seem, remains in vogue, despite the horrors of 1984.

 

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THE PIONEER

SLEEPING WITH THE DEAD

SPACE CRUNCH LEADS TO SHARED GRAVES

Lack of space is a perennial complaint for most London residents. But now it seems that the same could apply to the city's dead. Reports suggest that London is facing its most severe shortage of burial space to the point that authorities are literally trying to promote the idea of sharing graves. Understandably, the concept seems to have spooked many. For some it is sacrilege, for others it is downright weird. But unless a solution is found soon, finding a resting place for one's dearly departed will become a wee bit problematic. The attitude towards disturbing existing graves has roots in the 18th century when London was the medical research capital of the world. The city was then witness to numerous incidents of body-snatching or grave-robbery where shady characters would dig out recently-buried corpses and deliver them to aspiring surgeons for study. Though the practice might have contributed to significant medical advances, it was, nonetheless, frowned upon by the London public at large. Many people at the time took great pains to ensure that the buried bodies of their loved ones were not whisked away by grave robbers. Records quote one William Horne who was buried in Spitalfields in East London in a triple casket — the outer one made of lead, the middle of iron and the innermost of wood — to prevent his body from being snatched. It is perhaps this historic fear of people digging up other people's graves that has manifested itself in the form of present-day Londoners' allergy to the notion of disturbing the resting place of the long departed to make space for the recently dead.

Nonetheless, a legislation passed in 2007 empowers local councils in London to disturb graves older than 75 years with the consent of the deceased's relatives. This would involve exhuming the older corpse and reburying it deeper to make space for another one on top. But before such shared burials become common it will take the authorities quite a bit of advertising skill to convince Londoners of the benefit of the practice. On top of this, London is a city that has sizeable Islamic and Jewish communities that will definitely have reservations about sharing graves. Unless of course there is a consensus to bury the departed standing up. However, public opinion regarding stand-up entombment cannot be said to be favourable. But if Londoners continue to feel that electric crematoriums are too modern for their taste, there would be no other option but to go in for the double-decker graves. It might be against every British bone in their body, but they would have no other choice. On the positive side, there is no denying that one's dearly departed will not be without company even in death. Now isn't that comforting?

 

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            THE PIONEER

COLUMN

TELLING MRS G FROM HER LEGACY

ASHOK MALIK

Twenty-five years after she died, shot down on a deceptively calm early winter morning that no Indian alive that day can ever forget, Mrs Indira Gandhi remains an iconic presence in our collective consciousness. She is the once and forever Mrs G, India's Iron Lady, the Durga of 1971, the 'Only Man in her Cabinet'.

So much of what has constituted Indian politics for the past quarter-century is attributed to her. In a sense, in her final term as Prime Minister and in those turbulent days leading up to 1984 — free India's annus horribilis — she triggered the Hindu turbulence the BJP was to exploit. More recently, and perhaps exaggeratedly, the beginnings of economic reform have been traced back to 1981, when Mrs Gandhi negotiated a loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund, and took baby steps to roll back state control of the economy and of external trade.

Yet, nostalgia for Mrs Gandhi is much more than nostalgia for the sum total of her achievements. She is best remembered as a strong and decisive leader, the 'strongman in a democratic framework' that is the Indian middle class's — or any middle class's — dream.

Government veterans say her notes on files were among the most trenchant put down by any Indian politician, not just any Prime Minister. Those in the strategic affairs community swear they have never encountered a Prime Minister with such an astute grasp of realpolitik and so ferociously single-minded in her resolve to protect India's interests, whatever the costs.

 

Even so, two generations after her departure, with the hindsight of history and against the intellectual backdrop of a very different India, a provocative question does arise: Mrs Gandhi may always have desired what was best for India, but what if her interpretation of what was best for India was not necessarily the correct one?

This leads us to the essential paradox about Mrs Gandhi. She was a deeply loved, even revered, leader; a compelling personality; an imperious, awe-inspiring Prime Minister who could leave grown men quivering. Yet, is any assessment of her record in office as unmixed? Does she have a legacy to match her memory? Indeed, can one be a great leader — even India's greatest post-1947 leader — without leaving behind a legacy of unalloyed greatness.

The legacy issue is a strange and often deceptive one. Presidents and Prime Ministers spend long hours fretting over it. It is almost a cliché that every new resident of the White House begins his first day worrying about how history will judge him.

How do Indian Prime Ministers respond to the legacy touchstone? It is important to distinguish legacy from one-off events, even major ones. Legacy is more than a date and time. It can be contended that misreading China and the 1962 war were Jawaharlal Nehru's failings but not necessarily his legacy. Those phenomena were not around for all times to come and could be redressed and rectified by future generations.

Legacy will inevitably be assessed as the relevance of a leader's actions and decisions at a future juncture and their role in shaping successor societies. As such, as nations evolve, so do perceptions of legacy. For example, Nehru's legacy was seen as colossal in the aftermath of his death in 1964, but suffered devastating blows in 1989-90. In that period, the underpinnings of Indian foreign policy were shattered, the economy started to go into free fall, and prevailing notions of "secularism" began to be contested.

Twenty years on, in a more relaxed and prosperous India, Nehru is once again looked upon generously. His role in India's foundational years is appreciated that much more, especially when the contrast is made with the collapse of the Pakistani nation-building project or in the recognition that public investments in higher/technical education in the 1950s have proved economic game-changers.

Similarly, it could be said PV Narasimha Rao spent the final years of his life in exile from his own party, disliked intensely by Congress colleagues targeted by the hawala conspiracy or simply seeing him as a cunning interloper. To others, the sight of Rao going from court to court, defending himself against charges of bribery, constituted a metaphor for India's low politics.

Nevertheless, Rao's principal legacy remains providing the political ballast for liberalisation. So much of what we celebrate in today's India is owed to the fact that Rao took crucial calls in the summer of 1991. The reverberations of his first 100 days could potentially be felt through the 21st century.

The examples can go on, but they detain us from the issue at hand: Mrs Gandhi's legacy. More than the 1971 war or Operation Bluestar, it would be prudent to consider her imprint on India's political economy. It is here that she falters. Mrs Gandhi sowed the wind in the 1970s and India reaped the whirlwind in the 1980s.

Nehru's socialism may not have survived the test of posterity but it was well-intentioned and did not, immediately, damage the country. The destructive strain in India's economic policy was introduced by Mrs Gandhi in the 1970s. At a time when the building blocks of her father's years probably necessitated a gradual deregulation, she swerved to the other extreme.

In a decade when the Asian tigers began to galvanise East Asia, Mrs Gandhi put her faith in wildly Left populism, in a nationalisation binge, in high taxes and an extortionate state that made tax evasion an industry, drove good people out of business and decent, white collar Indians out of the country. All in all, she converted Government into a patronage-dispensing machine in a society of chronic shortages.

It took India 30 years to throw off that incubus. Imagine what may have been if Mrs Gandhi had promoted a less statist, a less highly-strung and an economically liberal India in the 1970s. There would have been no Emergency. The anger and energies of young India and of individual regions and States would have been sublimated in the larger concourse of hope — as is the case with contemporary India. Institutions, from the civil services to the judiciary, would not have been subverted. The public sector would not have become a self-serving racket.

Enlightened governance in the 1970s would have led to a more easy-going and confident India in the 1980s. Unfortunately, for all her sterling qualities as a leader, that was not to be Mrs Gandhi's legacy. It's sad; but she brought it upon herself.

 

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THE PIONEER

COLUMN

SADHANA IS THE REALISATION OF SOUL

ACHARYA MAHAPRAJNA

Spells like Aum, Arham, Namo Arihantanam, etc, are powerful esoteric formulas, a recital of which procures various kinds of gains for us. By themselves they are like a boat, which alone is incapable to take you to the opposite shore of the river. Besides the boat, you need a boatman, his technical skill and oars to carry you across the river. Mere mechanical recitation of the mantra will be totally ineffective. Without an expert boatman the boat, while crossing the river, is likely to capsize. Most of us simply recite mantras mechanically without fulfilling the concomitant condition, which are necessary for the affectivity of the mantra with the result that our recitation proves abortive. In such a condition we are likely to lose faith in the power of the mantra.

The first condition is that the practitioner's mind should be joined to the sacred formula. The practitioner has to identify himself with the mantra. He has to be mantra-minded so to say. The mind of man plays a very important role in almost all the activities of life. Even if you eat food without having a mind in it, it will not produce the desired effect.

A distracted mind is an obstacle in Sadhana. The practitioner should not leave any part of his mind unengaged. The mind should be wholly concentrated on the objective. This needs a vigorous training of the mind. It should be trained in such a way that it may be commanded to concentrate on any object you like. There should be the least possibility of its being distracted. A wavering mind is the most ineffectual instrument. It is the divided mind, which wavers and creates all kinds of problems. Every one of us has several minds, so to say. What is needed in Sadhana is to develop a single undivided mind.

The basic aim of Sadhana is to realise the soul, which is essentially a conscious entity. The Prana force can lead us to self-realisation. This needs a strong will and firmness of purpose of Samkalpa. If the will and the vital force are weak and if we are infirm of purpose, we can in no way achieve the soul. It is therefore, necessary to invigorate the Prana force. Japa (recitation of sacred words) operates on the plane of Prana. The Prana force is an electrical force. Every living being possesses this force. All the physical and mental activities of man are due to the Prana force.

 

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THE PIONEER

OPED

INDIA'S IRON LADY

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY ASSASSINS' BULLETS ENDED THE LIFE OF INDIA'S MOST CHARISMATIC PRIME MINISTER YET. A SATURDAY SPECIAL ON THE LEGACY OF INDIRA GANDHI

SIDDHARTH MISHRA

From the point of view of a media person it can be said with certainty that Indira Gandhi was a personality which Indian television missed. In a way she was ahead of her time. The way her personality make-up connected with people even through black and white still photos showed the potential she had for using the camera to her advantage.

In fact, whatever limited opportunity she had with television, she utilised it to the hilt to help build her party and political legacy. Can one forget the immemorable question she posed to astronaut Rakesh Sharma as to how India looked from the space and his reply, "Sare jahan se accha Hindustan hamara?" Ironically, the live coverage of her funeral saw the coming of age of the Indian television.

My first clear memory of Indira Gandhi is as a 10-year-old. In 1977, she had come to Bhagalpur to address a rally on the huge Sandy's Compound in the middle of the town. It was a winter's afternoon and the Emergency was still in force. The preparations for the rally were well-coordinated and there was a huge crowd present. We children had managed to find our way through the barricaded enclosures and reach right up to the front.

The chopper carrying her landed near the stage built for the rally raising a huge cloud of dust, but we loved it. The only other time I had seen a chopper from that close quarter was during the floods in Patna in 1975, when we were stranded in our ancestral home and survived on air-dropped food packets. She emerged from the crowd wearing her customary well-starched cotton sari covering her head and wore her trademark sunglasses.

She raced from the chopper to the podium with the young district collector finding it difficult to keep pace with her. The rally went off pretty well, as far as I could perceive, not really realising that the assembly of the huge crowd was courtesy the district administration. A few weeks later, glued to transistor set we heard All India Radio announce that the Congress had lost and the Janata Party was all set to form the government.

A few months later, the State Assembly poll followed. We had another Prime Minister's public rally on Sandy's Compound. It was again the same podium, the same barricades and the same group of children finding their way to the front. The meeting, however, did not have anything common beyond this. Prime Minister Morarji Desai did not arrive by chopper but by a state plane which landed at the airport a few kilometers away from the meeting ground. Thereafter, he went to the circuit house for rest and refreshment. When he finally arrived, he turned out to be an utterly boring orator. He spoke sitting on a chair like a school master. He did not get much applause either. But AIR was to tell us a few weeks later that the Congress government in Bihar under Jagannath Mishra was on its way out and Socialist leader Karpoori Thakur was to take over.

For several months, after her fall from power, I recall popular Hindi magazine Dharamyug carrying cover stories of excesses committed during the Emergency. Even as it tried to make heroes out of anybody and everybody in the Janata Party, the newspapers were soon to be full of the antics of the shenanigans of the Janata government. First, there was this splash on veteran Dalit leader Jagjivan Ram's son Suresh Ram, which later became popular as Sushma-Suresh Kaand.

Then, of course, there was Raj Narain, the man who had humbled Indira Gandhi at Rae Bareli, acting as Hanuman of Chowdhary Charan Singh and setting the Janata Government on fire. There was also flamboyant George Fernandes, who indulged in extraordinary political hop-step-jump in changing sides. The Congress once again got divided and those loyal to Indira Gandhi called their faction the Congress (I). For years, even after the rival faction had become non-existent, the Congress party continued to be called the Congress (I).

As the internal bickering within the Janata became boring, the newspapers and magazines resumed chasing Indira. And she indeed was master at using the media to her advantage. She traveled to Belchi in Bihar on an elephant to console the survivors of a massacre of Harijans. The state government became jittery.

When Home Minister Chowdhary Charan Singh decided to put her behind bars, she turned it again into a media spectacle. The police first tried to take her out of Delhi to Badkal in Haryana, to which Indira Gandhi opposed as she could not be taken outside the state. They could not keep her in any police station and were forced to take her to Police Lines in Kingsway Camp. She was produced in Court next day to be given bail by Metropolitan Magistrate Dinesh Dayal.

She planned her return to Parliament through the Lok Sabha route and made Chikmagalur famous by choosing it as her constituency. During the Chikmagalur bypoll, the Congress for the first time contested on the Hand symbol. The Government continued to play into her hands by disqualifying her from the Lok Sabha after she won the Chikmagalur seat.

The political vendetta shown towards her by the Janata leaders suited her well. By the time the Janata Party and the Government collapsed like a house of cards, Indira Gandhi had rebuilt her party, and more importantly a sympathy factor for herself. I heard the news of her return in the winter of 1984-85 at most unusual of places.

Bamdeo, if I recall the name of the hamlet correctly, in 1980 was neither connected by road or train to civilisation. A village located some 10 kilometres off Bhagalpur-Dumka highway, Bamdeo, was home of a classmate from my boarding school. We were spending a part of the winter vacation at his village haveli

njoying salubrious climate and desi food.

In those days elections were held in one phase and one did not have to wait for a month for the results to come out. I remember being woken up by the signature tune of AIR. It was still dark and we were advised to remain inside the mosquito nets which covered our beds. Soon the news was broadcast announcing the return of Indira Gandhi at the helm of affairs. The villagers assembled at the haveli to congratulate my classmate's father, who doubled-up as the local chieftain of the Congress.

The villagers noted with satisfaction that Indira Gandhi was once again going to be at the helm of affairs. History will debate whether their confidence was well-founded. The mishandling of the Punjab issue not only provoked her own assassination, but remained a blot on the country's consciousness ever since.

But she had some definitive credit points, more than any single Prime Minister in fact. She abolished the privy purses, nationalised banks, dismembered Pakistan, made India nuclear, and, most importantly, solved the foodgrains scarcity once and for all. Generally speaking, she dug the foundations of India as a 21st century world power for her son and others, notable among them Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to build upon.

Like all great performers in history, the iron lady of India too made a few mistakes. The people of India respected her for her boldness and ability to take a resolve to its logical conclusion. There was also a certain motherly quality about her which endeared herself to a whole generation of Indians. In the long run, some of her decisions cost the country dear, but history will never accused Indira Gandhi of wavering.

The writer is Associate Editor, The Pioneer

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THE PIONEER

OPED

INDIRA WAS HER OWN WORST ENEMY

THERE ARE MANY MYTHS ABOUT INDIRA GANDHI; THE MOST ENDURING BEING HER 'STRENGTH' AND 'COURAGE'. SHE BELIEVED IN THESE AND PUSHED HER LUCK TOO FAR, FALLING EVENTUALLY TO THE SAME DESIGN

SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY

During her sixteen years' tenure as Prime Minister, two dominant flaws in Indira Gandhi's mindset explained most of her controversial political moves. These were a deep insecurity about the loyalty to her from those near and dear to her, and her authoritarian mentality.

Of course, it would be wrong to infer that Indira Gandhi had no good qualities at all. Indeed, she had many likeable attributes, but these were overshadowed in her political decision making by her insecurity and authoritarianism.

This led her to make many blunders, produce many zig-zags, even somersaults in policy. She was obsessed by the urge to emasculate all those around her, particularly those who had patronised her initially. In retrospect, I hold her as a very erratic leader because of these contradictions. To call her 'strong' and 'decisive' is, therefore, very superficial. To anybody who understood politics, she was nothing but somebody highly unsure, even frightened, by events. This led her to perform many rash acts.

She was like a cat when cornered, capable of extraordinary counter-attack. But on normal occasions, she wavered between anxiety and lack of self-confidence. The best example of this zig-zag was her actions during the Emergency. I first met Mrs Gandhi in 1965 when she was Information and Broadcasting Minister in the Shastri's Cabinet. She had come to address a meeting at Brandeis University located in a small town called Waltham near the Harvard campus. At that time I was young professor of economics at Harvard University. Mrs Gandhi, who always fancied the company of intellectuals, sent me word through a common contact to meet her.

My contact with her continued till 1969 when I returned to India and joined the Jana Sangh. For this, she thought I was mad and conveyed the same with much irritation through my father, who was then at a senior level in the civil service, which he had joined after a stint as a Congressman in Tamil Nadu. Following my entry into the Jana Sangh, she became very hostile towards me. This did not change till about 1981.

On March 19, 1970, she took the floor of the Lok Sabha and denounced me by name for my "Swadeshi Plan" which I had submitted to the Jana Sangh. Soon thereafter, I was sacked from my full professorship at IIT Delhi, to which I was re-instated by Court after 22 years in 1991.

In the last three years before her assassination in 1984, after I had done a favour to her government on the China question by meeting Deng Xiaoping in Beijing, cordiality in my relations with her was restored. Thereafter, frequent tit-bit conversations with her took place during official dinners and other engagements which I attended as Deputy Leader of the Janata Party in Parliament. With her encouragement I became a very good friend of Rajiv, and collaborated with him in getting Chandrashekhar installed as PM in 1990.

Mrs Gandhi, in my view, cared a lot about the US and European opinion about her while she seemed, for what shall remain as unexplained reasons, obligated to protect the Soviet Union's interests in India. In 1959, as Congress President she was the prime mover in getting the first Communist government in Kerala dismissed under Article 356.

Her first move as PM in the 1960s was to adopt the West's prescriptions for reviving the Indian economy. So she devaluated the Rupee and empowered the well-to-do or 'kulaks' through the green revolution package. She got kudos for it in The New York Times. But, just as soon as the Left parties became important for her survival, she somersaulted and embraced harsh licensing, land reforms and nationalisation of banks. All this policy jugglery gave a huge boost to black money generation and corrupted Indian society forever.

She disregarded US interests when the Bangladesh issue arose in 1971, but just before the fall of Dhaka she spared West Pakistan from military devastation by declaring a premature ceasefire. A year later, she signed the Simla Agreement which meant restoration of the pre-1971 status quo and benefited Pakistan's military capabilities.

Thereafter, she tried to pacify the US, which had fiercely opposed the Bangladesh military operations. She invited Henry Kissinger to visit India and Kissinger flattered her saying she was "a dove with steel claws". Nothing pleased her more.

She declared the Emergency in 1975 because in her authoritarian wisdom, she could not tolerate the popular opposition which JP generated and represented. JP made her insecure since he had impeccable credentials as a freedom fighter against British colonialism and had a clean image too. The charges of corruption against her bothered her much, judging by her letters to her father's old-time friend in New York, Dorothy Norman. She tried hard to discredit JP with the likes of Sitaram Kesari, but failed.

Her authoritarian nature was fortified because, with notable exceptions, the Opposition leaders of her time lacked the ability to stand up to her methods. Some of them were in contact with her and had emboldened her with the input that JP did not enjoy their confidence.

This encouraged her to clamp down on democratic freedoms, jail 140, 000 innocent persons without trial, impose Press censorship and extend the term of Parliament postponing the elections by a constitutional amendment passed by a captive Parliament. Many Opposition leaders wrote apology letters and crawled out of jail on parole.

She did a volte face in 1977 and declared elections at a most inappropriate time for her. She lost the majority for the party and her own seat in Parliament too. To this day, many wonder why she called the elections at that time. I think the censure she received from longtime liberal friends of Nehru in the US and the UK, as well as the soothing advice from Jiddu Krishnamurthi, who was highly popular in high society abroad, drove her to take this step.

It is also possible that the election of human rights campaigner Jimmy Carter as the President of the US in late 1976 could have increased her anxiety about her legitimacy. Of course, my dramatic entry and escape from Parliament in August 1976 may have made her anxious as to how strong the RSS-organised underground had grown.

In June 1984, she launched the Operation Bluestar on the Golden Temple in Amritsar. I spoke to her twice in April that year urging her not to contemplate such action. I told her that there were other better ways of dealing with militants inside the temple. Her answers were vague and reflected a great deal of anxiety. It seemed she was pushed to do it.

After Blue Star, I met Mrs Gandhi in August 1984 for the last time in the corridor of Parliament House. She seemed on edge about Sikh anger and asked what could be done. I could only shrug my shoulders.

I feel sad for India when I look back to the Indira years. The country had given her a huge mandate. Yet her unhappy childhood, her agonising marriage, her disappointment with her siblings, friends, relatives, and most of all her inability to trust anybody caused her to fritter it away. She would be remembered by posterity for the ignominy of the Emergency and Operation Blue Star, without balancing for the Green Revolution, the liberation of Bangla Desh, and for daring to test the nuclear bomb.

The writer is president, Janata Party

 

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THE PIONEER

OPED

GUNGI GUDIYA WHO TOOK ON UNCLE SAM

INDIRA GANDHI WAS ESSENTIALLY A DEMOCRAT AND THOUGH HER CRITICS PILLORY HER OVER THE EMERGENCY, NOBODY CAN DENY THAT HER OUTLOOK WAS DEFINED BY THE URGE TO INCLUDE THE POOREST IN INDIA'S GROWTH STORY

CP BHAMBHRI

The social dialectics of a democracy are quite complex and contradictory. How could Indira Gandhi, a 'puppet' of the Congress party bosses become the Amaa of the poor, the Dalits and the women of rural India? How could she return to power on the basis of votes of the same voters who had rejected, even punished her in the Lok Sabha election of 1977? How could she win two-third of the seats in 1971 and 1979? How could she become the 'sole face' of the Congress and its 'sole successful campaigner'? How could she reduce, electorally, the Opposition parties to the position of great insignificance? How could she carry the verdict of voters on her shoulders in spite of the opposition and the sabotaging politicking of fellow Congressmen? Indira was a messiah of the poor and her promises carried great credibility and conviction with the oppressed. Her Garibi Hatao programme evoked enthusiastic endorsement from the masses. Bank nationalisation opened the doors for the Dalits who got jobs in modern organisations.

The Congress had opted for Indira in 1966 on the basis of a premise that as Nehru's daughter she would win elections for the party and as Prime Minister she would toe the line set by the bigwigs. They were not motivated by any sense of loyalty to her. In 1966, she was brought in as an interim Prime Minister after Lal Bahadur Shastri's death. The electoral reverses suffered by the Congress in 1967 brought into the open the conflicts among the various contenders for the prime ministership.

Indira's sense of political insecurity and anxiety forever haunted her and this was revealed when she 'split' the Congress in 1969 and asked for early polls in 1971. She got a confidence boost when that election resulted in a two-thirds majority for the Congress. For a few years, the nation saw a new Indira Gandhi bringing to an end the hesitant Indira of 1966-1971. She showed this new self-confidence while dealing with the crisis of Bangladesh.

During this period, the entire top brass of the party was reduced to the status of a cipher and the Congress had only one boss, i.e. Indira herself. Authority in the party, in the ultimate analysis, got concentrated in Indira's hands. This supreme trait was not confined to the affairs of the Congress; the affairs of the government were also conducted by her on the basis of the 'buck stops here' principle.

The only purpose behind the declaration of the Emergency in 1975 was to protect and defend Indira, the Prime Minister, who was under political siege. Power flowed from the Constitution till it protected Indira in power and the Constitution was expendable when it proved inconvenient to her. It clearly shows that Indira's authoritarian tendencies were integral to her philosophy of governance. This manifested itself in the Emergency and while dealing with 'movements' like the Assam student's demands.

In her obsession with the Opposition, she often adopted Machiavellian methods. To counter the Akalis, she created a Frankenstein in Jarnail Singh Bhindranwalla. To her, the end justified the means. She also created politics of the personality-cult when the need of the hour was to work with constitutionally provided institutions. This face of Indira should not be forgotten by future generations — they should look out for leaders like her who ride rough shod over Constitutional institutions for governance.

When the history of Indira's 15 years in power is written, there may emerge a ruthless leader who was also the darling of the poor.

Historical judgments are ruthless. But it is impossible for contemporary intelligentsia to objectively evaluate her legacy. Indian nationalists cannot forget her contribution to nation building, especially the events leading to the emergence of Bangladesh, especially the rebuff she gave to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

She also saved India's nascent economy. For today's great liberalisers it is impossible to comprehend the delicate condition that India was in the 1960s under pressure from global capitalism. The victims of the Emergency of 1975-77 cannot accept anything good to be written about Indira. This was Indira, who dominated the political scene and history from 1966 to 1984. She cannot be ignored either by contemporaries or posterity.

What is the real legacy of Indira? First, Indira loved India and was a zealous defender of her sovereignty. Her dialectical relationship with India spelt that love for India was equal to love for ruthless exercise of personal power for the defense of national interest, which got intertwined with her own. Second, Indira taught Indians that democracy can be subverted by a Prime Minster unless Opposition parties are vigilant. Third, only Indians can defend their own freedom from hostile powerful countries and no one will stand for India if the country is facing domestic or external problems.

 

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MAIL TODAY

 COMMENT

ROAD NAMES DECIDED ON POLITICAL WHIMSY

 

THE controversy over the naming of a lane near Lodhi Garden, with the names of two individuals being pitted against each other, highlights the fact that we still do not have a thought- out policy for honouring the dead, besides the question of our legacy for posterity.

 

Streets, buildings and schemes are still being named after individuals in a somewhat random manner, with the whims and fancies of those in power mattering more than the real contributions of people who are conferred the honour. So casual is our system of naming or renaming streets, and so captive in the hands of politicians that most streets in the country's capital are named after people whose contribution to public life or letters is trivial.

 

There is also the problem of certain individuals having too many schemes and structures named after them, with the Nehru Gandhi family and the Congress party being the original sinners in this regard.

 

The question ' why him or her?' is a legitimate one to ask before naming any street, airport, structure or scheme after a certain individual. This will automatically eliminate the candidature of people with somewhat questionable credentials. Also, since the parameters for judging achievement can vary, it is best for the authorities to have a bipartisan procedure when it comes to such an exercise. As things stand today, we have the unwholesome spectacle of political bodies going on a spree to immortalise friends, relatives and personal icons the moment they win power.

 

There is also the issue of renaming structures. The last two decades have seen a spurt in the trend to change the names of cities, streets and markets that are associated with their past, thereby robbing them of their history and heritage.

 

The most notorious example here is the renaming of Connaught Place as Rajiv Chowk.

 

To take an obverse example, several structures in Pakistan today continue to bear their names of the pre- Partition era, such as the Gangaram Hospital and Laxmi Chowk in Lahore. There is an element of maturity in this, as well as a sense of civic pride and self- confidence.

 

New India should make new buildings and structures and name them after its distinguished sons and daughters, but to put a new label over an old name smacks of dishonesty.

 

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MAIL TODAY

COMMENT

PROBE IOC FIRE

 

THE causes of the fire at the Indian Oil Corporation's fuel depot near Jaipur on Thursday night need to be probed thoroughly.

 

Besides the avoidable loss of six company employees and injuries to some 150 people, the blaze has cost the company a loss of nearly Rs 150 crore worth of fuel.

 

There are reports that a number of houses in the vicinity have developed cracks. While the loss is heavy, the fallout of the loss of fuel will be felt mainly in Rajasthan which was serviced by the tank farm. As of Friday evening, the authorities were still waiting for the fuel to burn itself out before allowing the fire engines which have been rushed to the spot from a number of surrounding towns to go into the depot.

 

The obvious question is the cause of the fire. Some reports speak of a fire being sparked off by a leaky valve. But there are reports that suggest negligence as well because something or someone caused the leaked fuel to ignite.

 

This said, we are confronted with another set of questions relating to the design of the tank farm. Usually such facilities are made in such a way that a limited fire does not trigger a big conflagration.

 

The government needs to review firesafety measures relating to oil storage facilities and petrol stations. Just ten days ago there was a major fire at a Bhopal petrol station, though no casualties were reported. Though there are rules and regulations to ensure that citizens are not endangered, the reality is also that these rules and regulations are broken at will.

 

At places unauthorised houses and shopping centres have been established. There is little point becoming wise after a tragedy, and something as inflammable as oil products is always a fire hazard of the first magnitude.

 

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MAIL TODAY

COLUMN

INDIRA GANDHI REBOOTED

BY DINESH C SHARMA

 

INDIA's software and outsourcing industry is projected as one of the poster boys of economic liberalisation unleashed in 1992. The sector witnessed exponential growth through the 1990s, and the industry took off with gusto in the post-2000 period. The combined revenue of the Indian information technology and business process outsourcing industry during the current fiscal is projected to cross $70 billion — which is 5.8 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. Exports alone will account for revenue worth $47 billion. Undoubtedly, this sector has emerged a major contributor to economic growth, urban employment and exports in recent years. This growth has made India a significant player in the so-called knowledge business in the past few years.

 

The seeds of making India a major knowledge economy player were sowed more than two decades ago. Industry leaders and scholars have often overlooked this and failed to recognise the key role played by Indira Gandhi in steering a decisive shift in electronics and computer policies in early 1980s — ultimately resulting in a robust multi-billion industry at the turn of the new century. It may be worth setting the record straight when Indira Gandhi's tenure is being re-assessed on the occasion of her 25th death anniversary.

 

CHANGE

We normally associate Indira Gandhi's rule with highly restrictive, socialistic economic and trade policies.

 

The government controlled the course of the industry through licensing and restrictions on production capacities. It also controlled the level of technology through curbs on import of technology and equipment.

 

The flow of foreign capital too was regulated through strict rules on foreign equity, technical tie- ups and profit repatriation. Domestic availability of capital was too limited and costly.

 

All this resulted in a slow and painful start of the computer hardware industry in the private sector during her first tenure as the Prime Minister from January 1966 to March 1977. It was during this period that her government rejected applications from companies such as Sony, Fairchild Semiconductors and Texas Instruments to set up export- led manufacturing plants in India. All these companies then went over to Southeast Asian countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia which were eager to facilitate foreign investment in high technology manufacturing. That's why India missed the hardware bus.

 

If the socialist policies of Indira Gandhi are to be blamed for India missing the hardware bus in 1970s, ironically it is the same person who needs to be credited for setting in motion the process for a liberalised computer policy framework in the post- 1980 period. Her second tenure in office was markedly different. The 33 months she was out of power seem to have changed her thinking on economic matters. This changed thinking made her abandon the statist and pro- public sector model of development of the Nehru era and her own populist " Garibi Hatao" policies and embrace pro- private sector policies.

 

She consciously broke away from the set of Nehruvian economic advisors and readily received new ideas presented to her from outside the closed group of advisors whom she depended on in her first tenure. Indira Gandhi gave her nod for preparing a liberalised computer policy early on to Dr N Seshagiri — then a middle- ranking official in the Department of Electronics ( DoE) headed by her. She delicensed consumer electronic manufacturing on the advice of a technocrat- turned- industrialist friend of her elder son — Prabhakar S Deodhar — and later appointed him Chairman of a state corporation functioning under DoE. She heeded the request of a NRI entrepreneur — Satyen Gangaram Pitorda — to present to her a blueprint of introducing India- made digital telephone exchanges in the country. This became a highly successful technology development programme under the Centre for Development of Telematics ( C- DOT) a few years later. Her government also announced a Software Export Promotion Policy in January 1982.

 

The most radical idea that India Gandhi agreed to during the months preceding her assassination was the concept of privately- owned duty- free technology parks for taking up knowledge- based exports. The idea first came from a young NRI entrepreneur — Sharad Madhav Marathe — during her trip to the United States in 1982.

 

Marathe had drawn his inspiration from the Research Triangle Park operating in North Carolina. In parallel, Seshagiri proposed a similar idea in a report he wrote for the United Nations Center for Transnational Corporations.

 

The idea of permitting " software exports through satellite based data links with overseas computers" got incorporated in a policy document, for the first time, in the Import- Export policy for 1985- 88 — approved on September 6, 1984 by the Cabinet Committee on Economics Affairs presided over by Indira Gandhi.

 

LANDMARK

This was a landmark decision that would change the contours of India's nascent computer and software industry over the next decade. In one stroke, the government sought to boost an export industry, without making it suffer due to lack of the physical infrastructure of roads, ports and airports.

 

Bits and bytes of information could simply be exported via computers connected through satellite data links.

 

This was indeed a revolutionary concept at a time when satellite communication itself was in its infancy.

 

The idea was further finetuned and incorporated in the liberalised New Computer Policy which was approved by her cabinet, but before it could be made public she was killed by her own bodyguards on October 31, 1984. Her son Rajiv Gandhi — who succeeded her chose her birthday ( November 19, 1984) to announce the new computer policy. This gave an impression that the new policy was a work of the new government. The widely held notion that a brand new, liberalised computer policy was hurriedly brought in soon after Rajiv became PM is thus misplaced.

 

ACHIEVEMENT

In fact, all major initiatives that are normally linked to the Rajiv Gandhi era — liberalised policy framework for the computer and electronics sectors, rural telephone exchanges, software technology parks, computerised railway reservation project and even technology missions — had their origins in the period when his mother was the Prime Minister. Actually when Rajiv took over, the groundwork for a liberalised regime in electronics, computer and telecom sectors had already been laid. The new electronics policy had been announced.

 

The cabinet had approved the new computer policy, it had cleared the setting up of C- DOT; and manufacturing of telecom equipment had already been opened to the private sector. The government had also announced programmes for introduction of computers in the government, education and public sectors. The forces of change that came to a head under Rajiv's regime had been pursued under Indira Gandhi with Rajiv helping in his personal capacity. It would appear as if Indira was repenting for the excessive socialist policies unleashed under her rule in the 1970s.

 

While the idea of software technology parks was incorporated in the 1984 policy and Texas Instruments set up its export unit in Bangalore in 1985, it took another six years for the parks to become conducive for exports by smaller Indian firms. Once the parks were functional, software exports witnessed exponential growth. The reasons for success of these parks were many. They brought Indian software companies closer to their customers in America and other countries through improved communication links and video conferencing. The parks freed exports from going through the drudgery of ports and customs and gave them fiscal incentives in the form of tax holidays.

 

The software parks also helped the emergence of high technology clusters like Bangalore and Noida. The entry of multinationals in these clusters further helped Indian software companies.

 

The overall impact of all these factors was the emergence of a robust software export industry by mid- 1990s, making the Software Technology Parks scheme the most successful export promotion scheme ever to be formulated by the Indian government.

 

The scheme remains relevant even in 2009 and this is clear from the industry demand for its continuation.

 

Dineshc. sharma@ mailtoday. in

 

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MAIL TODAY

THE LAHORE LOG

BOOMTOWN RAP

MAX MARTIN

 

IT CITY TO LEAD INDIA'S CHARGE ON CLIMATE

THE rains have stopped and the temperatures are rising once again in Karnataka. Even on the political front. But scientists in Bangalore are more concerned about the warming up on a global scale, and its impact. In the coming years, Bangalore will be known for research on climate change. Two of India's leading think tanks on the subject will be based here.

 

The Divecha Centre for Climate Change at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) will be looking closely at the causes and consequences of this global phenomenon. The primary goal of the centre is to quantify climate change and its impact on the environment. The recent flood in the north of the state is seen by some as a mark of climate change. The centre has been established with funds from US-based NRIs Arjun and Diana Divecha and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.

 

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is setting up its own new centre, jointly with the Ministry of Environment and Forests. The centre will promote India's own research on climate change. The current research is largely US and Europe-based. In some of the studies, there is an inbuilt bias against developing countries, environment minister Jairam Ramesh feels. The minister predicted that more such bogeys will appear in the run- up to the climate talks in Copenhagen. He was right.

 

There are new reports about the Asian Brown Cloud ( ABC). Scientists have studied this phenomenon for many years. Yet they have been unsure of what causes this seasonal haze over south Asia.

 

Where do all this soot and other carbon- containing suspended particles come from, especially during the winter? Fossil fuels guzzled by cars and trucks and coal burnt in power plants contribute to it. So do wood and other biomass burnt by poor people for cooking purposes and the practice of slash- and- burn farming. During the 2002 Johannesburg green summit ( Rio+ 10), ABC loomed large over international politics.

 

Developing country scientists saw it as a case of half- baked science and blaming the victim.

 

IISc scientists, including Prof J Srinivasan, who now heads the Divecha Centre, and monsoon expert Sulochana Gadgil then explained the phenomenon more rationally. To dumb down complex atmospheric science, ABC is not a phenomenon restricted to Asia, it is not brown, and it is not a cloud. More importantly, it is not poor people who are responsible for it. The emerging Bangalore centres are expected to cut through a lot of such haze.

 

CHANGING HATS, PLANTING TREES AND STORIES

REMEMBER Satinder Bindra, the former CNN South Asia bureau chief who wrote the book, Tsunami: Seven Hours that Shook the World ? He is currently the head of information and communication at the UN Environment Programme ( UNEP), based in Nairobi.

 

He is now travelling around the world, telling people to plant more trees, cut carbon and to " seal the deal" at Copenhagen.

 

The idea is to make nations commit to cut carbon emissions.

 

Bindra now produces more films for the UN than he ever did for his broadcasters. He calls himself a story- teller. Of course, he can effortlessly spin a lot of UN yarn. He gave some spirited talk at the Vatavaran.

 

Bindra has a lot of images and footage from across the world on environmental issues — free for publication and broadcast. You will hear more from him in the coming weeks.

 

STUDYING THE EARTH IN BALANCE

 

THE new chairman of ISRO is a man who wears many hats and masks — he is a classical singer and a Kathakali dancer. As the man who set up the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services ( INCOIS) in Hyderabad, K Radhakrishnan will contribute to ISRO's research on sea surface changes too.

 

There is a lot of research in the pipeline. For instance, scientists are awaiting the launch of the Indio- French project, Megha- tropiques, a dedicated satellite to study tropical weather and climate phenomena. It is expected to contribute a lot to the study of climate change.

 

Some of Radhakrishnan's statements, soon after his appointment, came while he was seated on a huge balance. He was offering bananas against his weight at the Guruvayur Krishna temple in his home district of Thrissur in Kerala. This practice is called ' Thulabharam'. It is an act of thanksgiving.

 

In an earth in the balance, with a lot of people going bananas over climate change issues, Radhakrishnan and ISRO will have some tough work ahead.

 

max.martin@mailtoday.in

 

ADDING to the local political temperature are the Reddy brothers, who bankrolled the Bharatiya Janata Party to power in Karnataka.

 

They have challenged the chief minister B S Yeddyurappa, who they have accused of an autocratic style of functioning. The brothers — G Karunakara and G Janardhan — are involved in large- scale mining in the northern district of Bellary, being considered like royalty in that area.

 

There is concern that some of their mining activities are at the cost of local forests.

 

Forests are considered sinks that soak up part of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — in effect cooling the globe. So any destruction of forests leads to global warming.

 

The question is whether Yeddyurappa will take this line and force the brothers to " seal the deal" even before Copenhagen. Anyway a lot of hot air has been released because of the heated exchanges between the two sides.

THIS is a gem from the film Home : We all drink the same water that our ancestors drank tens of thousands of years ago. The logic is that it is the same water that rains down, flows through springs, gets collected in the sea and again evaporates into the sky. There are exceptions of course — glacial lakes could contain water that dates back millions of years, untouched by our ancestors!

 

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MAIL TODAY

INTERACTIVE

INTERESTING STORIES FROM TAMIL NADU

 

THIS refers to the news reports ' Top cops in dock for Madras HC lawyer assault' and ' Villagers rise against Dinakaran' ( both published on October 30). The news items make for interesting reading and highlight the dire need for immediate analysis and remedial action.

 

In Tamil Nadu, the public is aware about the Police machinery abetting a state of lawlessness at the behest of its political masters no matter what party they belong to. Sadly, this happens all over the state, irrespective of the causes, and that too without exercising discretion and truthfulness.

 

The act of 66 residents of a Dalit colony complaining against the Karnataka Chief Justice Paul Dinakaran alleging the destruction of evidence of land- grab by removing the fence around the land was brave, but it is still just a police complaint, and not an FIR. The destruction of evidence cannot be executed without the complicit assistance of the Police. Their apathy also leads to an understanding by the state that it is lawful.

 

In both the cases, the image and conduct of the police establishes the truth that those in authority and power govern the affairs of the state without any fear of the law.

 

The State needs for arrest this tendency and discipline. It can no longer wait.

N. R. Narayanan via email

 

' FREEDOM OF SPEECH' IN AIR INDIA

THIS refers to the news item regarding Air India air- hostess Komal Singh having faced humiliation in a midair scuffle air during Flight IC- 884, being charge- sheeted for speaking to the media.

 

The Supreme Court should suo motu take note of this against the management of the National Aviation Company of India Limited ( NACIL) and Union civil aviation ministry for issuing such orders which prohibit staff of a national airliner speaking to the media, as it is against freedom of speech. Following several RTI petitions, it has been revealed that the company is facing severe losses due to corruption at various levels. However, no one from the Air India staff is willing to speak to the media on account of the fear of losing his or her job. As a result, the facts are forever concealed.

 

A recent RTI petition filed received a response from Air India's chief public information officer that was so weak that it could not even provide the simplest information on pay, perks and facilities available to the airline's top management.

 

On television, the company's chief public relations officer Jitendra Bhargava said that the mid- term termination of the Caribjet contract was due to a financial crunch. However, documents received under the RTI Act reveal that Air India had to suffer a massive loss of Rs 130 crore because the leased planes by CaribJet were not flight worthy, and the legal agreement had no exit clause for Air India in case of a fault on part of CaribJet.

 

The gag on the staff members speaking to media means that important information shall never reach the public. The circular or notification banning staff members of Air India talking to media should be immediately withdrawn.

 

Devendra Narain via email

 

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TIMES OF INDIA

COMMENT

WHAT'S UP, FAMILY DOC?

 

Make up your mind, Doc. Will it be chemotherapy or not? Mind made up, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat blames scribes for 'distorting' his comment that it's for the BJP to decide whether it needs medicine, surgery or chemotherapy. So, going by his illness-as-metaphor clarification, does he want to be doctor do-little because he really thinks the lotus isn't wilting? Or was his mention of a certain drastic treatment a Freudian slip? M M Joshi, for one, calls the BJP-wallahs "patients". Rajnath Singh has a happier diagnosis: party morale is "high" (read: under his stewardship). High, despite bitter pills from the 2009 general elections to the lost battle for Maharashtra. Well, when family doctors contradict each other on what seems a medical emergency, maybe it's time to seek non-parivar opinion.

Symptom-readers on the outside could find two clinical explanations for Rajnath's curious optimism. Either his flock needs to escape reality via intake of verbal hallucinogens. Or Rajnath suffers see-no-evil vision problems. We've all gaped at the spectacle of utter disarray within the "party with a difference". But Rajnath seems optically immune. Maybe that's why he's taken to journeying blind, a habit no less injurious to health than heading an outfit in apparent free fall. Recently, he flew off from an airstrip with only jeep headlights for visibility. Bah, say party colleagues. Since May 2009, haven't they all been doing a swell job of groping in the dark?

So what if they've been contaminated by a few rancid pickles, lotus-eaters and Jinnah fans setting off alarms at Nagpur's ideological wellness centre? If BJP needed intensive care, parivar patriarchs would surely not let it stop at band-aiding electoral wounds. Besides, the likening of Advani to a pickle past its prime was just one leader's way of lauding a specialist charioteer about to take much-needed rest. RSS biggies would agree, especially with the bit about Loh Purush's awaited retirement. Succession plots have been brewing ever since Advani jived with Jinnah's ghost, that too on enemy soil.

And who says the BJP can't perform dogma-saving operations when contagion spreads? Jaswant Singh too caught the Jinnah bug, becoming a qaidi of Qaid-e-Azam. Severed from the party with surgical precision, he had to recuperate from the shock in the hills of Darjeeling. Others need slow-acting panaceas. Iron Man, for instance, has been shedding posts so that a final round of ideological health check-ups throws up a fighting fit replacement. Nagpur seems ready to bless a new-look BJP, giving grassroots life support come polltime. It's called sticking together - in sickness and in health.

Second opinion: for political recovery, the BJP needs an alternative regimen. One, get off those chariots of ire. Two, get on to a 21st century treadmill to shed outmoded thinking. Last, tell parivar hawks their primordial prescriptions are the problem, not the cure. Only, do political saffronites have it in them to be that health conscious?

 

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TIMES OF INDIA

TOP ARTICLE

SOME QUESTIONS ARE BEST BURIED

ARVIND PANAGARIYA

 

Jaswant Singh has done a great service by sensitising us to the importance of a better understanding of India's immediate pre-independence history. His book, and the controversy that surrounded it recently, have led me to undertake a closer scrutiny of this critical period. I have, in turn, reached the conclusion that the key question on which the media has been transfixed who is culpable for the partition is essentially moot. The objectives, philosophies and backgrounds of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah and of the Congress and Muslim League were so fundamentally in conflict that the partition was inevitable.

The 1940s British India was divided into 17 provinces and hundreds of princely states. Of the 17 provinces, governors ruled 11 and chief commissioners the remaining six. The negotiations in the 1940s centred on the 11 provinces under governors. Hindus were in the majority in seven of them and Muslims in four. The principal parties to the negotiations were the Congress, the Muslim League and the British government. Princely states and minorities Sikhs, Christians and Dalits had representation but they did not have decisive influence on the outcome.

Nehru had a vision to build a modern, democratic India with equal representation for all. A strong central government was an integral part of that vision. Jinnah, who had given little thought to nation-building, was solely focused on achieving a post-independence governance structure in which his Muslim League would have parity with the Congress at the Centre and complete autonomy at the provincial level. The latter objective required a weak Centre.

Despite Muslims constituting only 25 per cent of the population, Jinnah insisted on equal representation for his Muslim League to that of the Congress at the Centre. He also saw his Muslim League as the sole representative of all Muslims in India and the Congress as representing strictly upper-caste Hindus. In contrast, the Congress viewed itself as the party of national integration representing all Indians. By corollary, it did not accept the Muslim League as the sole representative of Muslims.

At every stage in the negotiations, Jinnah insisted that the Muslim League be given as many representatives in the key decision-making central bodies as the Congress and that the Muslim League alone be allowed to appoint Muslims on these bodies. To the Congress, whose leadership included members of all communities including Maulana Azad, a Muslim who served as its president from 1940 to 1945 such demands were anathema.

Given the progressively inflexible position of Jinnah, the only way the Congress could have preserved a united India was by accepting his demands in entirety. But in view of his long struggle for independence that included many years spent in jail, his national integration aspirations, and the dream to build a modern democratic India, Nehru could hardly be expected to make such a sacrifice and that too in favour of someone who had not spent a day in jail, was solely focused on the preservation of the interests of a single community, and had little inclination to work cooperatively with the Congress to build a modern India. The experience with the 1946 interim government, administered jointly by the Congress and the Muslim League, confirmed the unworkable nature of their relationship. There came to exist a virtual vertical wall between the departments held by the Congress and the Muslim League from the minister at the top right down to the orderly at the bottom.

Prior to the arrival of Lord Mountbatten, the Cabinet Mission of May 1945 represented the only serious attempt by the British towards independence. To woo Jinnah, the Mission proposed an all-India federation with a three-tier governance structure with a weak Centre at the top, weak provinces at the bottom, and strong groupings of provinces in the middle. Three groupings were proposed: Group A with three contiguous Muslim majority provinces, Group B containing six Hindu majority provinces and Group C clubbing the vast Muslim majority Bengal with a much smaller Hindu majority Assam. Each group was to write its own separate constitution with the Centre's jurisdiction limited to defence, foreign affairs and communications. Predictably, the Congress refused to embrace the groupings idea.

Much has been made of Nehru's public repudiation of the idea in an interview to The Hindu in July 1946. A 1968 book reports even Azad as having said that the interview "changed the course of history". Yet, as a matter of historical record, at no stage had Nehru or the Congress accepted the groupings idea. As the Congress president, Azad himself had informed the Cabinet Mission in May 1945 that the Congress was "entirely opposed to any executive or legislative machinery for a group of provinces".

In the end, the gulf between Nehru's conception of a united India and that of Jinnah was too deep to be filled. Even so, if responsibility for the partition must be assigned, Indians with genuine national-integration aspirations are bound to point the finger at Jinnah.

The writer is a professor of economics at Columbia University.

 

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TIMES OF INDIA

TIMES VIEW

A FLIGHT TO NOWHERE

 

President Pratibha Patil, who was the toast of British royalty on a state visit this week, is setting her sights on the sky, quite literally. Defence ministry officials have revealed that plans are afoot to put the president on the Indian Air Force's potent supersonic fighter jet, the Sukhoi-30MKI. Patil is expected to take to the skies in this fourth generation fighter aircraft from the IAF's Lohegaon airbase near Pune in the last week of November. Patil will not be the first president to take a trip on military jet planes. Former president A P J Abdul Kalam has already travelled on such a flight path when he took a spin in a Sukhoi in 2006. He has also taken a ride in a submarine. The question to ask is: What is the point of such exercises?

Supporters of this plan aver that as commander-in-chief, a president on a sortie inspires confidence in India's military preparedness and capabilities. It's a substantive morale-boost both for the people in the forces and the citizens of this country, it is argued. That's a pretty lame argument. If anything, such displays are merely symbolic. The public's confidence in the defence forces is built on the basis of their track record be it during times of war or peace not through VIP endorsements.

The other argument being bandied about in defence of the president's proposed flight is that as the first woman commander-in-chief of India's armed forces, her sortie in the skies will push the case for the induction of women fighter pilots. It will, apparently, help women in the forces to also breach other boundaries that constrain them presently. That is a tenuous link.

The case for women in the forces merits a fair hearing irrespective of the gender of the commander-in-chief and symbolic gestures put out for public consumption. The president of India dons several ceremonial hats. But her substantive role is as the constitutional head of the Republic of India. That is the part that must take precedence.

 

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TIMES OF INDIA

COUNTER VIEW

IT SERVES AN ADMIRABLE PURPOSE

ANIL THAKKAR

 

The thought of the diminutive president Pratibha Patil strapping herself into the Indian Air Force's Sukhoi MKI fighter jet capable of shattering the sound barrier and hitting speeds of Mach 2.35 is admittedly a touch strange. But in the larger scheme of things, it is also entirely fitting. If Patil does go ahead with it, she will be following in former president A P J Abdul Kalam's well-publicised footsteps. And like him, she will be demonstrating both a deep appreciation for the armed forces' service to the nation and an understanding of her role within the constitutional framework.

The president's post may be a largely ceremonial one in the Indian context, but whoever holds the office is nevertheless head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces. In a perennial state of readiness due to border conflicts, dealing with decades-old internal security situations that ideally should not be their responsibility, the least the military can expect is a public show of support from its titular head. That Patil should think of doing so by climbing into a fighter jet is particularly apt.

The Air Force has been plagued by bureaucratic and financial constraints; these have seen its squadron strength dip and old, outdated aircraft retained in service. Not surprisingly, there have been a number of accidents and crashes over the years. By choosing to entrust her safety to the Air Force, Patil is providing a testament to both the men and the machines of the service. And if it also serves another purpose pushing the case for women fighter pilots so much the better.

That her position is a ceremonial one, in fact, makes Patil the perfect person for boosting the morale of the armed forces. Tradition and ceremony are inextricably woven into the fabric of the armed forces. They are present in every aspect of their functioning. There are sound reasons for this; a sense of history and continuity are indispensable in a service that has nationalism as its raison d'etre and asks millions of men and women to risk their lives daily. Who better, then, to show that the nation appreciates their service and has faith in them than the highest citizen of the land whose office places a similar emphasis on tradition and history?

 

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TIMES OF INDIA

GLOBAL EYE

COOL IT ON CHINA

NAYAN CHANDA

 

Until the calming words out of Chinese foreign minister's visit to India this week, the two countries seemed on a collision course. The People's Daily chided India for its border provocation and "dream of hegemony" while the Indian media, especially the echo chamber of 24/7 cable TV, behaved as if 'the Chinese are coming'. Some even predicted a date for the impending Chinese invasion. Scary stories about a Himalayan confrontation hit the world press. All this would be merely amusing sensationalism if not for the risk of generating a nationalist hysteria and an international crisis potentially spiralling out of control.

Indian public opinion has shown great maturity towards Pakistan because it is well-informed about that country's complexity. It is time for cooler editorial heads to prevail in dealing with China. This is not a call to turn one's gaze away from the northern border or to ignore the implications of a rising China and its growing military might. But one needs a realistic assessment of China's power, as well as its weaknesses and insecurities so as not to be obsessed with a hypothetical 'China threat'.

Three hundred years ago, China and India produced half of the world's gross domestic product. They are making a comeback, India more slowly. By building upon its thousands of years experience and opening its economy to the world, China has achieved record growth. It has lifted a quarter of its population out of poverty and is today sitting on a record $2.3 trillion reserve. Its double-digit growth in defence spending for the past two decades has endowed it with impressive military muscle - from long-range nuclear missiles to a blue-water navy.

But this rise has come at a price: growing income inequality and grave environmental degradation with clean-up and health costs amounting to nearly half of its annual GDP growth. Many of the growing numbers of protests in the country 58,000 officially counted "mass incidents" in first quarter of this year alone express anger at corruption and pollution.

The military parade held on the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic was certainly a reminder of Beijing's power but, ironically, also a demonstration of its weakness. For all its might and the size of its internal security forces, citizens were ordered to remain indoors obliged to watch the parade on television, not allowed even to peek through the window. Need to protect the stability of their one-party rule is supreme. Although the neuralgic issue of Taiwan has considerably calmed down with the rise of accommodating leadership on the island, new threats to national unity have emerged from the simmering anger of the minority Tibetan and Uighur populations following the deadly riots earlier this year.

While al-Qaeda's involvement with the Uighur separatists remains a distant threat, Tibetan rebellion is a more immediate concern. India, as the host of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exiles pining to return home is high on China's worry radar. This concern can only grow as the transition time in Tibetan leadership approaches. China cannot ignore the Dalai Lama's acceptance of Arunachal as belonging to India, nor his remark that his successor may be born outside Tibet, nor the historical fact that Tawang in the contested province was the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama. If China's alliance with Pakistan gives it certain leverage, India too enjoys the same vis-a-vis its Tibetan ties. What India needs is a pragmatic and sensitive approach and not histrionics.

It would be an error to cast the inevitably difficult relations with China in terms of military confrontation. India's main challenge from Beijing does not lie across its frozen border but in the economic success evident in China's glittering cities, infrastructure, booming industries, high-quality schools and its emergent clean energy technology. Its growing wealth confers enormous power and influence trillion dollars can buy a lot in international bodies. India's fledgling economy, still beset with widespread poverty, malnutrition, inequality and injustice that spawns, among others, Maoist violence, is no match.

This means that if a military confrontation were to take place, India might well find itself internationally isolated. Money talks and it certainly seems that, for the time being at least, the favoured accent may be Mandarin.

 

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

EDITORIAL

A CONNECTION HAS BEEN MADE

 

There was something refreshingly unadulterated about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi on Friday. It was an honest, calibrated opinion unclouded by rhetoric. So when Mr Singh stated that "the India of tomorrow cannot be built from New Delhi alone," we clearly heard what he was saying: there is an unquestionable urgency for expansive and inclusive democracy. His projection of a 9-10 per cent growth rate is stitched on to this 'one India' premise

 

Policies and politics that have perpetuated the split-level arrangement of the Great Indian Success Story cohabiting with 'Real India' need to be refitted. When Mr Singh reiterated that "we need to push forward reforms," the message could have been interpreted by those listening to suit what they define as 'reforms'. But the PM's assertion that reforms have "many dimensions" that must include increased rural infrastructure-building and the creation of an atmosphere conducive for rural development along with the more traditional forms of economic reforms underlined the need to demolish the Cartesian divide between Surging India and Left Behind Bharat. If the PM linked economic growth to social stability, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee spelt things out further. Three factors, Mr Mukherjee said, will determine India's economic prowess: an institutional higher growth trajectory, fiscal consolidation and inclusive growth. And for all these three to click and trot, not only does the global economic climate have to improve and permanent structures for reforms be put in place, but India's security environment must also improve.

 

That the government is not pushing every security challenge under the carpet of 'external aggression' was made evident by both speakers talking about the challenges of "internal disturbances". If growth has been hit by a 2 per cent dip in agriculture fuelled by the twin terrors of drought and floods, the rumblings from India's have-nots need to be tackled. It is the promise made by the Prime Minister and his colleague in the Finance Ministry of doing just that — tackling this socio-economic problem at its source as well as quelling its consequences — that should make the nation at large believe that something right is being done and allow us to invest our trust in plainspeaking.

 

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

EDITORIAL

NO ANSWERS TO THE KEY QUESTION

PRATIK KANJILAL

 

It's perfectly shocking that a Rajdhani Express can be 'hijacked' in broad daylight. But our sense of shock owes something to that term — 'hijacked'. It's a posh train, aircon from end to end, free mineral water and no beggars on board. So when it's held up by mugs of a Maoist front demanding the release of a fellow mug, it looks shockingly like a 'hijacking'.

 

But in West Bengal, it's called a rail roko, an event as routine as eating a rosogolla. As a local, what I found disturbing was not the hold-up but the firefight on the sidelines between Maoists and the police. It brought back memories of the early 70s, when the Naxalites were a force to reckon with. But otherwise, the Banstala incident was just a rail roko. It was not exactly Kandahar.

 

Every other day, we Bengalis hold up trains to press any old demand, sometimes with tragic consequences. The day of the Rajdhani drama, the Guwahati-Chennai Express was also held up for four hours by a rail passengers' association demanding a change in commuter train timings. On board was a young man travelling to Chennai to seek treatment for a respiratory illness. He did not survive the rail roko. This Assamese man died because of an obscure local issue in a district of West Bengal. To my mind, this sort of thing is truly shocking, because it's been going on for decades.

 

The Bengalis are a resilient lot and have adapted to rail rokos. Adaptation consists of lying back and enjoying the ride. I was once 'hijacked' for several hours at Gurap. Gurap? That's right, I said Gurap. A station as nondescript as Banstala, as the name suggests. No one knew who had 'hijacked' us. No one cared about the identity of the rail roko activists squatting on the tracks in front of the engine, waving placards and raising slogans. It was agreed that this had to be the Gurap Underwear Manufacturers' Association, or some similarly contemptible organisation, and no one paid them any attention.

 

The train was coming down from the north, so the passengers were prepared for a siege. Bottles of Sikkimese and Bhutanese liquor were produced and put through their paces. A foraging party liberated fried fish in industrial quantities from the fair town of Gurap. Another returned with news that the state Minister for Jails was among the 'hostages' on the immobilised train. Triumphant passengers surged out on the platform, shouting ironical demands for the immediate release of the Jail Minister, drowning out the 'hijackers' who were raising slogans about a far less exciting issue. Something about development, I think. The party lasted for hours until the 'hijackers' gave up and the train got under way again to the sound of lusty, drunken cheering.

 

But without Sikkimese lubrication, I don't think any of the passengers on that deliriously happy train would want to repeat the experience. Rail rokos typically cause aggravation, incalculable financial losses and even death. Now that the Maoists have brought the problem to the attention of the Home Minister, I hope he will at least address the most shocking feature of the Banstala drama — when the train was stopped, there wasn't a single policeman on board.

 

Pratik Kanjilal is publisher of The Little Magazine(The views expressed by the author are personal)

 

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

EDITORIAL

MRS G FORCE

VIR SANGHVI

 

On this day, 25 years ago, Indira Gandhi was struck down by assassins' bullets. A quarter century later, you would think that with the benefit of hindsight, India might have arrived at a consensus over Mrs Gandhi's legacy or that we were able to judge her time in office with some detachment.

 

In fact, we seem as divided and as confused about Indira Gandhi today as we were when she was alive. Over the last month, I asked people I met casually, those I interact with on Twitter and visitors to my website what they thought of Indira Gandhi.

 

There was no unanimity at all. Many praised her for her strength and leadership. But the critics attacked her on two principal grounds: dynasty and her left-wing economic policies which they argued had severely damaged India.

 

Funnily enough, hardly anybody mentioned the one reason why many people of my generation (including me) opposed her in life: the Emergency.

 

The amnesia about the Emergency extends to the BJP which hardly ever mentions the issue (though the RSS was banned and Jan Sangh leaders were locked up), and seemed content when party workers raised slogans  hailing Varun Gandhi as the new Sanjay Gandhi during the election campaign.

 

Asked by an interviewer how the BJP could allow the glorification of the man responsible (along with his mother) for the lowest phase in Indian democracy, L.K. Advani twinkled, "That is a small matter."

 

So while the Congress seems embarrassed by the Emergency ("even Mrs Gandhi apologised for the excesses and remember, she was the one who called the 1977 election"), the BJP seems to have forgotten about it and is content to hail the legacy of Sanjay Gandhi (a man whose notorious record has led the Congress to photoshop him out of its history)!

 

Who said there was no irony in Indian politics?

 

If you put aside the Emergency (which, unquestionably, was A Bad Thing), Mrs Gandhi's record is complex. There are the spectacular political achievements: the 1971 landslide, the triumphant come-back in 1980, the creation of two separate parties (the Congress-R in 1969 and the Congress-I in 1978) based on little more than her own charisma and many years in office (around 15 years in two separate spells).

 

But equally, there is a dark side. Her own insecurity led her to take steps that had damaging consequences for India. By the end of her first term in office, she had become so mistrustful of her political colleagues that she abandoned Cabinet government for a centralised style of functioning. At first, power was concentrated in her office. And then, more sinisterly, in her Private Secretary. (By 1981, R.K. Dhawan's power was second only to Mrs Gandhi's.)

 

To be fair, the damage to those institutions was temporary. The Cabinet's primacy has now been restored and nobody even knows or cares who the Prime Minister's Private Secretary is these days.

 

However, one consequence of her insecurity still haunts us today. It was Indira Gandhi who legitimised dynasty. While there had always been a family aspect to Indian politics, no Prime Minister had ever been brazen  enough to pick up a delinquent, motor-mechanic son with no previous experience of government and to declare that he would now be her effective second-in-command.

 

That decision opened the floodgates. Now, nearly every party (except the Left) treats genetics as a means of determining political advancement. And India is living with the consequences.

 

Whatever your views on Mrs Gandhi's style of functioning — as you can tell, I was not a fan — there's no denying that as a Prime Minister, she was largely successful.

 

Her primary achievement lay in holding India together in the 1966-1984 period when the neighbourhood was collapsing. Pakistan broke up. Afghanistan was taken over by the Soviets, Sri Lanka was rocked by civil war and Burma shut itself off from the world.

 

It is possible now to underestimate this achievement but till the 1980s, Western political scientists would routinely predict the break-up of India, its Balkanisation or a military take-over. It is to Mrs Gandhi's credit that none of these predictions came true and that elections during her time were vigorous, issue-based exercises that yielded national mandates.

 

Her handling of the economy is harder to judge. You'd have to be crazy to argue that India could have opted for an entirely free market (as Pakistan did) in the Sixties and the Seventies — we needed government investment to build up infrastructure and to ensure equitable development — but equally, there's no doubt that many of Mrs Gandhi's left-wing populist measures did not work: nationalisation of the grain trade, punitive taxation etc.

 

By 1980, Indira Gandhi had abandoned socialism and begun to liberalise but in retrospect it is clear that India moved too slowly to end the licence raj. However, it is not clear that this was Mrs Gandhi's fault alone. She followed the prevailing consensus among economists and political parties and was dead by the time this consensus changed. (Even Manmohan Singh was hardly a radical reformer during his time as an economic civil servant — the consensus changed later).

 

Her area of greatest success was foreign policy.

 

Can you imagine the mess India would be in today if East Pakistan still existed and if terrorists flooded across both our borders? By bisecting Pakistan, she ensured that it would never be more than a nuisance.

 

A united Pakistan, on the other hand, would have been a serious threat. Moreover, since 1971 when Pakistan lost the war, we had no trouble with Islamabad till Mrs Gandhi's death. Kashmir, today's flashpoint, was entirely peaceful.

 

It's easy now to say that she put too much faith in the Soviet Union. But, in reality, India had no choice. In the Sixties, Pakistan was a client state of the US. In 1971, it facilitated the rapprochement between America and China and by 1980, it had become the base for the American operation against Soviet-held Afghanistan.

 

The consequences of Islamabad's engagement with Washington are visible in the debris of Pakistan today. So not only could India not have offered the US the strategic assistance that Pakistan did, we are probably better off for not having done so.

 

So, finally, how does one assess Indira Gandhi?

 

I'll give you my own perspective. When she was alive, I opposed her for the Emergency, for dynasty and for the bypassing of cabinet government. Those are still my views.

 

But where I did not give her enough credit was in keeping India together, in making the electoral process vibrant and energetic and in forging a foreign policy that put a great democratic experiment on track to become a superpower of the 21st century.

 

Time has not softened my views on her flaws. But it has taught me to appreciate her achievements more.

 

The views expressed by the author are personal

 

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INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

READING NUMBERS

 

The numbers tell us the United States is out of recession. According to the US commerce department, America's GDP grew at an annualised rate of 3.5 per cent in this year's third quarter, following four straight quarters in which it shrank. But it may be too soon to beat the drums and bang the gongs of celebration. There are some questions to be asked first.

 

Does this constitute a broad-based recovery? Is it the case that American enterprises and American capital stand ready, again, to serve as the engines of world growth? Sadly, no. Breaking down the numbers makes it clear whence this growth derives: from the enormous resources that the US government has managed to mobilise to keep its economy from a spiralling free-fall into depression. The other components of growth haven't really bounced back in sufficient degree to constitute a full-scale recovery. Look, for example, at consumer spending. Yes, it went up by over 3 per cent; but a big chunk of that was because of the US government's "cash-for-clunkers" scheme, in which Americans were subsidised to encourage them to trade in older cars for newer ones with better fuel efficiency. Then consider the fact that in real estate, the sector in which the contagion began, residential construction went up rather dramatically, by as much as 23 per cent. But when that is put together with the fact that an $8,000 credit on federal tax for first-time home buyers has just been introduced, it makes more sense. The simple truth, therefore, is that crisis measures seem to be working — but that the crisis isn't over yet. The patient is walking, but on crutches; so it is too soon to declare her leg healed.

 

Crisis thinking, therefore, should not be abandoned, nor should any form of complacency be allowed to creep in. For one thing, many other major economies around the world are still in the doldrums — indeed, some in the UK economy fear they haven't yet seen the worst. Instead, policy-makers who believe that the government has done its bit should draw the opposite inference: the lesson that should, indeed, be learnt, is that government action can work to stave off the worst. Yes, perhaps big fiscal stimuli can no longer be handed out, given the size of the deficit and the fiscal space now available. But other, more innovative methods of stimulus are available, at least in India. The best of which: reform. Reform now, reform widely, reform unhesitatingly. That is the way to get India back on to the high-growth path that is politically and economically essential.

 

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INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

WRONG MEDICINE

 

The government's one-size-fits-all panacea to ensuring quality in educational institutions has been "control". How does one ensure teaching quality? Answer: state control. How does one deal with particularly mediocre educational institutions? Answer: even more control. The idea that independence fosters excellence, that the state must regulate quality not squash it, has long been alien to Indian higher education apparatiks. Which is why Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal's talk of institutional "autonomy" (especially in the context of IITs and IIMs) has been such a refreshing change.

 

However, consider the recommendations of a UGC-appointed committee, recommendations the UGC has accepted, and ones that the Sibal-appointed committee on deemed universities is said to be in favour of. The Tareen Committee was appointed by the UGC to examine its own haste in giving "deemed university" status to several institutions. One would suppose that the logical corrective to providing deemed university status to places which are ill-equipped, ill-qualified, and mint-fresh is to revoke that status (in fact, another UGC-appointed committee to look into precisely this has been less than stinging). But no, the Tareen Committee recommends that "deemed universities" must have entrance exams and fees must be fixed by a panel. This is in complete contrast to ideas of institutional autonomy. Private bodies must be free to set their own curricula and determine their own fees. The government's role must be reduced to overseeing excellence, and withdrawing licences in the case of fly-by-night operators. The recommendations, if accepted, would constrict all deemed universities, instead of just shutting down the tardy ones.

 

At the heart of the matter is the scandal that many institutions enjoying "deemed university" status have become. Sibal's decision to review many decisions pertaining to deemed universities was necessary. But the recommended solution could make a bad situation worse. Instead of being forward looking, it harks back to ideas that the current HRD minister himself aims to move away from. The UGC must not be allowed to compound its initial mistake with another one.

 

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INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

YOU TOO, ANDRE?

 

It goes well beyond the occasional confessional outburst. Written in the pages of his memoir Andre Agassi has done the nasty by revealing a shocking secret that he guarded for so long. That Agassi, the golden boy of tennis, an eight-time Grand Slam champion, lied about substance abuse in order to escape a ban has come as a shock to most. During his all-time low in 1997 — when his career dwindled and ranking slid to 141 — Agassi, urged on by his assistant, snorted the highly addictive crystal meth: a drug that would make him feel "like Superman, dude." What's more is that his actions can no longer be penalised but have raised a host of questions.

 

Why now? That's the first question that pops up. Surely a pro who has amassed a small fortune through both tennis and commercial endorsements isn't in need of extra cash. Could it be merely for attention? Agassi left his mark on tennis because he was both a fantastic player and a show-stealer. Be it through his outlandish outfits, lavish hair-dos, his gratitude to his fans by air kisses or tabloid relationships — Agassi commanded attention.

 

Agassi, at the centre of the storm, finds himself under attack now from both the International Tennis Federation and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The former head of WADA has urged authorities to take Agassi's admission as a wake-up call to the ATP: "The fact that one of the stars acknowledged that it is simple to beat the system tells you everything you need to know." Tennis has traditionally been lax about drug testing and Agassi's revelation will speed up the changing anti-doping practice. New WADA regulations are placing the heat on players though, for instance athletes are now required to disclose their whereabouts every single day and tennis has upped the ante by testing players during out-of-competition periods as well — a new practice for tennis but common in other competition sports.

 

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INDIAN EXPRESS

COLUMN

THE IDEA OF INDIRA

SHEKHAR GUPTA

 

What makes it even more challenging to understand a personality like Indira Gandhi even 25 years after her passing is the fact that you are not talking about one person, but three. Or, to put it more accurately, not one prime minister, but three. Indira Gandhi had two spells in power, but in fairness you have to break her first tenure (1966-77) also into two, with a changing of chapters at the end of the Bangladesh war in December 1971. This gives us three reigns of almost equal length, 1966-71, 1972-77 and 1980-end 1984. In each one, it was the same personality in office but a different prime minister. Mrs Gandhi was no doctrinaire figure, with all her wisdom or ideas inherited from her father. She changed and evolved, often for the better, sometimes not quite so. To that extent, she was an original among leaders who serve long tenures. Think of her, in fact, as a complete opposite of another titan of her times — and one she shared so much mutual fondness with — the unchanging Fidel Castro. Remember that wonderful picture of their joyous hug at the Non-Aligned Summit in New Delhi in 1983?

 

Unlike her son Rajiv, subsequently, Indira was not a reluctant politician. Even when Lal Bahadur Shastri stepped in after Nehru in 1964, many in the Congress saw her as a successor soon enough. She was already the minister for information and broadcasting, but, just like Rajiv, she was fated to be catapulted to prime ministership, unexpectedly with Shastri's sudden death in Tashkent. Her first tenure, therefore, reflected some of that under-preparedness and diffidence. This is what persuaded Ram Manohar Lohia to use for her the description, "goongi gudiya" (dumb doll). She made the entire opposition pay for that over her "three" tenures in power. And how.

 

This diffidence continued till 1969. With successive monsoon failures, dependence on imported foodgrain and political instability — in the 1967 general elections the Congress ceded space to a united opposition in many regions. Within the Congress, the old guard could barely suffer her. The external security environment was a mess — with the growing China-Pakistan bond and a six-day skirmish with the Chinese at Nathula in 1967. The internal situation was worse, with Naga and Mizo insurgencies at their peak and the Dravidian movement still mostly in the "separatist" state of its evolution. But she learnt on the job faster than anybody imagined. She stayed left-of-centre but unhesitatingly embraced America on project green revolution. The success in both, the purge of the "uncles" and agriculture, gave her the assurance of a leader in her own right. That is why when the East Pakistan crisis began on March 25, 1971, she was perfectly positioned to respond to it. She had political stability, five years of experience and a track record of success topped with the Garibi Hatao landslide of just a fortnight earlier.

 

That is why she listened neither to ultra-pacifists who pleaded for a do-nothing approach, nor to hawks who said join the war now, but to Sam Manekshaw who told her he needed time. As Manekshaw prepared his forces, she built the diplomatic foundation that this venture would have required at the peak of the Cold War, just when the odds had become even heavier against India, with the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China. You had to be an iron lady to embark on a project to break up a nation with no mean armed strength of its own and now counting the US and China among its allies. So she built a new, treaty-bound relationship with Moscow.

 

She won the war, but we still do not have sufficient evidence that her socialist swing, and then the Indo-Soviet Treaty, had arisen from a genuine, heart-felt commitment to that ideology. Was she experimenting, was she just playing cynical politics, or was she forced into that situation, socialism becoming her default option against an old guard led by Morarji Desai which was still seen as right-leaning, and the Soviet Union India's only anchor, given the China-US-Pakistan axis? We will probably never know for sure, but I would argue that it was still a case of learning on the job, and adapting, adjusting and manoeuvring in the true spirit of realpolitik.

 

If there was a certain listlessness to her second, post-victory tenure the reasons were quite evident. The euphoria of military victory was soon replaced by the realities of an obstinate poverty despite her slogans, erratic monsoons and rising political unrest. India was no post-World War II US or Europe where massive reconstruction of the economy replaced the high of victory. As history proved later, she showed poor judgment in listening to a left-ideologue cabal of foreign policy advisors and signing the Shimla agreement without ensuring a clearer settlement on Kashmir. Quite in contrast to the deftness with which she had put down the challenge within her party, her handling of political unrest was clumsy, ill-advised and short-sighted. She had lost her popularity as fast as she had built it, in a two-year period, and even Pokharan-I was not able to resurrect the "Indira as Durga" magic. The Allahabad high court judgment, the Emergency, the constitutional sub-version then just followed.

 

How would you describe Indira Gandhi in her second phase? Was she still the iron lady because she took away our fundamental rights, jailed her opposition, broke George Fernandes's rail strike, unleashed Sanjay Gandhi on us, nearly, very nearly destroyed the marvellous constitutional under-pinning that her own father had created for our nation? Not many remember today that the issue of whether there is a fundamental character of the Constitution which no majority in a parliament can violate was settled with the majority of just one in a full Supreme Court bench.

 

I would argue that in her second tenure Mrs Gandhi was no longer the iron lady she was in the first. Most of her actions arose from anger and insecurity, confusion and desperate self-preservation. Today you can look for scapegoats among her advisors and the "Indira is India" flock in her party. But that would be neither factually correct, nor fair to her towering personality. She was just too insecure about losing power. Not surprising therefore that the extreme leftward swing in her politics, the passing of so many terrible, retrograde economic legislations that her successors are still not able to reverse came not from any genuine commitment to socialism, but as an ideological camouflage for a series of dictatorial and subversive blunders which she was to regret later — "a step not to be taken for another 1000 years" — and for which Sonia Gandhi expressed regret in her interview on NDTV's Walk the Talk in the run-up to the 2004 election. It was fitting too that that conversation took place in Allahabad's Anand Bhawan.

 

If Indira Gandhi's second tenure was so forgettable she redeemed herself to some extent in the way she allowed it to end. She withdrew the Emergency, released political prisoners and held a fresh election proving, once again, that she was Nehru's worthy daughter. And I do believe that just those 34 months out of power gave her the time to reflect and regroup so she could return again in the summer of 1980 to her iron lady self. Why do we say so?

 

Not just because of the way she fought the commissions of inquiry and rebuilt her party and politics, or helped along the demise of the Janata government, but also because she showed the courage to change in her third term. She may have been still late in judging where the Cold War was headed, and thereby allowed the remnants of the same old left-ideologue foreign-policy cabal to push India into a morally indefensible and politically unsustainable policy on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In those two years our voting record at the UN compared with that of the worst Soviet client states. But she had the foresight to begin a shift. The younger people who worked with her, on both foreign policy and economy, say she had begun to feel deeply uneasy about India's ideological strait-jacketedness and pushed for change. It was she, for example, who orchestrated a "chance" meeting with Ronald Reagan at Cancun in October 1981. I also have it on good authority that she had now started talking of relaxing controls on the economy. It could just be, then, that she had the intellect to figure out first that the Cold War was ending and if India were to prosper in the new politico-economic environment, it could not do so if its people by and large saw the West as a permanently hostile entity.

 

The rest of her third tenure is still rather recent history: the massacre in Nellie during an election forced on a furious Assam, Bhindranwale, Operation Bluestar, even the beginnings of Indian support to Sri Lankan Tamil insurgency. History will take an unkind view of all of these, but these marked the return of the iron lady. I do not believe any other prime minister would have done any of these: hold an election in Assam (1983) that faced an incredible popular boycott but was constitutionally essential, send tanks and artillery to finish Bhindranwale and train Tamil guerrillas to "teach" big-mouth Jayewardene a lesson. These mistakes were not rooted in the paranoia and insecurities of her second phase, but in the heart of a rejuvenated leader who would not allow her or her nation's authority to be taken lightly. That it ended so tragically with her insistence that her Sikh bodyguards could not be removed is such a fitting tribute to her. Even in her death she ensured that at least one point on which historians would never disagree is that she was, ultimately, a secular, true-blue Indian patriot.

 

sg@expressindia.com

 

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INDIAN EXPRESS

COLUMN

MAO TV, MOU TV. AND MAHATMA

SAUBHIK CHAKRABARTI

 

Mao TV. Actually, MoU TV. For days now, news TV has been bringing to us long conversations on Maoists with important people who have asked us to understand or admit that memoranda of understanding (MoU) on exploiting natural resources between the Indian state and domestic/foreign companies are the reason the state is waging a "war". This seems to be the current grand narrative of the "we don't support violence but the real fault lies with the free-market ideology" group. News TV seems somewhat shy in interrogating this thesis. Members of this group were asked several times if they condemn Maoist violence, but they were seldom asked to fully explain the MoU narrative. Even when some details were offered, anchors didn't seem interested. I am puzzled because it is not as if the same anchors didn't ask 20 questions on all the other stuff. Why not, say, two questions on the big economic claim?

 

Before expanding on this a bit more, let me first put on record that there was a moment when my sympathies were with Arundhati Roy. Roy, being quizzed by a CNN-IBN double-anchor team, was told Mahatma Gandhi would have appealed to Maoists to stop the violence. I am not Mahatma Gandhi, Roy said. Quite. Good answer to a very curious argument.

 

Roy appeared twice on CNN-IBN recently (the other time on Devil's Advocate) and made a series of economic arguments, including the one on MoU, most of which went more or less uncontested. On Devil's Advocate, she said:

 

1. Capitalism guarantees better living standards for a few at the cost of many — plainly wrong, but she wasn't asked to explain herself. 2. Many Dalits are living in famine-like conditions in India — plainly wrong, but no comeback from the anchor. 3. The UNDP's Human Development Index shows 80 per cent of Indians are living in extreme poverty — wrong, but she wasn't asked to give details on this data.

 

4. Even since Independence, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer — all the poor haven't got poorer, poverty has come down, there're truckloads of data on this, but she got away with it on national TV.

 

This was more or less jaw-dropping to me. Hey, okay, I am an insignificant but sincerely committed member of what is now called the corporate media. But I can still ask, can't I, why news TV won't quiz big intellectuals when they trot out these big economic claims. There seems to be no attempt at product differentiation on this: what you see on CNN-IBN is also what you see on NDTV. On NDTV's We the People, Medha Patkar said the Indian state is hand in glove with corporates and international financial institutions, there was the MoU thesis again. Did the anchor, who fluently interrogated all panelists on many issues, ask Patkar to explain:

 

1. What she means by the state being hand in glove?

 

2. Which corporate is she talking about? 3. What does she mean by international financial institutions? Of course, not. Why not is the question that's keeping me awake.

 

You see, senseless violence is being committed — against economics, by important people, on news TV. My appeal: Will someone in news TV please try to stop it?

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com

 

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INDIAN EXPRESS

OPED

'SHE WAS ALWAYS THE BOSS'

VANDITA MISHRA

 

When Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980 — in the election that marked her political rehabilitation after the Emergency — she won both seats she had contested. She retained Medak in Andhra Pradesh and fielded her nephew ARUN NEHRU from Rae Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. That election marked the political debut for Nehru, then freshly retired as president, Jenson & Nicholson, and still in his 30s. Nehru went on to become a close — and controversial — aide to Mrs Gandhi and later her son Rajiv when he became prime minister. He subsequently fell out with Rajiv, taking him on under the umbrella of the Jan Morcha along with V.P. Singh. In an interview with VANDITA MISHRA, Nehru recalls the experience of working with Indira Gandhi, his aunt and prime minister, from 1980 till her assassination in 1984. 

 

What do you recall of the days before the assassination? 

I was the last person to meet Mrs Gandhi on the night of October 30. I had come back late at night from Rae Bareilly. General elections were due in the country and she wanted to see my final list of candidates. For about a week before this, she had been behaving strangely. She had gone to a public meeting in Sultanpur. Rajiv and I were to go on to Gorakhpur. But she asked us not to go, for security reasons. We pooh-poohed her concerns. She called up my wife, asked her to intervene. She had never done this before. Then, she suddenly said she wanted to go to Kashmir, to see the leaves change. The PM couldn't just take off suddenly, so we had to invent reasons for the visit. In the house, there was constant pressure to change the (Sikh) bodyguards. She had been disturbed ever since Operation Blue Star.

 

What are your memories of the day of the assassination? And the terrible violence it set in motion against Sikhs?

I reached the hospital when they were wheeling her out. Sonia was distraught. Rajiv was on tour. I left for the house to see the children (Rahul and Priyanka). The gates were open, there wasn't a single security guard in sight. It took half an hour to secure the PM's house, so you can imagine what was happening in the rest of the city. On the same day, I spoke to some people in the party. Continuity was most important. There are no vacancies in government. If (President) Gianiji, (also out of Delhi at the time) did not come back in time, I had decided (Vice President) Venkataraman would swear in Rajiv. When I went to receive Gianiji at the airport, he asked me, have you taken the decision? I said yes. We fixed the time of the swearing-in. I dropped him at the hospital and went back to get Rajiv. In the car, he only asked — is it the same person? Satwant Singh (one of Indira's assassins) was the guard at Akbar Road; we had all seen the hatred in his eyes. There have been several conspiracy theories about that day — that Pranab (Mukherjee) or Gianiji opposed Rajiv as PM. But where was the conspiracy? It was the logical decision. No one said anything. Later, someone said a meeting should have taken place. But in politics there can't be any vacancies.

 

The Congress is still haunted by the 1984 violence — it is seen as an organised pogrom. 

Rajiv did everything in his power to stop the rioting. There was complete breakdown of law and order. The Army has a drill, it needs time. The looting had started. It was the Gujjars, villagers... Today we are used to a security syndrome. There was no culture of security at that time. Once something like this had happened, there was no protection. After the event, it took six months to a year for security systems to be put in place. The prime minister had what is known as 'Y' level of security today — 1 PSO, 1 gunman. We (Rajiv and I) would have lunch with Mrs Gandhi and if we went on to Parliament with her, to make place in the car, we would leave the PSO behind. On the second day of the rioting, I found Madhu Dandavate shouting at the gate of the PM's house. I got him inside. He said this is happening. I spoke to the LG, the police. I said Dandavate cannot be lying. They said things are being taken care of but they had done nothing. Later, I recommended to Rajiv that anyone connected to it (the violence) has to go, names are not important. Things had gone out of control. But when you are in a position of responsibility, you have to handle a crisis. I will say this, my reaction would have been far more ruthless in the next couple of days.

If they could have acted in a few hours, if there were shoot at sight orders, it could have been controlled. But all of this is wisdom in hindsight. Today, with all the hyper security, you cannot prevent Maoists from taking away a train with nearly 600 people on board. About the violence being organised, I don't know. If someone has done it, they should hang. But I find it very difficult to believe that it was organised. Individuals could have done it.

 

Some accounts of Operation Bluestar — and the Emergency — paint the picture of a leader misled. They suggest that Indira Gandhi was pressured into those decisions by advisors.

I knew Mrs Gandhi was unhappy at the turn of events in Punjab. She did a lot of pujas before Blue Star, attended by the four of us — Rajiv, Sonia, my wife and I. Everyone took the hardline position on Punjab, the bureaucracy as well as political leadership. She was the only dove among the hawks. She was reluctant because she understood politics. These things cannot be solved by force. She understood what it meant to go in (the Golden Temple). She was hoping for a miracle. But she was no misled leader. In 1984, she tried very hard, there were long negotiations, but neither the Akalis nor anyone else wanted to take responsibility. Everyone was playing to the gallery. She looked for a solution but there was no political solution. But to assume that she was run by someone else, that's out of the question. She was always the boss.

 

Going back to 1980, had things changed in her second coming, after the Emergency? It is said she became more insecure of her power, and the PMO became a power centre as never before.

When she came back in 1980, Sanjay was totally in control. She was not running the party. He was. All cabinet appointments, everything. Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay worked in perfect coordination. All chief ministers were his choices, the states were under his control. If she wanted to adjust 5-6 colleagues somewhere, he didn't oppose it. But he was running the politics.Between 1977-79, all party work was handled by Sanjay. She had not changed, but the situation had changed. She adjusted to it. But there was no question of the PMO becoming more powerful.

 

She is seen as the Congress's first dynast. 

She did not push any of us into politics. Sanjay was keen I should fight an election. For Rae Bareilly, they wanted someone from the family. Sanjay said come and talk to mummy. But she badgered me for one hour. She gave me all the negatives, she was testing me, that was her style. When she realised I had made up my mind, she said the UP wallahs are sitting outside, now you deal with them. She threw me to the wolves — I, in my polo neck sweater and blazer. The next day we were off campaigning. Then in 1981, after Sanjay died, there were 6 bypolls in UP, including in Amethi and Allahabad. Rajiv had said he was interested in fighting polls. Sonia was opposed to it. But, contrary to perceptions of him being the reluctant politician, he had made up his mind. She had not talked to him about it. She asked me — Allahabad or Amethi? We kept it open till the last minute. She left on tour. She never pushed him.

 

You were the first of the computerwallahs in the Congress.

It was only a section of the media that created a fuss. In those days, none of us spoke to the media. It wasn't Mrs Gandhi's style. She couldn't care less. People said we were arrogant. But she had her own way of dealing with the media through H.Y. Sharada Prasad.

 

What was the essence of her political style?

She was the best communicator we have seen. I cannot remember a single day in five years when she did not send back the daily report I sent her along with a noting. Every day in Parliament, from 12.30 to 1 pm, she would meet about 50 MPs, no appointment needed. Twice a week, she had a morning darshan. Even if she didn't meet you, you had the impression that she had made herself available. She kept several channels of communication open. Once both Rajiv and I thought someone should be PCC president. She said, if the two of you gang up, you are of no use to me. She felt we were putting her under pressure —and she was right. She didn't appoint the person we recommended. She had her own system of evaluation. In every state, she had political and non-political confidants. I used to do the homework for Rajya Sabha nominations. Once, I chose someone from Bihar. She called me up at night, and said, but he chews paan. She said, I don't want the carpet soiled! I asked this person to come to Delhi and meet her. He was a good party worker. When he met her, she had a good laugh. He got the nomination. The point is, she would check and countercheck.

 

The shrinking of the Congress through the 1990s is often traced to her systematic cutting down of regional Congress leaders in the '80s.

The breakdown of the "Congress system" came in 1991 when Rajiv made a deal with Mulayam Singh Yadav in UP. The Congress did not shrink because of Mrs Gandhi. You cannot compare Panditji in 1952-57 with Mrs Gandhi after 1967 when she had lost half the states. Political power is about control, you have to know when to use it. How would you describe events in Andhra today? Whenever a chief minister goes berserk, it is your job to intervene. It is because of lack of political control that you (the Congress) are down from 67 to 40 in Haryana. Don't think there is no opposition to the Congress today and since the BJP is in a mess, you can do what you want. The public will create the opposition.

 

Do you get the feeling that Mrs Gandhi's ghost is still with us, whether we engage it or do battle with it?

Once you are dead and gone, you are only useful at election time, in posters. I am of the view that once a person is gone, you shouldn't even use him or her for the sake of getting the vote. In 1985 the election was fought on her blood and sacrifice. Thereafter, there was no reason to invoke Indira Gandhi. October 31 is only a ritual remembrance. The BBC did a survey in Allahabad and Panditji came way down in the list of remembered leaders, well after Amitabh Bachchan. Politics is heartless, and there is no place to be sentimental. You cannot personalise a situation in a democracy.

 

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INDIAN EXPRESS

OPED

THE 'R' IN INDIRA

SEEMA CHISHTI

 

It takes a minute or so to work out why the advertisements issued by the government on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's passing have the 'r' in Indira in white and the rest of the letters in green. The answer lies in what Indira loyalist, Assamese Congress leader D.K. Barooah had famously said. He pronounced Indira with a silent r, in the '70s. "Indira was India and India was Indira", he declared. Sychophancy of this sort paved the way for the spectacular result that laid the road for India's first non-Congress government in 1977, but perhaps there was a semblance of something (if not the truth) in what the faithful Barooah had said, as India could barely wait for three years for its next round of the Indira premiership.

 

Looking back at the Indira years and what she has meant to the party, which went as Congress (I or Indira) for several years before reverting to INC or Indian National Congress, makes it hard to identify one legacy, one programme or the one thing that she stood for.

 

A feisty, single woman, India's first woman PM who made Ram Manohar Lohia regret his loose remark of her being a "dumb doll", or a paranoid leader when she went onto declare a state of internal emergency? Aligning herself with her husband Feroze Gandhi's ginger group, the Congress Socialist Forum, yet instrumental in ensuring the dismissal of the first elected Communist government in Kerala, then again, carved a pro-poor, Left idea about India, nationalising banks, abolishing the privy purses.

 

The mild-mannered, charming and very political daughter of India's first prime minister, with her distinct voice and white streak, is not half as visible in Congress rhetoric (or on Doordarshan), as one might think a woman like her should be. Her "Gharibi Hatao" slogan of 1971, the Pokharan tests in 1974, her bank nationalisation at about the same time, her role in "dividing Pakistan" may be brought up. But otherwise, the references are subtle, sometimes so subtle that they go unremarked. Remember, that Rae Bareilly, the Congress President's constituency, was where Indira chose to stand from after the death of her husband Feroze. The line from Phoolpur (Nehru's constituency) was quietly allowed to slip, but never Rae Bareilly. Her daughter-in-law's very well-maintained saree collection takes several old timers down memory lane, and they insist that even fresh purchases display the same taste, the same eclectic respect for Indian fabrics — from all parts of the country — Pochampalli, Tant, Jamdani, Paithani — everything. Eclecticism, to perhaps symbolise some of the magic cement that Indira Gandhi represented for her party.

 

It was not something that was a calming unifier though. Indira's struggle to sieze control often convulsed the party. It eventually, further centralised the notion of the "high-command". It resulted in the Congress splitting, first in 1969 and then again in later years when she threatened to snuff out any thought that betrayed anything that was mildly less than idolatory.

 

The Congress has reason to keep what they like out of Indira's legacy and simply ignore the rest as if it never happened at all. Her first trip out of the country, meeting with Lyndon Johnson, when she went to negotiate food aid, was remarkable for the chemistry between her and Johnson that was much remarked upon. And then there was the other trip she made to the Soviet Union in 1971, when she secured a promise of military aid should Pakistan attack India over the Bangladesh war in 1971. Which trip should be appropriated and which must be kept quiet about ?

 

Her declaration of Emergency, just so that the Allahabad High Court, ruling that her election was null and void could be circumvented, which ensured so much hatred for the Congress and ensured a grand coalition against them? Or should there be talk of the fact that it was she who called for the polls and ended the monster reign between June '75 and March '77?

 

The Congress' dilemma goes on and on — a few weeks before her killing, she heroically refused to take her security guards off-duty because they were Sikh. But how about the fact that it was she, who actively supported her son Sanjay to look for a suitable candidate to cut the Akali threat in Punjab, someone who campaigned for her candidates in the 1980 polls — Sant Bhindranwale?   

 

It is because of the big questions that immediately surface when any attempt to quickly recall her legacy is made, that it is felt best to keep it a little quiet. Now, Indira Awaas Yojna remains the most visible symbol of her to the average citizen. Since the 1970s, slums have called themselves Indira Nagar, some named in awe of what the Indira name meant for the poor in the early 70s and some, with memories of later times, in the hope that they would never be pulled down with an address like that.   

seema.chishti@expressindia.com

 

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FINANCIAL EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

CLUNKERS AND DOLLAR

Finally, there is some good economic news out of the world's largest economy. US GDP grew by 3.5% in the quarter between July and September, a sharp jump from the either lethargic or negative growth rates recorded in the most recent four quarters. To the extent that this downturn is in part a confidence game, such good news is always welcome. It will boost consumer and investor sentiment. However, it is still much too early to call a sustained recovery. It is instead a reason for those who believe that government stimulus can work effectively to feel vindicated. Indeed, any sensible interpretation of this US GDP number has to give much credit to the massive stimulus unleashed by the US government. When one disaggregates the 3.5% number, one finds that the strongest recovery is coming from consumer demand—that accounts for 70% of US GDP. But within that head, there is strong growth (around 22%) in consumer durables. And this is where the key to understanding the 3.5% figure lies.

 

The most important category under consumer durables is automobiles. Here, the government's now famous Car Allowance Rebate System (Cars)—better known as 'cash for clunkers'—has played a crucial role in boosting demand. Under this programme, which ran for a limited period between July 1 and August 24, car owners were encouraged to trade in their old gas guzzlers for newer, more fuel-efficient cars. Crucially the government was committed to financing this scheme. Unsurprisingly, the entire budget for the programme was exhausted by the time it closed. And it shows in the GDP growth numbers. The caveat, of course, is that the cash-for-clunkers programme was a one-off measure, and its positive effect on GDP will show up just for this quarter, which has passed. And that really is the crux of government stimulus—it can only be a temporary measure, not permanent. Already, the US government is running into severe budget constraints. A sustainable recovery, therefore, has to be based on fundamentals beyond just temporary government intervention. And the US continues to remain some distance away from a complete recovery in fundamentals. Joblessness is still rising, even though at a decreasing rate. And a revival of the real economy seems months away, even though the financial sector has got back on its feet. Perhaps what will help recovery in the US most is the decline in the dollar. This will give the real economy, particularly export-oriented manufacturing, a fillip. It will also switch consumer demand to locally produced goods & services. Still, things are looking up for the US and the global economy much faster than most analysts had expected at the same time last year.

 

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FINANCIAL EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

THE BIG LANDLORD

What distinguishes the latest chapter in India's volatile land narrative is that it stars the Army. As The Indian Express has been reporting, senior officers appear to be involved in a fraudulent scheme to transfer land in Sukna to a sham educational society. The concerned land is located in the Himalayan foothills in Darjeeling, West Bengal. Here, the Vedic Village riddle still remains to be solved. Remember, on August 24, this country resort near Rajarhat was burned to the ground by villagers shouting land grab. Both CPI (M) and Trinamool members appear to have been in cahoots, as 44 acres was given away to the resort for Rs 97 lakh—against the official buying rate of Rs 25 crore. While the issue awaits resolution, it's industry—in an all too familiar take—that has once again taken the brunt of the backlash. Remember also, the Satyam scam that shocked us all at this year's opening also had a significant land grab component—with the Raju family having leveraged their political pull to amass thousands of acres across south India. We could go on listing examples, but the point is plain enough, that government agencies have too much control over too much land that they manage too inefficiently.

 

Budget 2009-10 states that the Central government owned Rs 1,15,796 crore of land assets at the beginning of 2007-08 and that it acquired a further Rs 100 crore's worth during the year. These are historical estimates. Plus, we have to consider the states' assets separately. The many scandals that have erupted this year give one face to how these assets are being criminally mismanaged. But the negligence also has an everyday, normalised face. Why, for example, did the Supreme Court recently ban construction of religious structures on public land? They encroach with impunity, making things difficult for traffic control and urban management by the day, and the government looks away. How substantive the encroachment is or how much it costs the exchequer is anybody's guess. Numbers are only intermittently available, such as when the Naveen Patnaik government admitted that 81,514 acres of public land was in unauthorised possession across Orissa. Generally, records are sparse and updated assessments sparser. Result: a waste of incalculable proportions while important projects are delayed for want of land. The web of regulations—from Chennai to Darjeeling—engenders corruption even as it exacerbates India's land logjam. High stamp duties, rent control, the Urban Land Ceiling Act, elaborate controls over the conversion of land from one use to another—the list of regulations that need to be reviewed goes on. Meanwhile, those who argue that the regulatory environment in India incentivises criminalisation of real estate make sense.

 

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FINANCIAL EXPRESS

COLUMN

WE CAN SEE NOW: INDIRA TRULY WAS INDIA

JAITHIRTH RAO

 

When the paper asked me to write about Indira Gandhi, what started as a piece of political analysis, ended up becoming a personal journey. All of us who have been living observers and participants in the various travails of free India are in some way touched and influenced by Indira, and as we explore her motivations and actions we are forced to face up to our own complex thought processes, tortuous feelings and tortured reactions to what could have been, what should have been and finally about what we are.

 

In 1970, in the warm glow that followed the 'glorious' bank nationalisation, my college friend Vaidyanathan and I declared ourselves as the voice of the youth Congress in college. We became aggressive fellow-travellers and ardent followers. Both of us were disappointed that while we were allowed to get close, another friend Krishnamani was chosen to garland Indira when she landed at Meenambakkam Airport, Madras, as it was then known. I still have with me a photograph signed by her which I conveniently lost for many years and which I have now resurrected and placed prominently in my office.

 

When Frank Moraes wrote his famous Myth and Reality columns, we dismissed him as an irrelevant, frustrated rightist critic. Over the years, as I grew out of my undergraduate leftism, Indira rapidly moved away from the realms of the positive and the dharmic to the regions dominated by the a-dharmic and the asuric in each of our private mental galleries. The Emergency, the imposition of Sanjay on the country, the repeated attempts at self-aggrandisement at the cost of all values, the growth of the vulture state, which sucked out freedom and enterprise while breeding frustration and cynicism, could all be laid squarely at Indira's door. Her supreme act of realpolitik in liberating Bangladesh can be legitimately criticised from the same amoral perspective. Maybe we should have let Pakistan continue undivided with East Bengal as a continuing ulcer debilitating Pakistan for years on end. In her last years, her cynical manipulation of events in the Punjab—first propping up the unsavoury Bhindranwale and then confronting him in a ham-handed manner—has to leave us with a sick feeling. The Indian state under her leadership had attacked the Golden Temple, something that even the British had not done. The last person to do it was Ahmad Shah Abdali a couple of hundred years ago. Frank Moraes's position that she was lacking in integrity and intelligence started acquiring a new-found credibility.

 

And after having said all of this, when I am asked to write about her today, there is no anger that she might have blighted the lives of a couple of generations of Indians. Instead, there is a palpable sense of nostalgia and a feeling of admiration. Of all our leaders, she is the only one who literally had a bond with the soil and the stubble of our land. She intervened decisively to end shikaar, to save our forests and its inhabitants. At one stage, she became the female embodiment of our country. And that is more or less the way we see her now. In her interview with Oriana Fallaci, Indira casually slips in a thought that her destiny and India's are interwoven. Intellectually, that might seem an unacceptable conceit. And yet, between her being our first and perhaps only environmentalist prime minister, our first leader in a long time to lead us to a military victory and probably our first leader since Tipu Sultan to stand up to overbearing foreigners—Nixon and Kissinger being comparable to Cornwallis and Wellesley—Indira does come across as a unique Yuga-amsa, a child and the mistress of our national destiny causing even understated persons like myself to indulge in hyperbole. Intentions are key to ethical disputations. But history is also concerned about outcomes. She, unlike leaders in India's past, was successful. Even the insufferably patronising Kissinger has admitted that India was 'safe' in Indira's hands.

 

Her father had credibility across the country. But he always contested his elections from Uttar Pradesh. She proved the truly 'national' nature of her leadership by standing for elections not only in Uttar Pradesh, but also in Karnataka, far away from imperial Delhi. She mingled with women in public and in a country where symbolism means so much, laid the foundations of a feminist movement, which is slowly and unsteadily gaining ground. Somehow, she seemed one of us, quite unlike the remoteness associated with the westernised Nehru clan. Could it be that as the daughter of the simple Kamala Nehru (nee Kaul) from old Delhi, she acquired traits that made her relate to us with a mixture of charisma and proximity, a little like a neighbourhood devi or a pir who gives us barkat?

 

I came across a book by an eminent astrologer who has analysed the horoscopes of the members of the Nehru family. Apparently, the family astrologer predicted to Motilal Nehru that the girl Kamala—who Jawaharlal was going to marry—would be the mother and the grandmother of great leaders who would lead all of India with distinction. Motilal believed it. India's desacralised intellectuals may not believe it. But most of us can easily believe it because we do see the hand of destiny. And on a mundane level it explains why the Cambridge-educated, westernised Jawaharlal was arm-twisted by his father (who almost certainly believed the predictions) to marry the shy Kashmiri Pandit girl from old Delhi who spoke very little English at the time of her marriage.

 

We love Indira, we miss Indira, because she resembles us. We vacillate between moments of faith in liberty and times when we seek a ruthless efficiency, which is always missing in our society. As we vacillate, we agonise, we throw tantrums, we make grand gestures of love and affection, we simultaneously feel insecure and on top of the world. And all along, rightly or wrongly, we have faith in our stars. She was one of them. In more ways than we care to admit, Indira was indeed India.

 

feedit@expressindia.com

 

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FINANCIAL EXPRESS

COLUMN

US ARMY AND BRIT COMEDY, THANK YOU

ANAND RAMACHANDRAN

 

It was 1969, the year Jimi Hendrix played 'The Star Spangled Banner' at Max Yasgur's farm, the year the Beatles broke up, the year man landed on the freakin' moon. It was the year Honduras and El Salvador went to war over a football game, the year the Boeing 747 first took to the skies, the year Led Zeppelin burst onto the scene and changed Rock n Roll forever.

 

In the midst of all this excitement, John Cleese thought it would be a good idea to invite Michael Palin to join Graham Chapman and himself to create a brand new television series for the BBC. Across the pond, US defence scientists used a cool new technology called 'packet-switching' to establish a network connection (They called it ARPANET. Scientists. You'd think they'd have come up with something cooler) between computers located at the UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

 

As a result of these two seemingly unrelated events, today we watch episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus on YouTube, excitedly send the link to our friends over e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, and waste the rest of our working day LOLing at the antics of the greatest comedy team in history. It's a complete #WIN.

 

Today, forty years later, it's almost impossible to wrap our minds around the impact that the Internet has had on our lives. It's like trying to describe how our lives have been affected by the invention of the wheel, or language, or processed food. Today, most of us live in a dizzying swirl of instant, always-on connections that criss-cross so many aspects of our daily lives, it's hard to imagine what life was like before the Internet.

 

One way to try and define the impact of the Internet is to look at the situations that it has made extinct. When was the last time you spent days trying to remember the lyrics to a song on the tip of your tongue, or the author of a book, or the winner of a sporting event? When was the last time you pored over old newspapers to find the advertisement you suddenly want to respond to? When was the last time that getting information from a college meant writing a letter to them and hoping for the best?

 

Yes, we don't receive warm, personal greeting cards on our birthdays anymore. But we do get hundreds of wishes from friends we haven't seen for years, and that's pretty nice. Yes, the excitement of finally finding a rare music album or movie is a thing of the past. But we do get to watch or listen to anything we want to, whenever we choose, and that's pretty cool. Suddenly feel the urge to watch Monty Python's famous 'dead parrot' sketch? No need to scour video stores, wait hopefully for TV reruns, or badger relatives in the UK. You can't tell me that's a bad thing.

 

We find jobs without having to leave our homes, reach hundreds of people instantly when we need help during a medical emergency, quickly verify the truth in rumours and don't have to risk buying products without learning what the world thinks of them first.

 

If you have any sense of wonder at all, you can't help but marvel at the amazing sci-fi-ness of it all. Science fiction writers teased us with tales of vid-phones (Skype), mass broadcasting of thought streams (Twitter), virtual avatars engaging in gladiatoral combat (multiplayer games) and all-knowing computer oracles (the World Wide Web). But they didn't warn us that it would all happen in our lifetimes. Guess they didn't know.

 

And those of us born in the sixties and seventies, we caught the crest of the wave. We're the ones who are old enough to remember what it was like before, and are young enough to be in the thick of what it's like now. And I hazard that we're the ones having the most fun, grinning like idiots as we live out what were merely fantasies when we were kids.

 

Even as I write this column in my home office, in my immediate vicinity there are eight devices which are connected to the Internet (two computers, three videogame consoles, two handheld gaming units and a smartphone)—I can almost see a John Cleese sketch called 'the Needlessly Overconnected Man', in which Eric Idle smugly explains to an increasingly stressed-out Cleese how he uses one broadband connection merely to check if the other one is working properly. Cleese then downloads a pistol and shoots Idle in the head, saying, "What a senseless waste of human life." Sounds far-fetched? Wait another twenty years, mate.

 

Until then, Happy 40th Anniversary, Internet. It's nice to have you around. And you too, Pythons.

 

The author is a game designer and gaming journalist based in Mumbai

 

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FINANCIAL EXPRESS

COLUMN

COAL, IN THE BLACK

INDRONIL ROYCHOWDHURY

Just when Indian industry has gone into an overdrive to optimise costs, a number of sectors are surely going to feel the pinch of the 11% increase in coal prices. Even then, Indian coal prices are among the lowest in the world. But coal still remains a government-controlled sector and Coal India Ltd (CIL) controls more than 95% of the Indian coal market.

 

The government always compelled CIL to sell coal at low prices, with the main aim being able to provide cheap power to both industrial and domestic users. But when it allows coal prices to go up, it gives an implicit clearance to the power sector to seek an increase in power tariffs, too. Not surprisingly, as soon as the coal ministry announced the hike, power producers began lobbying with the concerned electricity regulatory authorities for an upward revision of tariffs. For the Indian thermal power sector that consumes 175 tonne of coal for every mw of power produced, an 11% increase in the price of coal implies an incremental expenditure of Rs 77 per tonne of coal consumption with down the line power production cost going up by 5 paise per unit. Power producers will definitely try to pass it on to consumers.

 

If big power consumers, mostly in the metal sector—think steel, aluminium, copper—have to pay higher tariffs, their process of cost optimisation goes for a toss.

 

But CIL, too, has its compulsons. It couldn't have afforded to put its balance sheet under pressure, which was already bearing the impact of the national coal wage agreement and officers' salary revision to the tune of Rs 4,000 crore annually. Besides, it's just got navaratna status and couldn't risk turning into a loss-making company suddenly.

 

So, for CIL, the price increase was necessary, and importantly, it's likely to help two of its BIFR companies—Eastern Coal Fields Ltd and Bharat Coking Coal Ltd—turn black. By allowing CIL to charge 15% more for all grades of ECL and BCCL coal—as opposed to 10% for coal from five other subsidiaries—the ministry has enabled both to turn into profit- making units this year.

 

Ideally, the government should have revised coal prices a couple of months into the meltdown. That would have helped industries across sectors to factor in the hike. Instead, it gave priority to political considerations.

 

indronil.roychowdhury@expressindia.com

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FINANCIAL EXPRESS

REPORT CARD

This paper* describes important trade-offs that microfinance practitioners, donors and regulators navigate

 

We start from the observation that commercial banks were initially deterred from entering the microfinance niche by the small scale of the transactions that define it, but that the commercialisation of microfinance has started to change that mindset. A growing number of commercial banks are downscaling their operations, opening up services to poorer segments of the population, and competition is emerging as a result. Increased competition could change the industry in a number of ways, some for the better and others less favourably. We again look at MIX data, in search of evidence on where the balance between these competing effects rests. If microfinance institutions facing greater competition from commercial banks attempt to compensate by shifting their loan portfolios away from segments of the population that are perceived as being more costly to serve—that is, the relatively poor and women—competition may hinder outreach.

 

*Robert Cull, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Jonathan Morduch, Microfinance Tradeoffs Regulation, Competition, and Financing, Policy Research Working Paper 5086, World Bank, October 2009

 

REPORT CARD

 

This study* analyses the factors responsible for transport sector CO2 emissions growth in selected developing Asian countries during 1980-2005:

 

To identify the driving factors, we decompose the emission growth into fuel switching, modal shifting, per capita economic growth, population growth and changes in emission coefficients and transportation energy intensity using the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) approach. We find that population growth, per capita economic growth and change in transportation energy intensity are generally found to be principal drivers of transport sector CO2 emission growth in Asian countries, whereas fuel switching, modal shifting and change in emission coefficients are not found to have a sizeable influence on the growth of transport sector CO2 emissions. The per capita economic growth effect and the population growth effect are found to be primarily responsible for driving transport sector CO2 emissions growth over the study horizon in all countries, except Mongolia. The transportation energy intensity effect is found to be the main driver of the reduction of CO2 emissions in Mongolia. However, improvement in transportation energy intensity is also found to restrain the growth of transport sector CO2 emissions in some countries, significantly in China and India.

 

—*GR Timilsina and A Shrestha, Why Have CO2 Emissions Increased in the Transport Sector in Asia? Policy Research Working Paper 5098, The World Bank, September 2009

 

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THE HINDU

EDITORIAL

JOURNALISM FOR SALE

 

India's elections, which in mid-2009 brought 415 million voters to the 1.18 million ballot units in 834,944 polling stations and were mostly peaceful, may be one of the wonders of the world. But it is widely understood that in 2009 the free, fair, and democratic attributes of these elections have been compromised as never before by the large-scale, illegal, and scandalous use of money power — which, to a considerable extent, involved recycled dirty money garnered through corruption in executive and legislative office. The role of the Election Commission of India in curbing booth capturing, intimidation of voters, and some other kinds of electoral fraud has won public appreciation. But as P. Sainath points out in his article, "The medium, message and the money," published in The Hindu on October 26, 2009, "it is hard to find a single instance of rigorous or deterrent action" by the ECI in the face of such a serious danger to the democratic process. That is a large question that needs to be addressed in depth and in all its complexity by the various players in the political system.

 

The new shame is the extensive and brazen participation of not insignificant sections of the news media, notably large-circulation Indian language newspapers in two of India's largest States, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, in this genre of corruption — which a politician speaking at a Hyderabad media seminar memorably characterised as a "Cash Transfer Scheme" from politicians to journalists. Sainath's article exposes the phenomenon of "coverage packages" exploding across India's most industrialised State during the recent Assembly election. Candidates paid newspapers different rates for well-differentiated and streamlined packages of news coverage. Those who could not or would not pay for the packages tended to be blacked out. The Andhra Pradesh Union of Working Journalists has, on the basis of a sample survey conducted in West Godavari district, estimated that newspapers across the State netted Rs. 350 crore to Rs. 400 crore through editorial coverage sold to candidates during the 2009 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Some candidates even recorded the expenditure incurred in purchasing editorial coverage in their official accounts submitted to the ECI. With some senior journalists drawing its attention to this new-fangled cash transfer scheme in Andhra Pradesh, the Press Council of India has constituted a two-member committee to inquire into the matter. What to do about such a shocking breach of readers' trust (which is unlikely to be confined to Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra) by the so-called Fourth Estate will form the subject of a follow-up editorial.

 

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THE HINDU

EDITORIAL

U.S. ECONOMY BREATHES AGAIN

 

Government stimulus packages have virtually the same effect on the economy as a mechanical ventilator has on a patient with breathing difficulty. They get a slumping economy ticking again, but as in medicine the difficulty is in determining when and how to coax the economy to run along unaided. A year after sinking into its worst spell of recession since the Great Depression, the U.S. economy has begun to grow again, surprisingly faster than what most experts predicted. President Barack Obama, of course, has taken the initial credit saying the steps taken have made a difference, yet he readily acknowledges that there is a long way to go before the economy can be fully restored. There is no doubt that the huge stimulus package delivered by his government propelled demand over the past few months. With the "cash for clunkers" scheme and the offer of tax credit for first-time home-buyers thrusting government money in the hands of consumers, there was a substantial jump in car and home sales, the effect of which has been to magnify what might have been a 1.9 per cent economic growth in the June-September quarter to 3.5 per cent. The question is what might happen when the effect of the stimulus wears off. Are U.S. consumers and industry ready to pick up the baton? The answer is no. Sales of cars and light trucks dropped sharply in September, the scheme having ended in August. Unemployment is still hovering uncomfortably close to 10 per cent, and consumer credit continues to fall.

 

It is not just the U.S. that is hoping that the recovery is for real. Most emerging economies, especially India, have a considerable stake in the process. Their growth momentum was rudely halted by the downturn in the U.S. last year; normalisation in the U.S. will, as the International Monetary Fund says in its latest regional economic outlook report, generate "an outsized Asian upturn." India's software industry has always relied substantially on the U.S. engine for its growth; its ability to hire the nation's engineering graduates in their hundreds of thousands has remained compromised this past year as the U.S. market convulsed and software exports stagnated. Another large employer, the textile industry too had to downsize as U.S. demand fell sharply. While in recent weeks both sectors have scented recovery in their largest overseas market, the question whether this could be a false dawn still nags. Having run up a monstrous $1.3 trillion deficit, the Obama Administration does not have much money left for a follow-up thrust should the economy be found wanting. That is a predicament none would want the U.S. to get into.

 

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THE HINDU

LEADER PAGE ARTICLES

PROGRAMMING NREGS TO SUCCEED

A HUMUNGOUS PROGRAMME LIKE NREGS NEEDS AN INDEPENDENT BODY THAT LOOKS AFTER IT, HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT, EVALUATION, SOCIAL AUDIT AND GRIEVANCE REDRESS, WITHOUT WHICH QUALITY OUTCOMES WILL REMAIN ELUSIVE.

PRAMATHESH AMBASTA

 

In two general elections since 2004, the "other" India has spoken loud and clear to the few enclaves of prosperity that dot the country's grim development landscape: if growth is not inclusive and broad-based, its wheels will come off, severely undermining the very fabric of Indian democracy. In this context, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme acquires great significance. For, it marks a historic opportunity for pushing ahead with governance reforms in rural India. However, much more needs to be done before NREGS possibilities become a reality. For, the average days of work per household were only 48 in 2008-09. The record of productive assets creation has been poor if not altogether dismal. Long delays in wage payments, sometimes for several months, and the spectre of corruption rearing its ugly head indicate the failure of entitlements reaching the poorest of the nation, thus defeating the very purpose of NREGS.

 

An analysis of these symptoms suggests that there are clear reasons why the results are not along expected lines. Though no magic bullet or quick fixes exist, solutions may well be within our reach. As several observers have remarked, a critical lacuna in the implementation of NREGS has been the shortage of dedicated human resource, with an overloaded bureaucratic structure given "additional charge," leading to delays and poor quality output. Attempts to piggyback a radically new people-centred programme on to a moribund bureaucratic structure of implementation simply do not work.

 

However, a dedicated implementation structure will only solve part of the problem. The second crucial missing link in the implementation chain is concurrent monitoring. Here, Information Technology (IT) has a huge role to play in making necessary information available transparently and at high speed. Rich though the NREGA Management Information System (MIS) is, there is much scope for improvement. The MIS, for instance, is not able to raise an alert on delays in wage payments because data are normally updated post-facto, thus undermining the very basis of monitoring.

 

Evaluation and social audit are the third aspect of NREGS implementation in need of qualitative improvements. Both are integral to the bottom-up architecture of the scheme. Finally, despite the best design and rollout, problems and gaps in execution will always persist. It is here that a lack of any grievance redress mechanism is glaring for, such a system can work wonders in building confidence in the scheme.

 

Taken together with other reforms, changes in these four essential directions — human resource development, better use of IT, independent evaluation and social audit and effective grievance redress — can begin to make NREGS perform to its potential. However, the important question here is: who will oversee these key functions and ensure that all implementation agencies across the country comply with standards and norms established in all these aspects? We strongly believe that the largest employment programme in human history must be armed with an independent, dedicated National Authority to anchor and steer it. Such a national authority for NREGS (NAN) should be set up as an autonomous body. The function of coordinating the implementation and monitoring of the programme by the States would remain with the Department of Rural Development, as at present. But evaluation, social audit and grievance redress would become independent of the department. For, as a matter of principle, the agency executing the programme should not be the one evaluating its own work. In addition, NAN would be charged with the key functions of human resource development (deployment as well as capacity-building) and streamlining IT systems to facilitate effective monitoring and social audit.

 

In order to ensure maximum autonomy, the chairperson of NAN should be an individual of established integrity and eminence chosen from public life. The road map for autonomy along with its legal-constitutional implications should be worked out through detailed deliberations in the public domain. The executive arm of NAN should be headed by a Director-General (DG), an officer not below the rank of Secretary to the Government of India, competitively recruited from the open market using a search committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary and including persons of eminence/experience working on NREGS. Serving government officers would also be able to apply for the post. The DG will report to the chairperson of the Authority.

 

NAN should have four departments — evaluation and social audit, grievance redress, information technology and human resource development — each headed by a Deputy Director-General (DDG), a Joint Secretary rank officer, again recruited in the same manner as the DG.

 

The evaluation and social audit department will be responsible for mounting evaluation through a carefully selected panel of experts and institutions from across the country, and ensuring that social audits are undertaken and monitored. The grievance redress department will be a window for immediate response to any complaint made by wage-seekers or their representatives or organisations, lay citizens, or any other agency wishing to bring to the notice of NAN any violation of the Act anywhere. The department will appoint ombudsmen throughout the country — citizens of proven eminence, integrity and track record of service to the nation who will be fully empowered by NAN to work as its eyes and ears, arms and legs. The ombudsmen will receive complaints and take them up with the district administration and the State Employment Guarantee Council. If needed, they may go to the site from where the complaints originate, or appoint a team to go there, or organise a multilateral committee made up of representatives of the government, the ombudsman concerned and the complainant, to find out the true facts within a time frame. The committee would submit a report with clear recommendations specifying the time within which action needs to be taken. The ombudsman would report to the NAN about the action taken or not taken.

 

In order that NREGS becomes a vehicle for governance on the doorstep of the poorest, the speed and power of computer networks must be harnessed with a thorough understanding of the needs of different stakeholders. IT must enable availability of updated information which is as close to reality as possible for tracking NREGS. There must be a system in place, which is tightly integrated end to end, in which IT deployment is central to the workflow, so that data are as real time as is possible. In addition, there is need for a hardware and connectivity backbone which allows real-time online update of data. The system must also constantly innovate to bring more and more such areas, which have traditionally belonged to note-sheets, files and red tape, under its purview. It must constantly seek to harness newer ideas and innovations to fulfil the goal of digital inclusion. The Unique Identity can find a place within this information system to deliver much more than a number to every Indian, by allowing for real-time, non-repudiable authentication of beneficiaries in critical NREGS transactions. The NREGS worker will biometrically confirm receipt after the payment has been made. Given the importance of information systems, NAN's IT department must use the best technical expertise available in the country, which will take responsibility for putting in place and constantly streamlining the IT backbone for NREGS implementation. The department will also ensure that the States comply with the ICT requirements of data returns and updation.

 

The people-centred architecture of NREGS requires delving deep into complex technical and social processes. This necessitates personnel equipped to do the job. While such a human resource requirement is treated as obvious for infrastructure projects of "national importance," it is tragically never understood that the demands of governance and development in partnership with the rural poor require as much creativity, skill and professionalism, if not more. The human resource department of NAN will be responsible for ensuring that a professional tier is created for the cutting edge of NREGS implementation, work out standards for the personnel recruited, and a system of certification. It will set needs-based standards for training institutions across the country to build the capacities of NREGS implementers. It will also work out a detailed policy, aimed at rewarding performance, weeding out non-performers, low attrition and high retention of people who perform.

 

For the flagship programme to be effective, it needs to be programmed to succeed. A central anchoring agency such as NAN may well hold the password to such a programme, in the course of time, unlocking the gates to let the necessary changes in.

 

(The writer is National Coordinator, Civil Society Consortium on NREGA)

 

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THE HINDU

OP-ED

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

IN THEIR OWN WAY, INDIRA GANDHI AND HER FAMILY PAVED THE WAY FOR THE INDIA OF TODAY AND TOMORROW.

PRANAY GUPTE

 

Hard to believe now that it's been 25 years since Indira Gandhi was assassinated in the garden of her New Delhi home by her own security guards. Hard to believe that an entire generation of Indians has grown up without Indira in power.

 

I have lived abroad during much of this time, although journalistic assignments brought me to India several times each year. I have seen for myself the transformation of a largely backward country into one that can be termed an authentic economic world power, with a GDP exceeding one-trillion dollars, and a middle class that is larger than that of the entire population of the United States. That isn't to say that poverty has been eradicated, of course, but there is certainly greater prosperity since Indira's time.

 

During these 25 years, India's population has also doubled: the demography of nations changes every 30 years or so; so it could be said that perhaps a majority of Indians alive today have, at the most, dim memories of the Indira Raj. But Raj it certainly was, and it's unlikely that in an age of globalisation where every policy and act of political leaders is subject of intense scrutiny and transparency through the Web, any ruler especially of a country as large as India can rule through diktat, as Indira Gandhi did while she was alive.

 

The 25 years since her death have largely been good years for India, economically speaking, at least, notwithstanding the ups and downs. For me personally, they have not been necessarily kind. I was divorced after a 30-year marriage, I am estranged from my only son, and I lost both my parents and a very dear uncle who raised me as much as my father and mother did. So I sometimes ask myself, where did these years go?

 

But in the final analysis, I am an optimist, a sunny character who believes in redemption and rehabilitation, who believes that nations, like individuals, deserve a second chance in life. I am at that age where there aren't too many opportunities for a second chance, and I know that the years behind me are longer than the ones ahead. But India is forever, India is timeless, and India will endure.

 

And so, as I slip through middle age, I think of how fortunate I am to be able to say that I was born and raised in India, how very lucky I was to witness many of the great events some of them tragic, to be sure almost since India's Independence, and how even more fortunate the Indians whose lifetimes are likely to be longer than mine will be to experience the enormous change that lies ahead. In their own way, Indira Gandhi and her family paved the way for the India of today and tomorrow. All my reservations and criticisms and caviling apart, you cannot take that away from them. The Nehrus and the Gandhis were patriots, for them India did matter and that is what counts. They are the stuff of which history is made.

 

I probably won't be around 25 years from now. But this much I can predict: Like India, the names and legacy of the Nehrus and the Gandhis will endure.

 

(Pranay Gupte's new book, a completely new version of his 1992 Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi, is being published this month by Viking/Penguin, to mark the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Mr. Gupte covered the assassination while he was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.)

 

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THE HINDU

AID FOR CHILD ILLNESSES STALLS AMID FOCUS ON AIDS FIGHT

ALL THE ATTENTION HAS GONE TO MORE GLAMOROUS DISEASES, BUT THIS BASIC THING HAS BEEN LEFT BEHIND, SAYS THE CHIEF OF HEALTH AT UNICEF.

CELIA W. DUGGER

 

1. The disparity in American spending on AIDS and the big child killers — pneumonia and diarrhoea — remains stark
2. Experts agree there is tremendous potential to lower child deaths from diarrhoea and pneumonia substantially

 

Diarrhoea kills 1.5 million young children a year in developing countries — more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined — but only four in 10 of those who need the oral rehydration solution that can prevent death for pennies get it.

 

"All the attention has gone to more glamorous diseases, but this basic thing has been left behind," said Mickey Chopra, chief of health at UNICEF, which is trying to put diarrhoea back on the global health agenda. "It's a forgotten disease."

 

His observation lies at the heart of a wider debate over whether the United States and other rich nations spend too much on AIDS, which requires lifelong medications, compared with diarrhoea and the other leading killer of children, pneumonia, both of which can be treated inexpensively.

 

The debate is flaring at a time of great opportunity and risk. Recent data has documented remarkable progress in reducing child mortality and treating people with AIDS. Foreign assistance, which has often delivered disappointing results, is helping save millions of lives, the new figures show.

 

But as the United States and other rich nations hit by the global financial crisis face their own daunting challenges, there is heightened competition for foreign assistance. President Barack Obama has proposed a 2 per cent increase in HIV/AIDS spending for 2010 and a 6 per cent rise for maternal and child health, according to the Global Health Council, but the disparity in American spending on AIDS and the big child killers remains stark.

 

In Africa's two most populous nations, Nigeria and Ethiopia, the number of people who died of AIDS in 2007 — 237,000 — was less than half the 540,000 children under 5 who died of pneumonia and diarrhoea. But this year, the $750 million the United States is spending on HIV/AIDS in the two countries not only dwarfs the $35 million it is spending there on maternal and child health, but is also more than the $646 million it is spending on maternal and child health in all the world's countries combined.

 

"AIDS is still underfunded, no question," said Jeremy Shiffman, a political scientist at Syracuse University who has documented global health spending patterns. "But maternal, newborn and child mortality is a tremendous tragedy and gets peanuts."

 

Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel — a bioethicist, White House official and brother of Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's chief of staff — has contended that international aid for health is limited and would save more lives if increases focused on maternal health and the "mundane but deadly diseases" that kill young children. Such choices are necessary, he and a co-author wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April, "if the United States is going to shoulder the burden of choosing which lives to save in the developing world."

 

WRONG-HEADED IDEA

Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, countered that wealthy donors still spent far too little on global health and rejected what he called the wrong-headed idea that "we need to make a terrible and tragic choice between AIDS or pneumonia." The United States has invested heavily in the fight against AIDS, and other wealthy nations should pick up more of the cost of other global health priorities, he said. "Rather than tearing down what's working, we should continue to invest in what's needed," he said.

Mr. Obama has promised to put greater focus on child and maternal health and proposed a 53 percent increase next year in money to fight malaria, a major killer of African children, the Global Health Council estimated. But he has also committed to major increases in money to fight AIDS in coming years that, if enacted, would ensure AIDS remained America's global health priority, constituting over 70 per cent of its global health spending, he said.

 

International commitments to combat HIV and AIDS rose at an average annual rate of 48 per cent from 1998 to 2007, reaching $7.4 billion and making up almost half of donor financing for global health, according to Prof. Shiffman's analysis of data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

 

Still, more than half the people with the disease who need drug treatment still are not getting it. Two million died in 2007, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

 

The toll of women and children who die of easily preventable or curable conditions is even higher. Pneumonia alone killed two million children under age 5, and diarrhoea 1.5 million more, out of the almost nine million young children who died last year.

 

Dr. Olivier Fontaine, who described himself as the only person at WHO working full time on childhood diarrhoeal diseases, said health ministry managers in poor countries know diarrhoea is a crucial cause of child mortality, but focus on other diseases that have gotten more attention and financing from abroad.

 

Two days after her month-old son's bout of diarrhea began, Marcia Mankense, 23, took him to a hospital here in Johannesburg where a doctor administered fluids through an intravenous line threaded into his scalp. Before his birth, she said, no one told her she should give him oral rehydration salts — known as ORS — as soon as he got diarrhea, though she was counselled on the need to get tested for HIV. Nor did anyone give her a packet of the salts to take home.

 

"He's my firstborn and I know nothing about kids," she said, exhausted next to his crib after days of vigil. "I just feel like I need to be here for him. What if he's crying?"

 

Public health experts agree there is tremendous potential to lower child deaths from diarrhoea and pneumonia substantially. New methods of distributing rehydration salts and cheap zinc tablets, also recommended for diarrhoea, are being tested, including giving them away during national campaigns to hand out antimalarial bed nets and to vaccinate children against measles.

 

POPULARISE ORS

"Everyone should have ORS at home like we have Band-aids," Fontaine said.

 

For an extra $3 billion to $4 billion in coming years, children in poor countries could be inoculated against pneumonia and the rotavirus that causes about a third of diarrhoea deaths, according to the GAVI Alliance, a broad group of donors.

 

On the diarrhoea ward at the hospital in Johannesburg, most of the babies and young children had mothers patiently sitting next to their cribs, comforting them. But one little boy, 2 months old, was alone. His mother, a 10th grader, was at school. He had come in dehydrated, with sunken eyes, too enervated to even cry. But after being given fluids intravenously, life flowed back into him.

 

When he howled, a nurse or one of the mothers would look into his eyes. He would fall quiet, his cries muting to soft mewling, his eyes widening curiously.

 

"He wasn't even crying when he got here," Mankense said happily. "Now we can hear his voice. He's naughty!"

 

 © 2009 The New York Times News Service

 

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  THE ASIAN AGE

EDITORIAL

IS ANYBODY IN PAK LISTENING?

 

Speaking from the Kashmir Valley this week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh probably pitched his message just right, although it might be realistic not to set expectations too high. On the political side, Dr Singh made it clear his government was ready to discuss all aspects with any shade of opinion in the Valley whose representatives were willing to foment an atmosphere of peace and development. This broad formulation is not new in essence. Therefore, a good deal might depend on the progress of the "quiet diplomacy" with various groups promised recently by Union home minister P. Chidambaram. The language he used —specifically referring to "political" issues — has enthused public opinion in Kashmir. But we would do well not to get carried away. Kashmiri separatist groups are known to talk big, but tend to flinch from dialogue with the Centre when threatened by Pakistan-based outfits. With pro-Pakistan hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani sticking to his now-familiar line of not entering into talks until Islamabad is also brought on board in a three-way conversation — whose purpose is to make India acknowledge that Pakistan has a decent enough claim to Kashmir — it is hard to see how the so-called moderate Hurriyat sections can sustain the momentum of a dialogue with Delhi even if some are so inclined. It is not even clear if Mirwaiz Omar Farooq can be said to be in the latter category as he is known to blow hot and cold and normally trims his sails to commandments from Pakistan.

 

It is all too evident, however, that it is important to address the ordinary people of Kashmir who have come out over and over again to vote in "Indian" elections despite intimidation from Pakistan and from Hurriyat sections. Although the Pakistani dimension cannot be overlooked, the Valley's populace must develop enough confidence that the Centre is serious about approaching the subject of "autonomy". They are already persuaded that New Delhi is earnest about development, and also appreciate that several trans-border mechanisms — on trade, transport, communications — haven't fully worked out due to Islamabad dragging its feet. This is why they quietly do what they can — go out and vote. But some day they might pull back if the government cannot ensure them security against Pakistan-based terrorists and their local cohorts.

 

This is why from Kashmir Dr Singh carefully calibrated his call to Pakistan to end succour to terrorist elements on its territory so that peace conversations can be restarted. But Islamabad has clearly not heard. It is breathtaking how obtuse the Pakistan foreign ministry has chosen to be. Its spokesman chose to read in Dr Singh's remarks a "welcome reiteration of the understanding reached" at Sharm el-Sheikh. The tragedy of the situation — not responding to calls to end terrorism in Kashmir while all of Pakistan is being consumed by jihadist violence — clearly does not impress Islamabad. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was in Pakistan when Dr Singh was in Kashmir, has advised the people and government of Pakistan to embrace trade and economic ties with India if they wanted to get anywhere. There has not been even a pro forma response. She also clearly expressed her surprise that no one in Pakistan seemed to know where Al Qaeda leaders were hiding in that country for seven long years. Ms Clinton also made it clear that Pakistan's "military security establishment", clearly a euphemism for the ISI, came in the way of a "mature partnership" with Pakistan, not just for the United States but also other countries. India has been saying exactly this for three decades. The American tune can, of course, change opportunistically. But at least the secretary of state spelt out to Islamabad that it must sort out differences with India "bilaterally".

 

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THE ASIAN AGE

OPED

A MISUNDERSTOOD LONER

BY P.C. ALEXANDER

 

October 31, 2009, marks the conclusion of 25 years after Indira Gandhi's assassination at the hands of her own security guards. Only a few among the new generation which has grown up in India after this tragic event would have had the opportunity of seeing her or listening to her. The image of Indira Gandhi in the minds of most of them is that of a strong-willed person, an iron lady unwilling to make any concession to her political rivals and always ready to take risks by doing what she believed to be necessary in the interest of the country.

 

She has been described as Durga, even by her political adversaries, in admiration for her courage in taking hard decisions. Some others saw this courage as stubbornness or recklessness. The image of her as Prime Minister has generally been that of a hard-hearted dictator who trusted few and wished to concentrate power in herself. However, for those who worked with her closely, this image of her is a mockery, far removed from reality. I would say without any exaggeration, of her personality and style of working, that she was an exceptionally humane person, ever willing to listen to those in whose integrity and experience she had trust.

 

In order to fully understand her personality and style of working, one has to look into how she grew up and the problems she encountered in the early years of her life.

 

Though born into a family of great riches and fame, hers was a very lonely life. Perhaps it was this loneliness that made her cultivate a defensive mechanism in her personal and public life.

 

There were certain unfortunate facets of Indira's childhood which affected her general outlook. Very early in life she discovered that her aunts did not have very cordial relations with Kamala Nehru, her mother, who was suffering from tuberculosis. Since Kamala Nehru was not as educated as them, Jawaharlal Nehru's sisters thought her to be unsophisticated and tended to dominate her. This soured Indira's relations with her aunts. She also sometimes felt that her aunts considered her a competitor for her father's affections and this strongly influenced her relationship with them. If Indira was seen as a very lonely person, a part of the blame should go to the cold relationship she and her mother shared with her aunts.

 

Whatever may be the situation in which she grew up, the fact is that Indira Gandhi remained a loner in both her family and the society. This, in her case, made her unwilling to make compromises or adjustments in her life or to accommodate the wishes of others.

The circumstances of her marriage to Feroze Gandhi illustrate this trait clearly. Even her father was not very happy for a variety of reasons with the idea of her marrying Feroze Gandhi. However, once she had made up her mind that she would not marry anyone else, and made this known to everyone who mattered in her life, others had to fall in line with her wishes. Of course, if her marriage with Feroze Gandhi did not prove to be a great success, the fault cannot be attributed only to Indira Gandhi; her husband also must share a good part of the blame.

 

Indira Gandhi's insistence, after she became Prime Minister, to have a decisive voice in the selection of the Congress Party's candidate for the post of the President of India is another example of her readiness to take any manner of risk to meet her objective. While it was a fact that her election as Prime Minister was possible only after the demise of Lal Bahadur Shastri, she was not prepared to be merely one who reigned while members of the syndicate ruled. She had made it clear to everyone in the party that she would be Prime Minister in her own right. She was fully aware of the risks involved in going against the wishes of senior party leaders in their preference for Sanjeeva Reddy as the presidential candidate; but she was not prepared to surrender her right in selecting her party's candidate. Ultimately Indira Gandhi succeeded in having her nominee, V.V. Giri, elected as the President of India, although the party split on this issue. This was a turning point in her life and she became more convinced than ever that even if she was alone in asserting her rights as Prime Minister, she would do so instead of making any compromises with the principle which she considered most important.

 

Very soon Indira Gandhi established her credentials as leader of the common people in India and this enabled her to play a very important role as the Congress Party's powerful vote-getter in the various elections which followed. Of course, the Emergency which was declared in 1975 throughout the country and the excesses that were indulged in by some persons close to her, dented her image very substantially with disastrous results for her party.

 

The defeat of her party in the northern region of India in 1977 and the loss of political power for the party at the Centre and in most northern states became a good opportunity for introspection. In the general election of 1980 the nation could see a leader in whom it could bestow its trust once again.

 

A most unfortunate development in her new phase as Prime Minister was the Akali Dal agitation against her. Many people have not fully understood the various conciliatory moves made by Indira Gandhi for enlisting the support of the Akali Dal for her stand against organised terrorism unleashed by certain new leaders of the Sikh community. Indira Gandhi tried her best to reach a reasonable settlement with the Akali Dal on its various demands, but with little success. It was after exhausting all chances of arriving at an amicable solution that the unfortunate confrontation with the terrorist groups took place.

 

Critics of Indira Gandhi at that time blamed her for not being firm enough in dealing effectively with such groups. Those who are familiar with the facts relating to the negotiations with the Akalis know that she showed great patience and willingness to accommodate the legitimate demands of peace-loving sections of the Sikh community. It is ironic that her good intentions were misunderstood by some sections and she was blamed for alleged lack of will to deal with the agitations, while some others criticised her for trying to suppress the agitation by use of force. One can only hope that history will be more kind to Indira Gandhi when all facts are known to the people.

 

P.C. Alexander was Principal Secretary to Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi & Rajiv Gandhi

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THE ASIAN AGE

OPED

THE ROYAL BANQUET

BY KISHWAR DESAI

 

Often described as the most diminutive and least impressive President that India has produced — perhaps Mrs Pratibha Patil's stars are shining since she has arrived on the world stage just when India's fortunes are on the ascendant. Therefore, the reception accorded to her in London on her state visit has been one of the most spectacular — and very heartfelt.

 

The British are best when they do pomp and pageantry and for Madam President they had pulled out the stops. Probably the best evening in her honour this week was the State Banquet held by the Queen in Windsor Castle and I have to say it was mesmerising with its sheer splendour. One hopes that one day we, back home in India, will be able to learn how to arrange the perfectly synchronised reception, complete with trumpeters!

 

Just the glitter of the solid gold candelabras on the table and the gleam from the diamond and ruby tiara worn by the Queen was enough to daze most of the former residents from her erstwhile empire. However, as I have mentioned before, this Queen is very charming with a kindly air about her — which quite outweighs the ceremony which surrounds her. Therefore the evening, which ran with a clockwork precision, was grand but not overwhelming and we all came away with the impression that we all, individually, had been given a wonderful time. In fact, most people were reluctant to leave since the Queen herself stayed on to mingle with her guests during the post-dinner reception.

 

It was a very well organised banquet, where the conversation flowed — because there was a very eclectic mix of people; not just the royals including the queen-in-waiting Camilla and Princess Anne, but also people from the world of art and literature, such as J.K. Rowling and Anish Kapoor. And of course, politicians such as the Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the leader of the opposition, David Cameron. Overall, instead of a large number of the random "usual suspects" there was a more select crowd, so that everyone could meet and actually talk. There is a high premium on conversation since it is an immensely difficult art, and there is nothing worse than being trapped with a boring dinner companion!

 

However, for a change I got lucky! I personally had a great evening since I was seated right next to the very charming and suave leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron who, many predict, will be Britain's next Prime Minister. Mr Cameron turned out to be the ideal dinner companion — he was friendly, relaxed and totally at ease as we chatted away comfortably for nearly two hours. And of course, I found that very reassuring as we come from opposing ends of the political spectrum.

 

It was all the more surprising as after all, when one is billed as the next Prime Minister — the comfort level decreases rapidly. I remember sitting next to Rahul Gandhi, another aspiring Prime Minister, at a dinner a few years ago, and the conversation was nowhere as engrossing. Perhaps Mr Gandhi is still shy or he needs to develop (as Mr Cameron already has) some more confidence and panache. It should not matter who is seated next to him — as his personal charisma should be such that other people remember the evening. However, he was certainly better than some other Indian politicians who are usually so full of themselves that you can plunge face forward into your soup with sheer boredom.

 

Therefore, I was completely enchanted, to find in Mr Cameron someone who is interesting as well as happy to listen. I had imagined that he would be rather on his guard, and with elections barely six months away, be completely plugged into political debate.

 

However, we managed to cover a large number of subjects and even chatted about Indian cinema — which he confessed he had got a glimpse of because he has a Nepalese au pair looking after his children and one of her main conditions for joining the Cameron household was access to Indian cinema on television. So he was familiar with the familiar song and dance routine of Bollywood. Of course, I also recommended that he watches many more Indian films, — a future task that I do hope he is seriously considering.

 

Mr Cameron is also in the spotlight because he is trying to take some tough but necessary decisions. For example, some of the changes he is trying to bring to the Conservative Party are those I wish other parties would emulate: he is holding primaries (as in America) in which candidates are allowed to compete with each other to become the probable nominee for the Conservative Party. Debates are conducted, and the people of the constituencies (regardless of party affiliation) are allowed to vote for the most suitable candidate. Mr Cameron has now gone a step further and has put forward the idea of "women only shortlists" to push the number of women MPs upwards. As in India, male politicians in the UK are terrified of the prospect and are trying to block it. However, Mr Cameron is trying and one wishes him success. Even if he doesn't succeed, it is obvious that it will focus more attention on the need to have more women in Parliament.

 

That is an idea that Mrs Patil should be familiar with — and appreciate.

 

After the State Banquet, the next day we saw her again at the Guildhall for dinner — where once more there was a marvellous demonstration of how much the British believe in tradition. So there were trumpeters, and elaborate rituals — accompanied by uniforms, tiaras and gowns galore.

 

And then we attended the "grand" finale of Mrs Patil's visit — the launch of the Commonwealth Games — with the Queen's Baton Rally starting from Buckingham Palace. While it was a wonderful location — one wishes a little more preparation had gone into the showcasing of India. But more importantly, it was a historic occasion given double the value with the presence of the titular heads of two countries.

 

Though some of the ceremonial performances preceding the baton rally had little connection with the games, the unexpected chanting of a Sanskrit shloka from the Rig Veda by young British school children was very relevant and touching. Hopefully the games in Delhi will reflect some of the hospitality which their launch has received here.

 

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com

 

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THE ASIAN AGE

COLUMN

GUDIYA TO DURGA

BY INDER MALHOTRA

 

NEXT only to her illustrious father, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi was the longest-lasting Prime Minister of India but with a crucial difference. He was at the helm for 17 long, formative and unbroken years after Independence during which he won three successive elections hands down. All through he was the nation's cherished icon; only after the debacle in the border war with China in 1962 was his image smudged. Her 15 years in power, by contrast, were broken into not just two separate innings but also several different phases with sharp ups and downs, high drama, including a roller-coaster ride, and searing tragedy.

 

This inevitably made her controversial first and then the focus of constant contention until the country was overwhelmed by inflamed polarisation of both the polity and society for or against her. From the late 1960s to well beyond her assassination in 1984, she was either adored or abused. Significantly, reverence came from the masses and vehement reviling from the chattering classes. Her rationalisation of this was that her father's position was a "saint strayed into politics" and since his position was absolutely secure, he never had to struggle. Unlike him, she had to claw every inch of the way to the room at the top. Only the last part of this statement is true.

 

Complex and controversial Indira's personality surely was, but it was also compelling, which should explain her many splendid achievements — despite an equal number of failings and faults — and the lasting imprint she has left behind.

 

Since her life's story is all too well known — more books have been written on her than on any other Indian with the sole exception of the Mahatma — let me skip the phase during which took place the historic transformation of goongi gudiya into invincible goddess Durga, resulting from her tremendous triumph in the 1971 general election, two years after the Congress split, and from India's victory in the war for the liberation of Bangladesh.

 

Even today there is inadequate appreciation of her strategic virtuosity. She realised that international alignments were necessary to meet grim security challenges. After Henry Kissinger's secret flight to China, she signed the Indo-Soviet treaty. More importantly, after the war, during which America sent nuclear-armed Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal, she authorised Raja Ramanna, a nuclear scientist and then the director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, to start working on an underground nuclear test that was conducted in 1974. This was undoubtedly her finest hour. But the trouble with reaching Olympian heights is that you have nowhere else to go but down. No one could have foreseen, however, that Indira's decline would be so swift and stunning.

 

The afterglow of Bangladesh faded fast. In less than two years much else also happened to change the Indian scene so radically as to erode Indira's magic. Rains failed at a time when the government's granaries had been emptied to feed 10 million Bangladeshi refugees. Soaring prices led to mass discontent. The 1973 "oil shock" delivered a shattering blow to the already precarious Indian economy. Clearly, Indira had no control over this. But, unfortunately, she did nothing about equally disastrous developments that she could have and should have controlled. The most corrosive of these was massive corruption among her cohorts and henchmen aggravated by their links with hoarders, smugglers and profiteers.

 

Since, under political compulsions, Indira had moved from pragmatic to populist policies — and had incurred much opposition by such measures as bank nationalisation, abolition of privy purses, rigorous controls on industry and avoidable confrontation with judiciary — she made the cardinal mistake of nationalising the wholesale trade in wheat in conditions of egregious scarcity, and had to rescind it in something of a hurry.  

 

No wonder the dam of pent-up popular anger burst first in Gujarat as "Nav Nirman" and was soon overtaken by the formidable "JP Movement", so called because it was led by the highly respected Gandhian leader, Jayaprakash Narayan.

 

Over time, Indira could have perhaps coped with the tidal wave of protests. After all, she had successfully crushed a railway strike. But the Allahabad high court's judgment, invalidating her election to Parliament and disqualifying her from holding public office for six years, made this impossible.

 

Since she decided not to step down even temporarily, her answer to the countrywide outcry for her immediate removal was the hammer-blow of the Emergency, her Himalayan Blunder and a 19-month nightmare for everyone else. In clamping it she had erred greviously, and greviously did she pay for it. In the 1977 general election she and her party were defeated humiliatingly. The hurriedly cobbled Janata that had overthrown the Empress believed that she had been "consigned to the dustbin of history". How wrong it was. In just three years she was back in power spectacularly.

 

Within six months of this triumph took place the tragedy of the death of her favourite son and duly designated successor, Sanjay. From this shock Indira never recovered fully. But she lost no time to draft her surviving, apolitical son, Rajiv, to take up his brother's role. Dynasty, in her scheme of things, was above all, and this part of her multi-dimensional legacy has flourished in all parties during the last 25 years.

 

Although, after her second coming, Indira Gandhi was besieged by grim challenges from Assam to Punjab to Sri Lanka, Operation Blue Star — the storming by the Army of the holiest of the Sikh shrines because it had been converted into a citadel of secessionism and terrorism by a Frankenstein monster created by her own party — led to her assassination by her own security guards.

 

This is the logical end of the narrative. Let me, therefore, very briefly sum up Indira's unique qualities that made her dominate the Indian scene for 20 years like a colossus, irrespective of whether she was in power or our of it. These also account for the nation's continuing high respect and affection for her.

 

She is and will remain memorable because of her total devotion to India and its supreme interests, and her unflinching determination to defend its sovereignty and unity in all spheres at all costs. In this respect De Gaulle of France is the only other world leader that comes anywhere near her.

 

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THE ASIAN AGE

COLUMN

RAPID FIRE WITH UK FAR-RIGHT PARTY CHIEF

BY FARRUKH DHONDY

 

The BBC invited Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (BNP), to participate in a TV debate as a panelist on their prestigious current affairs show Question Time. The format, chaired by veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby, features each week a politician from the main parties and one or perhaps two people from wider political persuasions who have some track record of holding opinions of interest. They answer questions from a studio audience. The debate can sometimes get heated but is, in the British way, always contained.

 

Following the dictates of its Charter, which requires the BBC to give proportional air time on radio and TV to elected representatives of the population, invited the far-right BNP to participate. The party, hitherto restricted to representing patches of communities on local councils, won two seats in the last election to the European Parliament and as such was a candidate for air-time.

 

The BBC must also have known that the controversy would boost viewing figures. For weeks before the programme, after Griffin accepted their invitation, there were protests against his appearance on a "respectable" platform. The party was denounced as racist, fascist, homophobic and misogynist — all with plenty of justification.

 

The Labour, Conservative and Liberal politicians who accepted the invitation to share a platform with Griffin argued that challenging his views publicly would expose the BNP's policies for what they are. Their contention was that the people who voted for them had done so out of an ignorance of their origins and the true nature of their intentions. A TV debate would act as an X-ray and expose, if one can tolerate the metaphor, the skeletons in their cupboard, their Nazi past and persuasions.

 

There is no doubt that the BNP is the successor organisation to the British Union of Fascists founded by Oswald Mosley, a dissident semi-aristocratic former scion of Britain's Labour Party. It is a bastard great-grandchild of Mosley and espouses the causes that he first put forward and came, in these fair and fecund isles, inevitably to grief. In his heyday, extolling Hitler, marching with a small army of black-shirted thugs, preaching against the supposed influence of universal Jewry and marching to terrorise and victimise the poor and toiling minority of Jewish immigrants of East London, he won the support of a few thousand mentally or rationally damaged people. When Britain went to war against the Nazis, Mosley was jailed.

 

After the war, Britain was in no mood to tolerate a "Nazi party". The nutters who longed for their black shirts and square moustaches only returned to the political stage with the advent of immigration from the ex-colonies in the 50s and 60s.

 

These Fascists regrouped under the banner of The National Front. Through the 60s and 70s it was the nasty party whose only platform was the repatriation of black and brown people to India, Pakistan and the West Indies. They demanded an immediate halt to all immigration into the UK. They were vociferously opposed by the Left and a trifle haughtily by the Labour, Conservative and Liberal party establishments.

 

The National Front, a rump of a party with no electoral success of any sort, split and gave rise to several nastier formations. The latest progeny of this fascist movement is the BNP even though its leader Nick Griffin, a Cambridge graduate, has attempted to rid it of its criminal image and has induced its members to wear suits and get rid of their skinhead haircuts. He can't, of course, erase the criminal records that very many of those in the leadership of the BNP hold.

 

The Question Time on which Griffin appeared became a national affair. There were demonstrations and a police presence outside the BBC's studios. Griffin arrived with six bodyguards. The format was certainly loaded against him. The studio audience was uniformly hostile with a more than fair representation of black and Asian people. The programme, which normally covers four or five topics of the day, was distorted entirely into denunciations of Griffin and the BNP's attitudes. The fellow defended himself and tried to appear "moderate". Panelists quoted from Griffin's own pronouncements against immigration, against black people, against Islam. Griffin tried to make the racial point about an "indigenous" population of Britain being displaced and challenged by the arrival of immigrants and was faced with the argument that Britain had always been, from Celtic and Roman times, invaded or settled by different nations.

 

The argument may be academically sound, but television is not the forum for the persuasion of reason. Though the programme did expose Griffin as an undesirable racist, his appearance and arguments on it have, according to neutral polls taken after the transmission, not detracted from but mildly boosted the BNP's support.

 

Griffin and his party are no doubt aware of the psyphological research done by Manchester University into the popular appeal of the BNP. The research demonstrates that the BNP has, in the last decade, acquired a new "votebank" as we would call it in India. This is centred around Yorkshire and the Northwest, communities which used to be solidly working class and voted Labour. Support for the party is highest in areas with high Pakistani or Bangladeshi concentration, the mill-and-mosque towns of what used to be manufacturing England. There is very little or no support for the BNP in areas where Indians, mostly Sikhs and Hindus, are concentrated or in areas where people of Afro-Caribbean origin form a proportion of the community.

 

The BNP's support arises then from an anti-Muslim stance. The party has succeeded in channelling the anti-terrorist, anti-Islamist sentiment of the working class into an anti-Muslim political base. The main political parties, whose MPs are elected from several of these constituencies with significant Muslim populations, have taken very little heed of this particular development.

 

Apart from these MPs, the British Muslim population ought to take serious note of it. The counter argument to the BNP's poison has to encompass an absolute distinction between the positions and plans of Islamists and those of the Muslim communities of Britain. Such a distinction can only emerge dynamically from within the Muslim community itself and is long overdue.

 

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DNA

EDITORIAL

HAZARDS ALL AROUND

 

It is not immediately known what exactly caused the Indian Oil depot fire in Jaipur which has been raging unabated since Thursday evening. Petroleum minister Murli Deora has announced an inquiry committee to look into the causes of the accident and an examination of the safety norms is certainly a necessary response.

 

The immediate fears of a possible sabotage — a legitimate concern in these troubled times — seems to have been allayed. There is a mention of a possible earthquake and a pipe leak but only thorough investigation will tell us what exactly happened and why.

 

The depot with its huge storage capacity of inflammable petroleum products feeds all other depots in Rajasthan. It is situated in an industrial area of the Rajasthan State Industrial Development and Investment Corporation and the fire that broke out has destroyed property all round. The people living in the hutments around were able to flee.

 

It is now clear that the only way the fire will come under control is for the petrol and kerosene to burn out. Only then will fire tenders be able to douse it completely. The know how to put it out is not available. Lives have been lost and any blame game or hasty conclusions can wait; the key task is to ensure damage is minimised.

 

But we need to ask ourselves,  does India have sufficient safeguards to ensure complete safety — from natural disasters, accidents even hostile attacks — of installations such as petroleum storage tanks, LPG depots and such like?

 

Urban areas also need attention. Even a cursory look shows that petroleum tanks and refineries are often in the midst of residential areas or within city limits. A good example is Mumbai, where slums and residential complexes exist cheek by jowl with a vast bank of petroleum tanks which feed the city's petrol pumps. In addition, it is a common sight to see warehouses with LPG cylinders piled up next to a tower block.

 

The companies and agents may argue that when they set up those facilities the areas were fairly remote; an expanding city grew around them. Hence it is not their fault. This may well be true but we have to deal with present day reality and address potential risks.

 

This requires sophisticated urban planning which factors fire and other hazards. Apart from zoning laws, proper maintenance and security systems have to be put in place and implemented. The city's administrators, politicians as much as bureaucrats have to take into account that dense urban habitations have crystallised around the industrial centres.

 

The trend will only increase and with it, the risks. The Jaipur fire is a shocking reminder, a wake up call to governments, especially at local levels, to move fast and create capabilities that can prevent and fight such conflagrations.

 

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DNA

EDITORIAL

GELLING YOUR NUMBER

YOGI AGGARWAL 

 

Things are not always what they seem or are made out to be. Take the Unique Identification (UID) project set up by the Indian government under former Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani. In his interviews to TV and the press, Nilekani has reiterated that the main function of the project is to be "an enabler which will allow more effective public delivery" for schemes for the poor.

 

It plans to have all of India's billion people covered by a unique number, which will have fingerprints, besides a photograph and details of the person, his/her sex, age, and address. All this is to be achieved by people voluntarily agreeing to be fingerprinted and their details being filed in a central depository. No coercion is mentioned and the unspecified "investment of money in this project will actually make all those other monies" for development projects "be spent more efficiently".

 

By funding and placing the project under an innocuous new ministry its real intent is concealed. In other countries such as the UK, similar proposed schemes come under the home ministry as it "offers the potential to combat the threat of terrorism, identity fraud and illegal working." The Indian scheme had a similar purpose when first put forward by the NDA government in 2001 but this has studiously not been mentioned by Nilekani. He has also neatly sidestepped the infringement of civil liberties and a person's privacy that the scheme would entail. 

 

Far from helping, say, people getting work under The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) or people under the poverty line getting food at subsidised rates, it will introduce another bureaucratic layer that will be used to harass them. It would also be used to get information on anyone using banks, passports, driving licenses, demat share accounts or any other place where the individual has to deal with institutions. Once the scheme is installed, all such institutions will ask for the unique identification number, forcing a person to register, placing all such details as bank account numbers, passport details and demat share account numbers in a central depository.

 

Apart from the power such information gives the government, it can be misused by hackers. In October 2006, Jerry Fishenden the national technology officer of Microsoft in the UK wrote in The Scotsman that the proposal to put biometrics such as fingerprints on a national database would perpetuate the very problems it was built to solve, as no computer system is ever 100 per cent secure, "putting a comprehensive set of personal data in one place produces a honeypot effect — a highly attractive and richly rewarding target for criminals" and the UK government  "should not be building systems that allow hackers to mine information so easily".

 

The most comprehensive critique of a national ID scheme was done by the London School of Economics (LSE) of the UK draft Identity Cards Bill. It largely agrees with the conclusions of the UK home affairs committee set up to study the bill. Its analysis has been seen as sufficiently perceptive to contribute to policy deliberations in related areas in the US, Australia and Canada.

 

Among the many observations and recommendations LSE makes, some are worth mentioning as they would equally apply here:

 

In some cases, the use of unique identifiers for citizens has become the key enabler of identity theft. Reports from the US indicates that in 2004 there were 9.3 million victims of identity theft, costing over $50 billion.

 

Genuine biometric information could be inserted into otherwise fraudulent identity documents. Therefore the risk with this type of identifier lies in the issuing process.

 

Although law and order is a key motivation for the establishment of ID cards in numerous countries, evidence establishes that their usefulness to police has been marginal.

 

The National Identity Register poses a far larger risk to the safety and security of UK citizens than any of the problems that it purports to solve.

 

The technology envisioned for this scheme is, to a large extent, untested and unreliable.
No scheme on this scale has been undertaken anywhere in the world. The use of biometrics gives rise to particular concern because this technology has never been used at such a scale.

 

The UK scheme proposes to centralise ID records of 60 million people. India, a far less developed nation is attempting this at 20 times the scale. It is a bonanza for the IT industry but could be a disaster for the rest of us. We must not "sleepwalk into a surveillance society".

 

Gandhiji first used satyagraha in South Africa when the Smuts regime made it compulsory for Indians to have their fingerprints on their certificates of registration. The irony is those who claim his legacy have now put forward a far more intrusive, and ultimately coercive, proposal.

 

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DNA

A COMMITTED RULER

The country will be observing the 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's assassination today. She ruled this country with an iron fist when it was passing through a difficult period. Even her detractors would agree that whatever she did, the country's interests were paramount in her thoughts. She was totally committed to the integrity of the nation. When asked what she considered the greatest achievement in the post-Independence era she is reported to have replied "To have survived as a single nation".

VVS Mani, Bengaluru

 

GOODBYE SHEPHERD

Being a hardcore cricket lover, who spent his youth in England, I was sad to read that David Shepherd is no more ('A tribute to David Shepherd', DNA, October 29). Cricket has seen umpires like the legendary Sir Frank Chester and Shepherd's colleague Dickie Bird, but coming across a jovial umpire is a rarity. "Umpires are like stern judges, who don't love to smile, let alone laugh," observed West Indian cricket scribe Sir CLR James, but Shepherd was an exception. Always smiling and cracking jokes, Shepherd belied the general perceptions about the umpires. Despite his friendliness, he was a professional, who never let his off the ground closeness influence his decisions. It is said that he had a fondness for those who played for Gloucestershire county, but he didn't hesitate to adjudge Zaheer Abbas LBW out in a match between Gloucestershire and Kent.We don't get to see people like Shepherd anymore.

Sumit S Paul, Pune

 

ADDRESS THE REAL ISSUES 

The government strategy on Maoists will generate more Naxals than it kills ('Naxals kill three brothers in Chhattisgarh district', DNA, October 30). The Maoists original success was due to the state's failure to provide proper governance in around 30 per cent of the country. Unless the government stops treating this as law and order problem and address real development concerns, it will find it absolutely
impossible to whitewash the red.

Shekhar Suvarna, Navi Mumbai

 

CHANGE FOR BETTER

R Jagannathan amply brought out the changes India has undergone during the past five years, with Manmohan Singh at the helm of affairs ('Brand Manmohan rising', DNA, October 29). And it was a good augury that the paradigm shift in the style of functioning was changed for better!

PM Gopalan, via e-mail

 

BJP'S TRAVAILS

BJP once called itself a factionless party. The hollowness of this claim lies exposed. What is happening in Karnataka is the latest example ('Yeddyurappa has upper hand in game of cat and mouse for CM's seat', DNA, October 30). BS Yeddyurappa was not a natural or popular leader when he initially took over. Though he carried BJP to a majority, with the help of a few independents, in the last assembly elections there was something amiss in his leadership which has come to the fore again. As compared to Yeddyurappa, Ananthkumar, the national general secretary, had more charisma and followers. But caste equations tilted the balance in favour of Yeddyurappa. Those in the thick of Karnataka politics wish Yeddyurappa continues but with a more refined and matured approach.

Ganapathi Bhat, Akola

 

JUST DESSERTS

What is happening in Pakistan is not totally unexpected with the way its military was supporting and training extremist groups. The saying 'as you sow, so you reap' aptly applies to Pakistan. The current scenario in Pakistan is definitely a matter of concern for the US. It is pity that they are paying dearly for the destruction caused by these terrorists. But even America cannot be freed from the guilt. The US faces a peculiar situation; on the one hand its  soldiers are dying in Afghanistan fighting the terrorists and on the other hand, it is reimbursing Pakistan's losses. Either way Pakistan is benefiting.

MH Nayak, Mumbai

 

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THE TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL

WHY THIS EXTRA BURDEN?

NEED TO SCRAP PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARIES

 

The front-page report on The Tribune (October 30, 2009) brings to the fore the manner in which the chief parliamentary secretaries in Punjab are bleeding the state exchequer with virtually no work to perform. Unfortunately, the malaise is not restricted to Punjab alone. Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, too, have over the years been facing the same problem. There is no need for the chief ministers to continue these posts which are redundant and often sinecures. Apart from being a huge burden on the exchequer, continuance of these posts amounts to nullifying the letter and spirit of the Constitution (Ninety-first Amendment) Act, 2003 under which a state ministry's size cannot exceed 10 per cent of the total strength of the State Assembly. As the chief ministers are unable to accommodate more members in their ministries because of this limit, they appoint parliamentary secretaries with pay, perks and privileges of ministers to keep the MLAs happy.

 

In April 2005, the Himachal Pradesh High Court had ruled that the appointment of parliamentary secretaries in the state was a "fraud on the Constitution". Moreover, it ruled that they are not ministers under Article 164 of the Constitution and no job, which is in the nature of functions and responsibilities to be discharged by ministers, can be assigned to them. If Punjab's parliamentary secretaries think they are being humiliated everyday with no work, it is the Chief Minister's own making and his refusal to scrap these posts. Mr Parkash Singh Badal's claim that these posts are "a tool to groom future leaders" is specious. When he was in the Opposition, he had condemned his predecessor, Capt Amarinder Singh, on this issue.

 

While Punjab boasts of 14 chief parliamentary secretaries, Himachal Pradesh has two as of now. The Veerabhadra Singh government had 11 of them. Haryana had 10 of them in the previous regime. Its Chief Minister, Mr Bhupinder Singh Hooda, is under tremendous pressure now from members for ministerial berths. As his government is heavily dependent upon the seven Independents' support, it remains to be seen whether he would appoint parliamentary secretaries to appease various MLAs. In any case, he would do well to respect the constitutional cap on the ministry size as also refrain from appointing parliamentary secretaries. The money thus saved on these posts can be deployed on development.

 

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THE TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL

POSITIVE SIGNALS

INDIA WILL GAIN WITH END OF US RECESSION

 

If the growth of the US economy by 3.5 per cent in the July-September 2009 quarter is anything to go by, the Americans can feel somewhat relieved that the recession is behind them. The positive signals are manifest—a turnaround in growth after four quarters of continuous decline, improved corporate earnings, and more consumer spending, exports and home construction. The number of people on jobless aid has slid by 148,000 to 5.8 million. Considering that a housing slump had been the main factor behind the economy's downturn, a jump of 23.4 per cent in residential investment can be seen as a hopeful sign. Evidently, the stimulus packages that the US government announced at the height of recession helped in enhancing demand for consumer goods and homes.

 

India can draw comfort from the fact that even at the peak of western recession, it was not badly hit. While much of the world showed negative growth rates, India, along with China, was in the positive range with India's growth rate hovering around 6 per cent. The Manmohan Singh government doubtlessly deserves to be commended for managing the economy wisely at a crucial time. The Indian banking system with its tight regulatory controls proved resilient as compared to the recklessness with which American and other western banks lent money leading to a recovery crisis. Now, with the US joining Germany, Japan, France and Singapore in shrugging off recession, India can hope for a turnaround in exports which have been declining for over a year, and a revival of the international job market.

 

What is crucial for the US at this stage is to see that the economy shows a meaningful momentum on a sustained basis. The fiscal situation continues to be dismal with the deficit ballooning, largely due to the huge spending on bailouts and a drop in tax revenues. The accumulated debt of the US government has hit an all-time high. However, with consumer spending picking up across the board there is much to be hopeful about.

 

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THE TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL

WHEN SUGAR IS LESS SWEET

STATES WILL HAVE TO BEAR SOME BURDEN

 

The Union Cabinet has kept up the promise of Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar to pay a bonus on paddy though the amount of Rs 50 has been dismissed by the Punjab Chief Minister as "too little, too late". It is the Cabinet's other decision to fix the "fair and remunerative price" (FRP) of sugarcane at Rs 129.84 a quintal that may rattle the sugarcane-producing states. It is likely to unsettle their finances. Earlier, they would "advise" (read force) the sugar mills to pay the SAP. Now the Centre has shifted the responsibility for paying the state advised price from the sugar mills to the states.

 

The sugar industry has suffered for long due to the politically motivated sugarcane prices. The states did not follow any objective criteria for jacking up the "advised" prices. Now, they will have to foot the bill for their political largess. The order is bound to create a political controversy as the financial condition of the states, particularly Punjab, is already shaky. Against the Central price of Rs 129.84 a quintal, Punjab had hiked the state advised price for sugarcane to Rs 200 a quintal. The latest order may force the state to either go back on or prune the SAP.

 

This will hurt farmers. Already due to low returns from sugarcane, farmers are shifting to paddy. In Punjab the area under sugarcane has fallen by 30 per cent this season. Lower sugarcane supplies will hit sugar mills' operations. Their gain from paying less for cane could be wiped out by inadequate sugarcane supplies. They may have to pay more to farmers so that they keep growing enough sugarcane. Whether the government's recently introduced FRP in place of the statutory minimum price for cane is "fair" and "remunerative" is debatable, but at least the irrational pricing system will stand scrapped. It had harmed the mills, which, in turn, had failed to make timely payments to farmers.

 

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THE TRIBUNE

COLUMN

PITFALLS OF DEMOCRACY

WHEN POWER FLOWS FROM HIGH COMMAND

BY KULDIP NAYAR

 

With every election, democracy is undoubtedly deepening in India. But it is also exposing the system's limitations. True, the frequency of polls is at regular intervals. It is also true that the voters are free to exercise their ballot and walk up to the polling booths on their own and on their free will.

 

Yet, it is equally true that elections have been reduced to an exercise to grab power — the power which has itself become an end by itself, not an opportunity to serve or perform. Three traits are recognisable: criminals, moneybags and defeat of women candidates.

 

Take the example of the three states — Maharashtra, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh — which went to polls recently. Criminals have captured 50 per cent seats in Maharashtra. There are regular charges under Indian Penal Code against them. Of these, 15 per cent have been booked for murder and 22 per cent for dacoity and kidnapping and six for extortion. The state's record is "better" than before. In the 2004 assembly election, the number of criminal candidates was 123. This time they are 143.

 

Haryana, next door to Delhi, has elected 17 per cent of criminals. Haryana has "slipped" in the sense that in the last election there were as many as 28 members with a criminal history. This time their number has gone down to 17. Arunachal Pradesh has made no "progress." It has maintained the figure of 5 per cent like the last time.

 

Also, money is becoming crucial in every poll. There is no doubting about the relationship between the assets of a candidate and the victory. The analysis of assets declared by candidates — a statutory requirement — showed that if a candidate possessed more than Rs 1 crore, his or her chance of success straightway went up by 50 per cent in all the three states.

In Haryana, an affluent candidate was best placed with 72 per cent chances of success. In Maharashtra, the success was 68 per cent and in Arunachal Pradesh 58 per cent.

 

And it was distressing to see fewer and fewer women winning the election. The government's efforts to reserve 33 per cent of seats in Parliament and state assemblies become all the more necessary to offset their poor representation.

 

In all the three states, women have done badly. The percentage of the success is 3.82 per cent in Maharashtra, the most advanced, 5 per cent in Arunachal and almost twice the average, 8.89 per cent, in the otherwise backward Haryana.

 

A new thing which has, however, emerged is the proliferation of family members. Earlier, this was confined to the Mrs Indira Gandhi's dynasty —she nominating her son Rajiv Gandhi, and Sonia Gandhi, positioning her son, Rahul Gandhi, in the Congress party she heads.

 

However, this assembly election has seen chief ministers, party chiefs and those highly placed in the Congress or the BJP nominating their sons, nephews, daughters and daughters-in-law. Most of them have won. The most reprehensible part is that the son of India's President has returned on the Congress ticket. The President is a figurehead in our Constitution and she becomes crucial when the alliances break. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leads a coalition which has inherent weaknesses.

 

What is most disturbing is that the ideology has more or less disappeared. The name of the Congress or that of the BJP was there but candidates seldom mentioned or projected the party's ideology. Combinations and alliances on the basis of sub-castes and regional bias have come to the fore. With no ideology and a surfeit of loyal relatives, political parties are rapidly taking the shape of a private limited company which distributes shares to its deal ones. Both concentrate on the strategy to succeed by hook or by crook.

 

What gave the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) the edge in Maharashtra — they won 188 seats out of 288 — was the alliance and the fallout of the fight between the two Marathi chauvinists, Bal Thackeray's Shiv Sena and the breakaway Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) led by his nephew, Raj Thackeray.

 

The division of votes — MNS secured 6 per cent — also affected the fortunes of the BJP. The MNS also helped the Congress-NCP alliance which had also announced the installation of Rs 250-crore Shivaji statue on the Mumbai seafront.

 

Again, in Haryana, Om Prakash Chautala, who did not win even half a dozen assembly seats in the last election, emerged as the Jat leader by projecting the community's pride. In the house of 90, the Congress secured only 40. And what the party did to form the government is itself a shameful story. Seven independent MLAs were picked up by the police overnight. All have been promised ministership or equivalent positions with the same status and emoluments. And it was not a surprise that the session was convened for one day to administer oaths to 90 MLAs, to elect the Speaker and Deputy Speaker, to have the Governor's address, discussion on it and vote of thanks before adjournment.

 

The state government should have intervened to stop the horse-trading. But how could he have such gumption when he owes his appointment to the Congress-ruled Centre? The civil society does not speak out because it has more or less accepted that politics cannot be cleansed. Then why blame the extreme communists, the Naxalites, who have taken to the gun because of their loss of faith in the ballot box?

 

The sham of democracy was underlined by the one-line resolution passed by elected members: Congress president Sonia Gandhi is authorised to nominate the leader. She named Ashok Chavan to head Maharashtra and Bhupinder Singh Hooda to lead Haryana.

 

The electorate returned members, not Sonia Gandhi. But this has become a practice. The Congress is no exception. All political parties, more or less, adopt the same procedure. BJP's Vasundhara Raje Scindia, former Rajasthan Chief Minister, had to quit the leadership although she commanded the support of the majority of MLAs. The BJP high command — or the party mentor, RSS — "punished" her for the defeat in the Assembly election. If democracy is to prevail, the MLAs, who faced the voters, should have decided her fate.

 

It is always easy to hang all your problems on one peg. It makes you forget even the call of conscience. The high command would decide. But then, it leads to autocracy. At least, the Congress should have learnt the lesson when it was in the wilderness. But then, power is such a heady wine that it makes parties forget to differentiate between wrong and right, moral and immoral. The leader knows best.

 

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THE TRIBUNE

COLUMN

FUND-RAISING IDEAS

BY S. RAGHUNATH

 

I knew there had to be a catch — a loophole thru' which an outsized adult elephant could wriggle with ease and still have plenty of room left.

 

Clarifying its landmark directive banning the collection of donations by private school managements, an official of the Haryana Education Department has said that they (private managements) were, however, free to organise "charity shows" to raise funds.

 

I have been talking to the "Sole Proprietor" a 'mot juste' description—who runs a string of pre-nurseries, LKGs and UKGs across the length and breadth of the state, including the capital Chandigarh and who indeed has found his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

 

"We're deeply beholden to the Hon'ble Haryana Government for permitting us to hold charity shows to raise funds for our schools, "he said rubbing his hands in glee."

 

"Just what do you have in mind?" I asked.

 

"Well, "said the sole proprietor, "I'm toying with several novel fund-raising ideas."

 

"Such as...." I prompted.

 

"Well, I want to hold a mime show."

 

"A mime show!" I exclaimed.

 

"Yes," he said, "and I'm sure it would be hugely entertaining. The show will revolve round my surly and unkempt school peon entering a make-shift classroom set up on the pavement and going thru' the motions of dusting the furniture and swabbing the floor. Then a nursery teacher will come in and mime writing the English alphabets on a non-existent blackboard and with a silent movement of her lips, she'll say A for Apple, B for Bat, C for Cat and so on."